LINK nky Team of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the LINK nky Team of the Week and who runs it?

LINK nky publishes local news and sports coverage for the NKY community from linknky.com, and Team of the Week is its recurring reader vote for school sports teams. It is not a single seasonal event but a rolling series: a fresh question, a fresh slate of nominated squads and a fresh poll every week while a sports season runs.

The ballot addressed at poll.fm/15565443 carries the title "Who should be LINK nky Team of the Week?" and sits on Crowdsignal's polling service, the platform LINK nky embeds at the foot of each week's article. The spring 2026 round framed its question around the spring sports schedule and drew nominees from baseball, softball and track and field, including a girls track program. LINK nky treats the honor as editorial content as much as a competition, because the winner is written up and promoted through the paper's own channels, a point the mechanics section below develops.

Organizer and platform in brief

The quick-facts table gathers the identifiers a reader needs: who organizes the vote, where it runs, what kind of contest it is and how the weekly rhythm is defined.

Read together, those identifiers describe a hyperlocal sports honor rather than a regional best-of ranking, and that difference shapes how a campaign around it should be timed.

Which seasons have run so far and when does voting close?

Confirmed seasons of the series cover 2024, 2025 and 2026, and within a season the rhythm is weekly. The spring 2026 round went up in early April around the spring sports schedule, and its ballot stayed open "through Friday at 11:59 a.m." An earlier season's notice described the window differently, as open "to the public through Friday at noon each week," so the deadline clearly lands on Friday morning, with the precise hour shifting between notices; the current week's article is the place to check.

The final standings of that spring ballot were lopsided:

A few things about the format go unstated from week to week. LINK nky has not printed a standing roster of which sports and team types rotate through the nomination slot; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The notices likewise give no blanket opening day for a season, only the weekly close, so anyone planning ahead should treat the running article, not a fixed calendar date, as the schedule.

How does a supporter vote in the weekly LINK nky poll?

Casting a vote is short: find the story, reach the poll, pick a team. Start by locating the week's Team of the Week story on linknky.com; LINK nky announces the nomination call through its online and printed editions and pushes the links across all of its social media platforms, so the story is easy to find from any of those posts. Next, scroll to the end of the article, where the embedded poll waits; the site's own wording is that "the poll where you can vote follows at the end of the article." Finally, select a team and submit. Because every week brings a new question and a new poll, the address listed on this page serves whichever ballot is current until the next edition replaces it.

The repeat rule is generous by design: "Participants can vote multiple times a day and can vote every day leading up to the close of voting." That wording comes straight from LINK nky's coverage of the series, and it means a determined base of supporters, a softball roster, a track squad's families, can return again and again within the format the organizer itself set. Nothing in the notices asks a voter to register, and no device rule or hourly spacing appears alongside the repeat permission.

After the close, the outcome moves fast: the newest Team of the Week is announced with a featured article on Friday and then featured in the following week's print edition, giving the winning program another wave of local exposure. Supporters who want to organize that daily return more deliberately can pick up tactics in our guide on how to get more votes online.

How does this weekly team vote compare with other Kentucky ballots?

Kentucky already carries a crowded bench of public-vote programs, and LINK nky's weekly honor behaves differently from all of them. The state's established ballots are annual reader-choice events: Best of Bowling Green, Best in Kentucky, Best of Lexington KY, Chevy Chaser Best of Lex, the BroadwayWorld Louisville Awards for theater, and Best Places to Work in Kentucky for employers. Those contests ask a broad public to rate businesses, venues, workplaces or productions across many categories, and their cycles close once a year.

LINK nky's Team of the Week compresses the idea to a single question asked week after week: which nominated school team deserves the honor right now. Its scope is narrower too; where Best in Kentucky spans the whole commonwealth, this ballot speaks to the NKY readership LINK nky already serves, and its nominees are school programs rather than restaurants, shops or employers.

Pacing is where the difference bites hardest. An annual best-of campaign builds over months; a Team of the Week push has roughly a working week to gather strength before the Friday-morning close. Readers comparing Kentucky's public votes side by side can start with the statewide Best in Kentucky ballot and work outward to the city-level Lexington edition.

How can a team's supporters build momentum in this poll?

A weekly format rewards steadiness over bursts. Since LINK nky explicitly allows multiple votes per day, a team's backers do best when every committed voter returns daily from the article's publication to the Friday-morning close, instead of relying on a lone push. Sharing the week's story link matters more than sharing the bare poll address, because each new poll travels inside that week's article and an older address goes stale once its ballot closes.

Nomination is the other lever: LINK nky invites readers to send Team of the Week nominations through its social channels and print editions, so a program that responds quickly to the weekly call puts its own name in front of the newsroom early. On outside help, the published notices spell out the repeat-voting allowance but say nothing about votes arranged through third-party services; anyone weighing that option can compare providers on our buy award votes page before deciding.