The Rockland Journal News Boys Lacrosse Player of the Year, Presented by White Plains Hospital: How Voting Works & How to Win

A single-sport award that stands apart from New York's weekly fan polls

Most public-vote programs in New York are weekly rhythm ballots: a publisher posts a player of the week poll, closes it a few days later and starts another. This program works differently on every axis. The Rockland Journal News Boys Lacrosse Player of the Year, Presented by White Plains Hospital, is a single seasonal award for one sport, boys lacrosse, decided once the spring season ends rather than refreshed every seven days. The sponsor in the title, White Plains Hospital, is a local institution whose name sits in the award branding itself, which is rarer than a generic presenting-partner tag.

The organizer is the Rockland Journal News, the publisher serving the Rockland, New York community, and the voting itself runs on Crowdsignal's poll.fm platform, the same host behind many regional publisher polls. The live ballot asks one question and lists the nominees for the current edition.

The facts at a glance

Because it honors a season rather than a week, the award carries more weight for the players on it, and the voting push behind each nominee is a community effort rather than a one-week sprint.

What the dated history shows, and what the organizer leaves unpublished

This program's dated history covers two seasons, 2023 and 2025. Both windows are anchored to June, which fits a lacrosse award, since the high school spring season in New York wraps in late spring and a player of the year vote follows it. The most recent ballot was live in June 2025, and the pattern points to a next expected edition in 2026, though nothing about that future cycle has been printed yet.

Several facts sit outside the published material, and each matters to a supporter planning a push. No exact open and close date for the June window has been announced. No list of ballot categories exists beyond the single question the poll asks. No rule on repeat submissions by a single person, and no eligibility criteria for nominees, appear with the ballot either. Anyone who needs those specifics for this award should confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

The nominee list itself is dated evidence of a different kind: the 2025 ballot grouped players with Tappan Zee, Suffern, Pearl River and Nyack, giving a picture of which programs the award draws from. That roster belongs to its own edition and says nothing certain about who will appear next June. The polls from prior years remain reachable on poll.fm after closing, marked as closed, so a reader comparing editions can see the earlier nominee fields for themselves on the platform rather than relying on secondhand summaries.

How a supporter actually casts a vote on this ballot

The mechanic is the simplest form a fan vote takes. A supporter opens the poll.fm page for the current edition, reads a single question, who is the Rockland Journal News Boys Lacrosse Player of the Year, and picks from the listed nominees. Each nominee appears with his school beside him, so on the 2025 ballot a reader chose among players identified with Tappan Zee, Suffern, Pearl River and Nyack. Selecting a nominee and submitting the form logs the vote. There is no registration, no email confirmation and no account wall described on the ballot; the entire action is one click and one submit.

What a supporter cannot do, on the evidence of the ballot, is split a vote or rank nominees. The form takes a single selection per submission. A household with several backers of one player therefore mobilizes several devices rather than gaming one form.

Timing is the other half of the mechanic. The window lives in June and closes, as the 2025 page's title showed, leaving the ballot marked closed afterward. A vote submitted after closing goes nowhere, so the practical advice for Rockland lacrosse families is to vote early in the window rather than waiting for a final-day push whose rules, whatever limits the platform applies to repeat submissions, are not announced in advance. For a broader walkthrough of fan-vote tactics, see our award-votes reference.

Where this ballot sits among New York's other public-vote programs

Rockland's lacrosse award shares a state, a host platform and a genre with several neighboring programs, and the contrast is the useful part. The lohud Boys Basketball Player of the Week and the lohud Girls Basketball Player of the Week run on short winter cycles in the same Hudson Valley publishing family's orbit, rewarding one week of play at a time. The Buffalo News Prep Talk Girls Athlete of the Week does the same for western New York across sports.

Football supplies the rest of the neighborhood: the Hudson Valley New York High School Football Player of the Week, the statewide New York High School Football Player of the Week, and the New York Section 1 High School Football Player of the Week, the last of which covers the same general region of the state as Rockland.

Against that field, this program is distinguished by being a year-end honor rather than a weekly one, by belonging to a single spring sport, and by carrying a hospital's name in its title. For a Rockland nominee, that means the voting push is a season-capping event, not a recurring Tuesday habit, and the audience it reaches is the lacrosse community specifically rather than the publisher's whole readership.

Strengthening a nominee's support in a short June window

Because this ballot is a single award with a June window, effective support looks like a concentrated community push rather than a long campaign. The practical levers are local: the player's own program, the families around Tappan Zee, Suffern, Pearl River or Nyack whichever schools the new roster names, and the booster and alumni networks that follow Rockland lacrosse. Each supporter votes from their own device, so a straightforward ask shared through team group chats outperforms any single post.

The organizer's published rules for outside help are the limit on all of it. Nothing in the ballot text describes what the Rockland Journal News does about voting software or bulk submissions in this poll, which means a nominee's camp has no published assurance that irregular activity would be tolerated. The safest reading of any publisher poll is that the organizer's rules, whatever they turn out to be, bind the result. Read how to get more votes online for outreach methods that fit a short, community-driven ballot like this one, and treat the publisher's own conditions as the boundary line for anything beyond asking people to vote.