Who is the Taunton Daily Gazette Fans' Choice Field Hockey Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Fans' Choice field hockey ballot is and who runs it

The Taunton Daily Gazette Fans' Choice Field Hockey Player of the Year is a readers' award ballot run by the Taunton Daily Gazette, a Massachusetts newspaper that publishes at tauntongazette.com and serves the Taunton area. The ballot asks a single question, who deserves the paper's field hockey player of the year honor, and it answers that question through a public vote, not through a panel of judges. Its scope is a single sport and a single honor, which separates it from the multi-category readers' choice contests some publishers run across a whole season.

The vote is hosted on Crowdsignal, whose public web address is poll.fm. The 2025 field hockey ballot sat at poll.fm/16382907, and its title carried the paper's full Fans' Choice branding alongside a poll closed notice once voting ended. Because the format is a plain public vote with no judging panel, the outcome reflects whichever nominee's community of supporters turns out, not a selection made by the paper's sports staff.

The market is Taunton, Massachusetts, the city whose name the daily paper carries. Nominees on the 2025 ballot were identified by their high school programs in Taunton, Bridgewater-Raynham and Dighton-Rehoboth, which roots the award firmly in Massachusetts high school field hockey rather than in professional or college sport.

The dated record for the Taunton field hockey award

Two edition years stand behind this program: 2022 and 2025. The 2025 ballot was titled around that year explicitly, and its window fell in December, with the poll.fm series placing both the opening and the close of the 2025 field hockey vote inside that month. By the time the 2025 ballot was last seen it carried a poll closed notice, so that edition has finished and the honor has been decided.

The decided ballot also published a result. The leading nominee's share reached 68 percent of the votes cast on the 2025 field hockey poll, a margin that left the rest of the slate well behind. That figure is the only published number attached to the award, and it comes straight from the tally shown on the closed Crowdsignal page.

What the Gazette has not printed matters as much as what it has. The publisher leaves the precise December open and close dates unprinted, along with any per-supporter limit; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. No nomination window is published either, and the ballot presents a single question rather than a slate of categories, so there is no category roster to consult ahead of the next edition.

Looking forward, the pattern of confirmed runs in 2022 and 2025 points to a 2026 edition. The Gazette has not printed a forward calendar for the award, so the December placement of the 2025 poll is the best available guide to when the next ballot is likely to appear.

How a supporter votes in the Taunton Gazette field hockey poll

The sequence is short. A supporter visits poll.fm/16382907, reads the nominee list, selects a nominee and submits. The 2025 ballot presented its field hockey choices as a plain list of answers, each identified by the nominee's high school program, so the selection step is a pick from a slate rather than a write-in or a ranked form. The 2025 ballot text named no account or login step, so nothing beyond the select-and-submit sequence was required of a visitor while the poll was open.

That poll is now closed. The 2025 edition finished with its tally published, which means a visitor to poll.fm/16382907 today reads a finished ballot instead of casting a fresh vote. For the 2026 edition, the same sequence will apply on whatever new ballot address the Gazette posts, and the fresh page is where any changed rules will show up.

Two practical notes follow from the mechanic. First, because the poll asks a single question, every vote a nominee receives competes directly with every other nominee's total, so timing a push inside the December window matters more than on a ballot that runs all year. Second, the Gazette has not printed a repeat-vote rule for the field hockey award, so a supporter planning multiple visits should read the live ballot for the current edition rather than assume a standing rule carries over.

How this ballot sits beside its Massachusetts neighbours

Massachusetts readers meet several public-vote sports awards, and this one differs from its neighbours on three axes: publisher, cadence and sport. The Eagle-Tribune Athlete of the Week belongs to a different newspaper and runs on a weekly rhythm, resetting its field every seven days, while the Taunton award crowns a single end-of-season honor for one sport. The Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week is the same weekly shape under the Brockton paper's masthead, again with no tie to the Gazette's field hockey ballot.

Statewide programs sit further away. The Massachusetts Gatorade Softball Player of the Year covers a different sport and a sponsor-driven selection, and the Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week spans all sports rather than a single one. The baseball and basketball player of the week ballots cover their own sports on weekly cycles.

What makes the Gazette's ballot distinct is the combination: a daily newspaper's masthead, a single girls' fall sport, a December close, and a Crowdsignal ballot that publishes its tally when it closes. A supporter moving between these programs cannot carry assumptions across, because the weekly ballots reset their fields constantly while this award accumulates votes toward one decision, and the publisher's rules for the field hockey poll are printed, if at all, only on the ballot page itself.

Strengthening support for a Taunton field hockey nominee

Support in this award flows through the school communities named on the ballot. A nominee from the Taunton, Bridgewater-Raynham or Dighton-Rehoboth program draws on teammates, families, alumni and local followers, and the December window compresses all of that energy into a short stretch, so early and repeated sharing of the poll.fm link during the open days is the tactic the ballot's shape rewards most.

The Gazette has not printed an outside-help policy for the field hockey award, and it has not printed a per-supporter rule either, so nobody can quote a standing rule for this ballot. The safe reading is the organizer's own framing: this is a readers' honor decided by the public ballot, and support that comes from real people in the nominee's community is what the award is designed to measure. Our guide on earning more votes online sets out the organic playbook, and our page on whether buying votes is legal separates the legal question from the publisher's rules.