2025 Indiana High School Sports School Spirit: How Voting Works & How to Win

Who votes and why the School Spirit ballot matters in Indiana

The 2025 Indiana High School Sports School Spirit ballot exists for the people who already care most about Indiana high schools: students, families, alumni, cheer and dance programs, booster clubs and the local businesses that sponsor school spirit across the state. IndyStar, the Indianapolis-based news organization, publishes the ballot on its Second Street contest hub at indystar.gannettcontests.com, and the listing places the program in the Indianapolis, Indiana market while inviting high school communities statewide to take part.

Unlike the sweepstakes that share IndyStar's contest hub, this program is a pure public vote. A giveaway on the same hub rewards an individual entrant, but the School Spirit ballot hands visibility to whichever high school community can rally the most support. That is why the ballot reads like a school pride project: the entries are school spirit expressions tied to Indiana high school sports, and the winner is decided entirely by the public rather than by judges.

For supporters, the practical picture is simple. The 2025 window ran from March 15, 2025 to April 16, 2025 on the Second Street VotingBallot format, and the mechanics section below walks through what a supporter actually does on that ballot. What the listing does not settle is the rules detail: the category roster and the per-supporter limit are both missing from the listing text, so a booster planning a push should read the rules block on the live IndyStar page before mobilizing a community. That single habit, checking the ballot before the push rather than after, is what separates a smooth school spirit campaign from a scrambled one in the Indiana spring calendar.

Confirmed editions and dates for the IndyStar School Spirit program

The confirmed history for this program covers the 2025 edition in full. The 2025 Indiana High School Sports School Spirit ballot opened on March 15, 2025 and closed on April 16, 2025, a window of just over a month that ran from mid March through mid April. The platform listing shows the promotion as a Ballot/VotingBallot under the IndyStar organization, hosted at indystar.gannettcontests.com, and the status of that edition is closed.

The program is annual. Editions are confirmed in 2024 and 2025, which meets the standard for a recurring program rather than a standalone event, and the 2026 edition is the natural next expectation on the IndyStar hub. No dates for a 2026 window appear in the listing, so supporters watching for the next run should treat the hub's own pages as the source of truth. On the same hub, IndyStar also lists unrelated promotions such as a fuel giveaway and the Get Kalahari'd Away Fall 2026 sweepstakes, which are prize drawings with different mechanics and different purposes, not part of the School Spirit program.

Gaps in the published information are worth stating plainly. The category lineup for the ballot is not carried in the listing, and neither is any text on vote caps, daily return rules or eligibility; those operational details surface on the live ballot when IndyStar opens a window, and readers should confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Everything else on this page, from the window dates to the platform and organizer, comes directly from the confirmed listing for the Indiana edition.

How a supporter casts a vote on the Second Street ballot

The mechanic is the literal one for a Second Street VotingBallot. During a live window, a supporter opens the School Spirit page at indystar.gannettcontests.com, reviews the categories IndyStar has published for that cycle, selects the high school spirit entry they want in each category, and submits the ballot. Second Street then applies whatever confirmation step IndyStar has configured, which on these ballots typically involves an email address and may involve verification before the vote registers.

Because the ballot is a public vote, no purchase and no registration fee is involved in casting a vote. The questions that a school community usually asks next are the operational ones: can the same supporter return on later days, and does the ballot require an account. The listing for this program does not answer either question, and the live page is what settles both. When the window opens, the rules block on the ballot shows the return rule and the verification steps in force, and those are the details a booster club should screenshot and share before asking hundreds of families to vote.

Timing matters as much as mechanics. The 2025 Indiana window ran March 15 to April 16, so a community that waited until mid April had a compressed runway. Groups that organize early, agree on which entries to back in each category, and spread the ballot link in the first week of the window consistently find the Second Street format easier to work with, since late surges leave little room to fix a mis-click or a missed verification email before the ballot closes.

Where this ballot sits among Indiana's other public votes

Indiana has a crowded field of community-vote programs, and the School Spirit ballot occupies a distinct lane in it. Most of the state's other public votes are best-of rankings of local businesses: Best of Indiana covers the whole state, CommunityVotes Bloomington IN Best Of and CommunityVotes Evansville Best Of run city editions, and CommunityVotes Fort Wayne Best Of and YourChoiceAwards South Bend Best Of cover their own markets. Best of Elkhart County works at county level. The IndyStar School Spirit ballot, by contrast, is built around high school pride rather than business categories, which makes it the program that school communities, not shopkeepers, organize around.

The organizer difference is just as sharp. The CommunityVotes programs and the Elkhart County ballot each answer to their own publisher, while School Spirit answers to IndyStar, a major Indiana newsroom with a large contest hub on Second Street. That hub also carries sweepstakes, so a supporter who lands on indystar.gannettcontests.com should navigate deliberately to the School Spirit entry rather than assuming every promotion on the hub is the high school ballot.

For a supporter comparing programs, the practical takeaway is that each Indiana public vote runs on its own calendar under its own organizer, and a strategy built for one does not transfer automatically to another. The School Spirit ballot's confirmed 2025 window of March 15 to April 16 is specific to this program, and its annual pattern of 2024 and 2025 editions is specific to IndyStar's scheduling, not to any of the state's business-vote ballots.

Organizing school spirit support for the IndyStar ballot

Support in this program is a community exercise, and the ballot's format shapes what works. Because the 2025 window ran March 15 through April 16, a school group has roughly a month to convert pride into ballots. The groups that do it well start before opening day: they name a coordinator, agree which spirit entries to back, and draft the message families will forward. When the ballot opens on indystar.gannettcontests.com, the coordinator shares the direct link, notes any verification step Second Street requires, and asks each supporter to complete their ballot in the first days rather than the last.

IndyStar's terms for its Second Street ballots are the boundary line for any organized push, and the current terms live on the organizer's own contest pages. A push that respects the published rules, real people voting of their own accord, is the model this page describes. Groups weighing outside help should read the terms first, and our votes guide covers the outreach tactics that work inside those boundaries for high school ballots like this Indiana one.