Vote for PennLive's boys lacrosse Player of the Week for the week ending: How Voting Works & How to Win

A weekly spring ballot, not a season-long award

Most of the Pennsylvania high school fan votes that sit near this one are built around football or basketball, or around a whole-season award decided once. This programme differs on three counts at once. It covers boys lacrosse, a spring sport, so its window falls in May rather than in autumn or winter. It is weekly, meaning each edition covers a single week ending and a fresh ballot replaces it the following week. And it is a player award rather than a team or business award, so the nominees are individual high school athletes.

The organizer is PennLive, the Pennsylvania publisher whose high school sports desk produces the series. The vertical is sport, and casting a choice is open to anyone who reaches the page. The ballot is a Crowdsignal poll reached at poll.fm, and the voting URL for the current edition is poll.fm/16951681.

Every name on the ballot belongs to a student athlete, so this reference describes the programme by publisher, sport, season and school rather than reprinting player names. The schools represented on the edition on file include Carlisle and Cumberland Valley, and the wider set of Pennsylvania towns tied to this publisher's coverage area includes Hershey, Palmyra, State College, Mechanicsburg and Mifflin.

Which editions are confirmed, and what the ballot leaves unsaid

The series is confirmed in 2023 and again across the 2025 and 2026 seasons, which is why the programme qualifies as annual instead of a one-off poll. 2027 is the next expected edition year, though the publisher has printed no forward schedule anywhere on the ballot.

The specific edition reachable at the voting URL covers the week ending May 2 and carries a Poll Closed notice, meaning that week's window has ended and the page no longer accepts selections. Earlier and later weeks in the same season run on their own poll pages with their own nominee lists, so the May 2 ballot is one link in a chain rather than the whole programme.

Several facts a supporter might want are simply absent. PennLive prints no opening or closing timestamp on the poll page, no nomination deadline, and no platform round dates. The ballot also carries no rules text of any kind: no per-supporter limit, no eligibility terms and no statement about outside help. The publisher has not published those terms anywhere this programme is described; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What that absence means in practice is straightforward. A supporter planning a push cannot point to a printed daily-vote rule or a printed cap, because neither exists on the page. The honest position is that the rules stay unknown until the current week's ballot says otherwise.

How a supporter votes this week

Voting here takes almost no effort. The supporter loads the week's poll.fm address, reads a list of nominees where each entry names a high school boys lacrosse player and his school, marks the selection control beside one name, and submits. The page confirms the choice on screen. No login is required and no payment is involved; the ballot is open to anyone who reaches it.

Timing causes most of the mistakes. Because each edition covers one week ending, a ballot that was live on Monday can be marked Poll Closed by the weekend. If the page shows a closed notice, the selection controls are gone and the only move is to wait for PennLive to publish the next week's ballot through its lacrosse coverage.

There is no write-in option and no nomination form on the ballot itself. Nominees appear on the list as the publisher presents them, and a supporter's role begins and ends with choosing among the names already printed. Anyone wondering how a player gets onto a future list has nothing on the ballot page to go by, since the poll shows answers only and no entry process.

One practical habit helps: open the ballot early in the week it goes live, confirm the nominee list, and share the link while the window is still open rather than discovering a closed notice after the fact.

How this ballot sits beside its Pennsylvania neighbours

Pennsylvania has a crowded field of high school fan votes, and the lacrosse poll differs from each of its neighbours in at least one respect. The Mr. PA Football ballot and the Pennsylvania High School Football Player of the Week both sit in the autumn football season, while the PennLive Mid-Penn Boys Basketball Player of the Week runs in winter and shares this programme's publisher and weekly shape.

The rest of the neighbourhood differs by publisher as much as by sport. The Pennsylvania High School Softball Player of the Year is a season-long award rather than a weekly one. The Morning Call Athlete of the Week answers to a different Lehigh Valley publisher entirely, and the WICU Athlete of the Year belongs to an Erie television station, not to any print publisher.

What makes the lacrosse ballot distinct is the combination: a spring sport, a weekly cadence, a single publisher, and a nominee list drawn from central Pennsylvania schools. A supporter with a player to back cannot ride another programme's ballot, because each of these votes answers to its own organizer and its own poll page. The useful takeaway is that a school with athletes across several of these programmes runs several separate pushes at once, each aimed at its own ballot and its own window.

Turning out support inside a one-week window

A weekly ballot rewards speed. The window is short, the nominee list is fixed once published, and the winner is whoever's school community shows up before the poll shuts. The moves that work here are the ones that do not depend on the ballot's rules: posting the poll.fm link to team group chats the day the ballot goes live, asking the booster club and the athletic department to share it, and asking the same people again midweek while the window is still open. Because PennLive prints no per-supporter limit on the ballot, supporters should watch the live page for any restriction rather than assume one. For a fuller playbook aimed at exactly this kind of short-window public vote, see our guide to getting more votes online, and for the paid side of the picture, our award-votes page explains what a purchased push is and is not.