The North Jersey Girls Team of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the North Jersey Girls Team of the Year and who runs it?

The North Jersey Girls Team of the Year is a fan-decided honor for high school girls athletics in northern New Jersey. The Record and its website NorthJersey.com organize the balloting inside their high school sports coverage, and the program works differently from the publisher's reader-choice surveys: instead of scoring restaurants, dentists or shops, the ballot nominates whole school squads and lets readers push the team with the strongest season to the top.

Voting runs on Crowdsignal, whose poll.fm pages carry the ballot at https://poll.fm/17130502. Supporters alone set the outcome on that page; nothing in the setup describes a judging panel, a bracket or an entry fee, and the result feeds the publisher's own high school sports awards programming.

The nominee format shapes the whole contest. Because every option is a team rather than an individual, supporters weigh a full season of collective achievement, and the schools involved draw their backing from their own communities.

When does the North Jersey Girls Team of the Year vote open and close?

Editions of the vote ran in 2024, 2025 and 2026, which puts the program on an annual rhythm rather than making it a one-season experiment. The 2026 cycle carries the clearest published timeline: voting shut down at 11:59 p.m. on June 21, and the Girls Team of the Year award was set to be handed out at the North Jersey High School Sports Awards show on June 28. The sequencing matters for anyone planning a campaign: the fan vote settles the honor, and the show presents it days later.

The organizer has printed no opening day and no nomination round for the balloting; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Whether the 2027 edition follows the same June rhythm has not been posted either, so the live page remains the only schedule worth trusting.

Once the deadline passes, the ballot itself changes character. The poll page headers itself as closed, and the address keeps serving visitors the final standings instead of a live form, which is how latecomers can still read the outcome long afterward.

How do you vote for a North Jersey girls team on the ballot?

Casting a vote happens entirely on the poll.fm page for the girls team ballot. A supporter opens the address, scans the nominated squads, marks a selection and submits the form. No registration wall or email prompt is advertised ahead of the vote, and whatever verification the form applies before counting a choice is not described publicly.

The 2026 slate gave readers a genuine cross-sport choice. Nominees printed on the ballot included Bergen Tech bowling, Bergen Tech tennis, Demarest volleyball, DePaul softball, Glen Rock tennis, IHA ice hockey, Ramsey soccer, Ramsey softball, Ridgewood cross-country and Ridgewood lacrosse. Every line pairs a school with the sport that earned the spot, so a volleyball power, a bowling program and an ice hockey side all compete for the same crown.

That simplicity concentrates the work elsewhere. The form asks for a selection and a submit click, so nearly all of the effort in a serious campaign goes into reaching people who will actually open the page, not into mastering the voting steps themselves.

How does the girls team vote compare with other New Jersey reader ballots?

New Jersey readers meet plenty of public ballots, and this one sits apart from the pack. The state's reader-choice lineup includes Asbury Park Press Readers' Choice, Bergen & Morris Top Dentists, Best of Bergen and its Community's Choice Awards franchise, the Best of Jersey Shore Contest, Best of New Jersey and the Jersey Bites Monmouth County Readers' Choice. Those programs score businesses across long category lists; the girls team vote crowns school squads instead, and it resolves on a stage at the high school sports awards show rather than in a publication spread.

Where the 2026 votes landed

The closed 2026 ballot also published its arithmetic. Demarest volleyball drew 73% of the displayed tally, with DePaul softball at 12%, Ramsey soccer at 9%, Ramsey softball at 3% and Glen Rock tennis at 2%. Ridgewood lacrosse rounded out the visible list below the leaders.

A concentration like that builds over days of coordinated sharing across a school community, not in the closing hours alone, and it explains why the nominees' own networks matter as much as any matchup on the slate.

How can supporters build momentum for a nominated girls team?

Momentum in this poll comes from early, repeated pointing at the official address. The 2026 close sat at a fixed hour, 11:59 p.m. on June 21, so campaigns that treated the final full day as the true deadline avoided assuming any midnight grace period. Practical channels are the ones schools already run: team group chats, parent networks, the athletic department's usual announcements. Ask each family to pass the poll.fm link onward rather than recycling the same post.

The Record posts no guidance for this ballot on outside help or purchased support. Readers who want the mechanics of widening reach can begin with how to get more votes online, and award-style polls have a dedicated overview at buy award votes. Read the organizer's silence as a reason for caution rather than permission, since no outside service can promise where a team finishes.