Who is The Gardner News Boys Track and Field Athlete of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What this ballot is and who stands behind it

The program poses one question to readers: which boy deserves the paper's athlete of the year honor for track and field? Behind it stands The Gardner News, a newspaper that puts its masthead directly into the ballot's title. The award belongs to the sport vertical, covering high school boys track, and the winner is decided by whoever reaches the poll and clicks, not by a panel of judges.

Crowdsignal (poll.fm) carries the ballot at the address poll.fm/15690124. Crowdsignal is a polling service publishers use for reader surveys, and its forms load as a single page with a list of options. Here the options are nominees, each printed as a name followed by a school. The schools on the current form are Gardner, Murdock, Narragansett, Monty Tech, Oakmont and Quabbin.

Because the mechanic is public-vote, no nomination round, account or login sits between a reader and a counted selection. The pairing of athlete and school is the only context the form supplies: no statistics, no season recap and no write-in box appear anywhere on it.

The dated history of this award

Two editions are on file, 2023 and 2025, and both windows fall in July. The program is marked annual, with 2026 as the next expected run. Neither the ballot nor the publisher has printed a first-run year or a full list of past editions, so those two years are the whole published history anyone can point to.

Just as important is what the organizer leaves unstated. The form carries no exact opening or closing day, no roster of categories beyond the single question, no per-person voting limit and no eligibility wording; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That silence has consequences for planning. Anyone who assumes the window runs to the end of July, or that one vote per day is allowed, is borrowing a rule from some other contest. The month is the only dated anchor this program offers, and every more precise detail appears only on the live form once the next edition opens.

The July placement also reads literally: this is a year-end honor decided after the track season has finished, so the nominee list is settled before voting begins and no mid-window roster changes show up on the form.

How a supporter votes today

Voting takes four short moves. First, open poll.fm/15690124 and read the question at the top. Second, scan the nominee list, where each name sits beside a school: Gardner, Murdock, Narragansett, Monty Tech, Oakmont and Quabbin are the schools on the current form. Third, click the option beside the chosen athlete. Fourth, submit.

Nothing on the form asks a voter to register, sign in, or hand over contact details before the selection counts. There is no visible second round, no bracket and no write-in field. It is a single Crowdsignal poll, which is why it loads quickly and behaves the same on a phone as on a laptop.

The form is equally silent about coming back. Whether one person may vote again the next day, or how many times, is nowhere printed. The honest reading is that the organizer has left the return rule unstated, and the live form at the moment of voting is the only place that answer can come from.

For a nominee's camp, the practical takeaway is that every vote requires someone to reach this one address and finish one selection. There is no app to install and no detour through the publisher's site, so the ballot link itself is the thing to circulate.

How this ballot sits beside its Kansas neighbours

This ballot has company in Kansas. Sibling programs on this site include Catchy Awards Kansas High School Athletics, ESPN Wichita High School Athlete of the Week, Greater Wichita Sports Banquet Athlete of the Year, the DiRenna Awards Kansas City Basketball Player of the Year, and two Topeka Capital-Journal athlete of the week ballots. Every one sits in the same vertical: school and amateur sport decided by reader votes.

Cadence and scope separate them. The weekly ballots, like the ESPN Wichita and Topeka Capital-Journal ones, turn over on a short cycle and salute a single week's performance. The Greater Wichita Sports Banquet and the DiRenna Awards are year-end honors tied to a banquet or a single sport. This program is a year-end honor for one sport only, boys track, run by one newspaper under its own name.

The publisher's identity shapes the audience too. The Gardner News is a community paper, so its ballot draws on the readership around its own coverage area rather than a metro sports desk's reach. That is why the nominee list pairs athletes with schools such as Gardner, Murdock, Narragansett, Monty Tech, Oakmont and Quabbin, a roster a statewide outlet would be unlikely to assemble.

For anyone weighing where to focus, the useful distinction is that every sibling here answers to a separate newsroom with a separate form, so support built for one does not carry over to another.

Strengthening support in this specific ballot

Since the mechanic is one click on one page, real support for a nominee means getting the right people to poll.fm/15690124 and making the choice obvious once they arrive. The form pairs each name with a school, so a push that leads with the school connection hands voters the context the ballot itself assumes.

The organizer publishes nothing about outside help, paid promotion or vote sources; the form carries no rules wording on the subject at all. That silence works in both directions: nothing published restricts how support is gathered, and nothing published protects a nominee either. Anyone weighing purchased votes can compare options on our award votes page, but the decision should rest on the live ballot's terms rather than assumptions imported from another contest.

Timing is the other lever. The window falls in July, and a year-end honor with a settled roster rewards an early, steady push over a late scramble, because the list will not change mid-window and late momentum has a shorter runway.