Vote for the StarNews Girls Lacrosse Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the StarNews Girls Lacrosse Player of the Year ballot is

The StarNews Girls Lacrosse Player of the Year is an award decided by readers, produced by StarNews, the North Carolina publisher whose sports desk covers high school athletics in the state. It honors one girls lacrosse player at the end of the season, and the winner is settled entirely by public vote rather than by a panel of editors. The ballot is a vertical in the publisher's broader player-of-the-year coverage, sitting alongside similar end-of-season honors the sports team produces.

Balloting runs on Crowdsignal's poll.fm tool, the same lightweight service many publishers use for reader polls. The live ballot for the 2026 cycle sits at poll.fm/17078841, and StarNews links to it from its own sports articles rather than requiring readers to hunt for the address.

The 2026 edition carried 26 nominees, and the schools those nominees attend trace the state's competitive lacrosse map: Hoggard, New Hanover, Cape Fear Academy, Topsail and Ashley all appear on the option list. That school spread matters for supporters, because a nominee's base is her own school community first and the wider StarNews readership second.

Because the ballot names individual high school athletes, this reference page deliberately describes the program through its publisher, its sport and the season rather than naming any nominee. Readers who want the roster should open the ballot itself, where the full list is printed.

The dated record: 2025, 2026 and the June window

This program has two confirmed cycles, dated 2025 and 2026, and both landed in June, which makes the award a reliable early-summer fixture on the North Carolina high school sports calendar. The 2026 ballot's own title carried the label Poll Closed, a plain signal that voting for that cycle has ended and the tally is final.

The hardest date on the page belongs to the 2026 window. Voting stayed open through Thursday, June 25, at 11:59 p.m., a cutoff printed in the organizer's announcement alongside the nominee list. That article, which introduced the 26 nominees for the year, also carries the rule that matters most to supporters: fans may cast as many ballots as they want while the window stays open.

Several facts about the program's structure are not published anywhere the organizer maintains. The page does not carry a list of award categories apart from the lone Player of the Year question, and no tiebreak, verification or eligibility procedure is printed with it; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the two-year history establishes is shape. A June open, a late-June close and a roster drawn from schools across the StarNews coverage area appeared in both confirmed years, and the next turn of that pattern points to a June 2027 ballot. The publisher's boys lacrosse poll follows the same seasonal rhythm and was announced in early June 2026, which suggests the girls ballot's successor article lands on a similar schedule.

How a supporter votes on the poll.fm ballot today

The act of voting here is deliberately plain. The supporter opens the ballot, sees one question with a radio button beside each nominee, makes a selection and submits. Each option pairs a player with her school, so a Topsail backer finds the Topsail row, a Cape Fear Academy supporter finds the two Cape Fear Academy rows, and so on down a list of 26 names for 2026.

Two features of the ballot shape how a campaign is run. The first is the repeat rule: the organizer's announcement says fans may cast as many ballots as they want, so there is no one-per-person ceiling printed anywhere and no daily return discipline required by the format. The second is the deadline, because a vote cast after June 25 at 11:59 p.m. in the 2026 cycle landed on a closed poll and counted for nothing.

The platform itself matters less than supporters sometimes assume. Crowdsignal's poll.fm hosts the question and the tally, and the 2026 page displayed a percentage share beside each option once voting ended. Nothing on the ballot requires an account, a login or an email address; the vote is cast anonymously in a browser.

Right now the 2026 poll is closed, so a supporter's first real action is waiting for the next cycle's ballot to go live and confirming the new roster and cutoff there rather than relying on the previous year's dates.

How this ballot sits beside its North Carolina neighbours

North Carolina has a busy field of publisher-run athlete ballots, and this one is distinguished by cadence and scope. The Charlotte Observer Athlete of the Week and its boys and girls editions run weekly during the school year, resetting every seven days with a fresh slate of nominees. The StarNews Girls Lacrosse Player of the Year runs once a season, in June, and settles a whole sport's year in a single window.

The Greensboro News & Record Player of the Week follows the weekly model too, while the Tatum & Atkinson Scholar Athlete of the Week from ABC45 folds academics into the criteria. The North Carolina High School Baseball Player of the Week is the closest structural cousin in sport-specific coverage, though it stays on the weekly spring cycle rather than closing a season with one award.

What this means for a supporter is runway. A weekly ballot rewards a fast, concentrated push inside seven days, while this lacrosse award gives a school community several weeks of June to organize around a fixed deadline and an unlimited-repeat rule. The 26-nominee 2026 field also meant the vote was a genuine school-versus-school contest rather than a two-way race, which raises the value of mobilizing a whole roster's families early instead of relying on a late surge.

Strengthening support before the June close

This ballot rewards organization more than any exotic tactic, because the format itself is open: unlimited repeat voting, a several-weeks June window and a fixed cutoff of June 25 at 11:59 p.m. in the most recent cycle. The organizer, StarNews, has published no rule restricting how supporters gather votes, and the poll requires no login, which lowers the friction on every return visit.

The highest-impact moves are the ordinary ones. Get the ballot link in front of the nominee's own school community first, since the 2026 field split support across 26 players from schools such as Hoggard, New Hanover, Cape Fear Academy, Topsail and Ashley, and no single school supplied more than a few options. Remind people early rather than only in the final hours, because the window's exact close is the one mistake that cannot be undone. For a fuller playbook aimed at publisher polls like this one, see our votes guide, and for the legal and rules side of outside help, the legality overview sets out how organizer terms govern what is possible.