Courier & Press Orthopaedic Associates Team of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Courier & Press Orthopaedic Associates Team of the Year?

The Team of the Year honor is the Evansville Courier & Press's season-closing salute to high school athletics in its corner of Indiana. Rather than ranking businesses or restaurants, the paper poses a single sports question to its readers: which high school team deserves to be called the best of the 2025-26 school year? Orthopaedic Associates, the Evansville orthopedic practice, lends its name to the honor as presenting sponsor, the same partnership role it fills in the paper's weekly high school Player of the Week polls during the fall.

The ballot itself sits on Crowdsignal, the polling service whose ballots live under the poll.fm address; this program's ballot is https://poll.fm/17207472. Anyone holding the link can read the question, scan the nominee list and take part, which places the contest squarely in the public-vote tradition the paper applies across its sports honors.

Because the question is framed around teams instead of individual athletes, the nominee pool stretches across several sports and many school communities, from volleyball lineups to football and girls basketball squads drawn from towns large and small around Evansville and beyond. The table below gathers the fixed facts a supporter, a parent or a curious reader needs most often.

Which editions have run, and when does the vote close?

Cycles of the honor appear in the poll series for 2024 and 2026. The paper treats the Team of the Year vote as an annual summer event that wraps up the school year just finished, and the 2026 ballot carried the 2025-26 season label in its announcement. That announcement ran on July 6, 2026, and the window it described stayed open through the following week, shutting at 12 p.m. CT on Friday, July 10.

The same story settled the frequency question in unusually generous terms. "You can vote as often as you'd like until 12 p.m. CT on Friday, July 10," the paper told readers, so no daily ration limited the 2026 edition.

What the paper leaves unpublished is the wider frame around the honor. Beyond the Team of the Year question itself, it prints no category roster and no eligibility terms; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Nomination rounds, judging arrangements and prizes are absent from the announcement too, so anything past the ballot and the promoting story remains an open question until the paper says otherwise.

How do you cast a vote for Team of the Year?

Taking part is about as simple as web voting gets. Open https://poll.fm/17207472, read the question at the top, mark the school you want to back and submit. Under the as-often-as-you-like terms the newspaper announced for 2026, a supporter could repeat that routine day after day until the noon cutoff on July 10.

The 2026 nominee field gave voters a genuine cross-section of the region's athletic map. Volleyball accounted for the deepest bench of contenders, football supplied two powerhouse programs, girls basketball added three more, and softball produced the eventual front-runner. Every nominee on the list is shown below with the standing the closed ballot displayed.

For a school hoping to appear on a future list, the practical takeaway is that visibility with the paper's sports desk during the season matters, since the nominees mirror the programs that made noise across the 2025-26 calendar in volleyball, football, girls basketball and softball alike.

Where does this vote fit among Indiana fan ballots?

Indiana readers meet plenty of public votes each year, and the Team of the Year poll occupies a narrow, well-defined slot among them. Its closest neighbors in coverage are the multi-category best-of contests: the statewide Best of Indiana program, city-level events such as CommunityVotes Evansville Best Of, regional rundowns like Best of Elkhart County in the north of the state, and sibling efforts in Bloomington, Fort Wayne and South Bend.

Those contests ask readers to sort dozens of businesses into categories over long windows. The Team of the Year ballot does the opposite: a solitary question, a fixed list of school nominees, and a compact July window that closes with the school year freshly behind everyone. Where a best-of poll measures commerce, this one measures loyalty to a gym, a field or a dugout.

The scope is local as well. Evansville's own paper runs the honor for the teams its reporters covered all season, so the nominee list reads like a map of southwestern Indiana athletics rather than a statewide roll call. A Fort Worth-style national bracket this is not; it is a hometown referendum with a trophy question at the end.

That difference shapes strategy too. Winning a broad best-of category usually means outlasting a deep field of businesses over weeks, while the Team of the Year race rewards a school community that can concentrate its enthusiasm inside a short, clearly bounded voting stretch.

How can a community boost its favorite team before the close?

This ballot rewards concentration. Because the newspaper invited as many repeat visits as a supporter cared to make, a disciplined group that returns daily through the final week compounds its advantage over a fan base that votes a single time and drifts away. Pair that habit with a hard stop: the 2026 window died at midday on a Friday, so any push scheduled for the weekend arrived too late.

Share the poll.fm link where the school's people already gather, from team messaging groups to booster club posts, and name the nominee exactly as the ballot does so nobody picks a wrong entry. The paper's announcement set no restrictions on how supporters rally each other, and it printed no ceiling on participation either.

Readers who want to understand the paid-support side of contests shaped like this one can review the award-vote explainer, which describes how such purchases work in general terms. Whatever route a community takes, the tally on the Crowdsignal page is the only score that decides the honor.