WBZ-TV MVP of the Week (Massachusetts): How Voting Works & How to Win

WBZ-TV's MVP of the Week has no ballot, no widget, and no vote count

There's no ballot here. That surprises people who land on this page expecting one.

WBZ-TV, the CBS-owned station covering Greater Boston, runs its Massachusetts high school MVP of the Week as a staff-selected spotlight. The sports desk reviews nominations and picks whichever athlete's week, or whose personal story, earns the feature. Nobody clicks a name and submits anything resembling a vote. There's no embedded widget, no per-device cap, no countdown clock the way the statewide Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week poll runs on si.com.

The web address gives it away before you read a word of coverage. cbsnews.com/boston/tag/wbz-tv-mvp-of-the-week/ is a tag page, the kind a newsroom uses to collect every article carrying one label, not a ballot page with a widget bolted on. A poll URL usually shows a running vote count and a closing timer. This one shows a list of published features.

What the tag page has instead of vote totals is range. A Bishop Feehan quarterback has been featured. So has a Deaflympic gold medalist, whose achievement traveled further than a typical box-score writeup because winning at a Deaflympics level is exactly the kind of detail a poll counting clicks would never surface. WBZ's editors chose both, in different weeks, for different reasons — judgment decides this one, turnout decides nothing.

How WBZ's staff pick compares with Massachusetts's fan-voted athlete polls

Three other Massachusetts programs share the same general territory, and mixing them up wastes real effort pointed at the wrong process.

The Massachusetts High School Athlete of the Week, run by High School on SI and SBLive Sports, is a genuine fan-vote poll: an embedded widget, unlimited voting, a Monday close at 11:59 p.m. Pacific. The Enterprise Brockton Athlete of the Week splits into separate boys' and girls' ballots, with a confirmed 21,572-vote result on one side and 12,052 on the other, closing every Monday at noon. Both ask a supporter to click, then come back and click again.

WBZ's program asks for none of that. There's no vote count to check and no deadline to beat. A supporter's only real lever is getting a strong nomination in front of the sports desk, then sharing the finished piece once it airs.

That last row deserves a second look. Best of Boston runs the same kind of split WBZ effectively runs alone: a staff-chosen track sitting next to a voted one, except Boston Magazine publishes both tracks under one name. As far as the confirmed sources for this guide show, WBZ has only the staff-picked side.

What happens between a nomination and a WBZ broadcast

Start with what's actually published, because the gaps matter as much as the confirmed parts.

WBZ hasn't attached a public submission email or web form to the MVP of the Week brand in the sources checked for this guide, unlike SBLive's Alabama program, which runs on a named inbox. The reliable route is CBS Boston's own sports desk contact channels, or watching the station's on-air and social accounts for an open call. A submission built around the athlete's community story, not only a stat line, matches what the format has rewarded before.

What "confirmed" actually means here

Once a nominee is chosen, the piece runs as a broadcast segment with a companion article filed under the tag page. Older features stay live there, so a family checking for the current week's spotlight should confirm the publish date before assuming a feature is new.

That table stays short on purpose. Filling in a submission deadline or an air time nobody has confirmed would be worse than leaving the row blank.

The Massachusetts schools and towns the spotlight has actually reached

Bishop Feehan High School, a Catholic school in Attleboro down in Bristol County, is the one confirmed name tied to this program's roster, linked to a featured quarterback whose performance led into a college recruiting story. That single data point says something about reach on its own: WBZ's Greater Boston broadcast market stretches to towns like Attleboro, roughly 40 miles south of the station, not only the communities inside Route 128.

The Deaflympic gold medalist's feature adds a different kind of reach, measured by the scale of the achievement rather than distance from Boston. WBZ didn't need a hometown rivalry angle to justify that story; the achievement carried it on its own. That's the real tell for what "unique community stories" means on this program — a spotlight built around what makes a person's week remarkable, not a running leaderboard of clicks.

Beyond those two confirmed threads, this guide won't hand you an invented roster of schools. WBZ's own tag page is the only reliable record of who has actually been featured, and it grows every week. For the fuller picture of Massachusetts recognition programs, from statewide fan-vote polls to the Boston Magazine Best of Boston program and the newspaper-run South Shore ballots, the Massachusetts contest hub lays every program out side by side.

What actually helps a nominee here, and what wastes money

Here's the plain version: nobody can buy a WBZ MVP of the Week pick. There's no vote count to inflate, so a service promising to "win the vote" on this particular program is selling something that doesn't exist here.

The nomination pitch that actually works

What moves the needle sits upstream of any broadcast: a nomination detailed enough that a producer can already see the segment inside it. Game context and stats help, but the format has rewarded the personal or community angle more than a big highlight reel on its own. Think about why a Deaflympic gold medal made the cut over an ordinary box score. That's the model worth copying.

Downstream, after a feature airs, there's a real and legitimate role for amplification: sharing the published piece across school and community channels, tagging CBS Boston, making sure the athlete's own network sees a story that already exists instead of trying to manufacture one that hasn't happened yet. That's closer to how award-style recognition programs get shared once a result is real, and it's a genuinely different job from the vote-mobilization playbook that fits an unlimited-vote poll like the ones covered under sports fan-poll vote support elsewhere in Massachusetts.

Reading the actual rules matters too. Whatever WBZ or CBS Boston publishes about submissions should be checked directly before anything gets sent, and the broader line between real outreach and manufactured demand is covered at is buying votes legal. For Massachusetts contests where an actual ballot exists, the general online voting guide covers that separate playbook from the start.