The Gardner News Team of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Team of the Year ballot is and who runs it

The Gardner News Team of the Year is a readers' ballot that asks the paper's audience to name a single local high school team as the team of the year. It is run by The Gardner News, a newspaper based in Gardner, Massachusetts, whose own masthead site is thegardnernews.com. The vote itself sits on Crowdsignal, the balloting service reached through poll.fm, and the current cycle's ballot is posted at https://poll.fm/17324307.

The program belongs to the best-of vertical, but its ballot looks different from the business readers' choice contests that dominate that category in Massachusetts. The options are school teams drawn from the paper's North Central Massachusetts coverage area: Narragansett football, Quabbin field hockey, Gardner boys soccer, Monty Tech girls soccer, Narragansett boys basketball, Oakmont girls basketball, Gardner baseball and Narragansett softball, with the list continuing on the ballot page itself. That makes the audience a school-sports community of parents, players and local fans rather than a shopping audience, and it explains why the paper runs the program on a lightweight public poll instead of a full contest platform.

The dated facts behind the Team of the Year vote

This program's dated facts are short and specific. Confirmed editions of the Team of the Year vote ran in 2025 and 2026, and the recurrence pattern marks it as an annual fixture with a next expected run in 2027. The voting window fell between July and August in the confirmed cycles, which places the ballot in the middle of the summer calendar while school sports sit between seasons.

Beyond those anchors, The Gardner News has printed little about the mechanics on the ballot page itself. The exact day voting opens, the exact day it closes and any nomination round that may precede the vote are not stated there. The page also publishes no per-supporter limit, no eligibility text and no schedule of platform rounds; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

What the confirmed editions do establish is the shape of the cycle. Each edition lives on its own poll.fm ballot, and both confirmed cycles carried a team list of the kind printed on the current page. Nothing in the published material suggests the 2027 edition will move out of the summer slot, but nothing guarantees the same months either. A supporter who wants certainty about the next window should watch thegardnernews.com and the poll.fm address in early July rather than relying on the pattern alone.

How a supporter votes on the current ballot

Voting in the Team of the Year poll is a plain public-vote action on the Crowdsignal ballot. A supporter opens https://poll.fm/17324307, reads the printed list of team options, which on the current ballot runs from Narragansett football and Quabbin field hockey through Gardner baseball and Narragansett softball, selects the team to back and submits the choice with the control on the poll page. The Gardner News does not state on the ballot whether an account is required or how often the same supporter may return.

The single-question shape matters for anyone organizing support. There are no side categories to spread attention across, so every share, every reminder and every group post points at the same list of teams. That concentrates the competition: Narragansett appears in several sports on the ballot, Gardner appears in boys soccer and baseball, and Quabbin, Monty Tech and Oakmont each carry entries of their own. The size and activity of each school's fan base, not the length of the list, decides the result. It also means a supporter who misses the window has no second category to fall back on, because the team-of-the-year question is the whole ballot.

For that reason the practical advice is to act early in the July-August window rather than waiting for a final push, and to read the live page on each visit in case the paper has added a rule the ballot did not carry before.

Where this ballot sits among Massachusetts best-of programs

Inside Massachusetts, this ballot sits beside a group of far larger best-of programs: Best of Boston, Best of Boston (Boston Magazine), Best of Cape Cod, Central Mass Community Choice Awards, BOSS - Best of South Shore and Boston.com Readers Say. Those ballots are business and readers' choice contests run by metro publishers and regional magazines, and most of them cover the eastern part of the state.

The Gardner News Team of the Year is the opposite in almost every dimension. The organizer is a single local newspaper in Gardner rather than a metro media group, the ballot honors school teams rather than businesses or restaurants, and the audience is the paper's own North Central Massachusetts readership. Of the siblings, the Central Mass Community Choice Awards is the geographically nearest cousin, though it still runs a business-facing ballot rather than a school sports vote.

For a supporter, that difference changes both the outreach and the timing. This is a community loyalty vote, not a shopping guide, so the effort goes into team communities rather than customer bases, and the July-August window means the result turns on summer engagement with the schools named on the ballot rather than on end-of-year spending.

Strengthening support for a team on this ballot

Support in this ballot runs on team loyalty, and the named options show where the energy sits: Narragansett, Quabbin, Gardner, Monty Tech and Oakmont each bring a school community that already follows its teams. The most effective legitimate step is also the simplest. Put the poll.fm link where those communities already gather, team parent groups, booster pages and class chats, and ask for the vote directly during the July-August window, then remind people while the poll stays open.

The Gardner News publishes no stated policy on organized vote gathering or outside services on the ballot page, so treat anything beyond plain sharing with caution and read the organizer's own text before committing effort to a push. Because the ballot is a single team-of-the-year question, every reminder points at the same target, which makes consistent outreach across the window more valuable than a late burst. For methods that fit any public poll of this shape, see how to get more votes online.