Best of Local High School Sports 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best of Local High School Sports is and who runs it

Best of Local High School Sports 2025 is a public-vote award ballot for high school sports in the St. Cloud, Minnesota market. The organizer is Leighton Broadcasting, which operates the ballot through its Leighton - St. Cloud organization on Second Street. Leighton Media is a radio and marketing company headquartered in St. Cloud, and the ballot is one of the promotions it runs for its local listeners and readers, sitting alongside sweepstakes and seasonal promotions on that same Second Street account.

The vertical is a best-of format: rather than a single winner-takes-all poll, the ballot is built as a nomination-and-voting ballot, the type where supporters first nominate entries in each category and the field then moves to a public voting round. That two-stage structure is visible in the ballot's own setup on Second Street, and it shapes how a supporter participates, because the nomination stage and the voting stage both fall inside the same dated window.

The ballot lives at leighton-stcloud.secondstreetapp.com/Best-of-Local-High-School-Sports-2025, with one address per edition year. The table below collects the confirmed facts about the program side by side.

The dated facts: editions, windows and what is not published

Six editions of Best of Local High School Sports are confirmed, running each year from 2020 through 2025, which makes the ballot an annual fixture in the Leighton - St. Cloud promotion calendar. The earliest edition's activity reaches back to August 24, 2020 on the platform, and each subsequent year has carried its own ballot at its own address on the same Second Street account. A 2026 edition is the next expected run.

The 2025 window is the most precisely dated fact about the program: the ballot ran September 22 through November 1, 2025, and it is now closed. Results were announced after the close, with Leighton Media describing the outcome as the sixth annual edition of the ballot in its results coverage.

Two things the organizer has not published shape what a supporter can plan around. First, the ballot page carries no category roster, so the list of categories a given edition covers is only visible on the live ballot. Second, no rules text accompanies the ballot: there is no printed per-supporter vote limit, no stated one-vote-per-day rule and no eligibility terms. Both gaps mean the practical details of participating are confirm on the live ballot each cycle, and neither gap can be filled from the ballot page itself.

How a supporter votes on the Leighton ballot today

The literal mechanic is a two-stage ballot on Second Street. A supporter opens the current edition's page, and because the ballot is set up as a nomination-and-voting ballot, the first action is nominating: filling in the name of an athlete, team or program in the category the supporter cares about. Once the nomination stage feeds the voting round, the same supporter returns to the ballot and votes for the nominees.

Both stages sit inside the edition's single window. For 2025 that window was September 22 through November 1, 2025, so nominations and voting shared the same roughly six-week span rather than running on separate calendars. The ballot is now closed for 2025, and the next edition will open on its own dates.

Practical notes for a supporter: each edition lives at its own address on leighton-stcloud.secondstreetapp.com, so an old bookmark may land on a closed prior-year ballot. The form itself is the authority for vote frequency, since no written per-supporter rule accompanies the ballot. And because nominations are typed in by hand, spelling the nominee's name the way the school community knows it matters, since the nomination form is what carries an entry into the voting round.

How this ballot sits beside its Minnesota neighbours

Minnesota's best-of field is crowded, and Best of Local High School Sports occupies a specific niche in it: it is the prep-sports ballot of a single broadcaster, Leighton Broadcasting's St. Cloud operation, rather than a general readers' choice covering businesses across a city. That focus is what makes it different from the general-interest ballots around it.

The nearest neighbours in the state include Best of the Midwest and Minnesota's Best, both broad best-of programs, along with the Best of the Best Brainerd Lakes Area run by the Brainerd Dispatch and the Best of the Best from the Duluth News Tribune. CommunityVotes runs two more markets in the state, CommunityVotes Duluth and CommunityVotes Rochester.

What separates the Leighton ballot from all of them is subject and host: among these programs it alone is devoted entirely to high school sports, and it alone is hosted by a radio and marketing company headquartered in St. Cloud. Its two-stage nomination-and-voting structure also differs from straight voting ballots, and its results coverage, such as the 2025 six-category sweep report, reaches the broadcaster's audience rather than a newspaper's. A supporter choosing where to focus should match the ballot to the nominee: a prep athlete or team belongs here, while a local business belongs on the general best-of ballots.

Strengthening support on the Leighton prep sports ballot

Support on this ballot is built in two moves, because the ballot is a nomination-and-voting ballot. The first move is getting nominated: a school community that submits nominations early in the window, spelling names consistently, guarantees its entries reach the voting round. The second move is turnout in the voting stage, which is where most ballots of this type are won or lost.

Leighton has not printed any rule about outside help, vote buying or automated voting on the ballot page, so the organizer's enforcement position is unknown from the page alone. That cuts both ways: nothing on the page authorizes purchased votes, and nothing on the page states a penalty either. The safe reading is that the live form and the broadcaster's own terms govern what is allowed, and a supporter who wants certainty should ask the organizer directly before spending money.

Organic tactics that fit this ballot's shape: rally the school's parent and alumni groups during the September 22 opening week, since a nomination lead early in the window compounds through the voting stage; use the broadcaster's own results coverage as proof the ballot is taken seriously in the community; and keep every push inside the window, which closed November 1 in 2025. For broader tactics that transfer to ballots like this one, see how to get more votes online, and for the service side see award votes.