Middle Tennessee High School Sports Awards School Spirit Vote: How Voting Works & How to Win

A school-spirit ballot, run by a Nashville newspaper for a region, not one city

Middle Tennessee High School Sports Awards School Spirit asks a specific question: which Middle Tennessee high school shows the most spirit, decided by a public vote The Tennessean runs on the Second Street platform. The Tennessean itself is based in Nashville, but the ballot's own name scopes its subject to the wider Middle Tennessee region rather than to Nashville specifically.

Two editions are confirmed: an earlier one dated February 5, 2024, and the 2025 edition, whose full public voting window is dated March 11 through April 23, 2025. The program runs on tennessean.gannettcontests.com, a Second Street-hosted address separate from The Tennessean's main news site.

That last row matters for a supporter trying to plan ahead. Beyond the dates above, neither a participating-school list nor a per-voter rule has gone live anywhere checked, so treat next year's shape as unproven until tennessean.gannettcontests.com actually posts it.

What the confirmed dates actually show, and what they leave open

The 2025 edition's public ballot ran forty-three days, March 11 through April 23, 2025. That's the only fully dated window in what's confirmed. An earlier edition is dated from February 5, 2024, but what's published doesn't spell out when that 2024 window itself closed, only that the program was active from that date.

Two confirmed editions is a short history next to some Second Street programs that have run for a decade or more in other Gannett markets. It's real, though: The Tennessean built a second consecutive cycle around this exact subject, a Middle Tennessee school's spirit rather than an individual athlete or a business, and kept the same tennessean.gannettcontests.com address running it.

Where the pattern isn't settled yet

Whether a School Spirit ballot opens every spring on a fixed schedule, or whether 2025's March-to-April window shifts for the next cycle, isn't confirmed anywhere published. Two editions isn't enough history to call that a settled annual pattern the way a program with a decade of dated cycles could. tennessean.gannettcontests.com is where that answer actually shows up once a new cycle opens.

A region-wide school vote among Tennessee's mostly business-focused reader ballots

Most of the other confirmed Tennessee reader-vote programs in this set rank businesses or theater productions, not a single region's high school communities. That makes School Spirit's subject the outlier among its own closest neighbors in this set.

Six separate rulebooks, six separate results pages, and not one of them touches a Middle Tennessee school's spirit the way this vote does. A parent typing "Tennessee school vote" into a search bar is about as likely to land on one of those six, and none of them do a School Spirit push any good.

Turning out a school community inside a six-week voting window

Forty-three days, the length of the confirmed 2025 window, sounds generous until it's measured against how a school community actually mobilizes: students graduate, seasons end, and attention shifts fast once spring sports wrap up. A school's best chance is spreading the ask early across students, parents, alumni and staff rather than concentrating it in the final week before an April close.

Real voters who already have a connection to the school, current students, recent graduates, teachers, band and club members, convert at a far higher rate than a generic social post aimed at strangers. A young program still building its reputation has more to lose from faked or automated activity than a decade-old ballot would.

Appearing on the ballot is not the same claim as winning it, and The Tennessean alone gets to make that second call once its own process wraps up. Is buying votes legal is worth reading before that line gets crossed, and turning real supporters into votes covers tactics that hold up even where School Spirit's own rules stay unpublished.