Lubbock Avalanche-Journal High School Team of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal High School Team of the Year?

The High School Team of the Year ballot belongs to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the daily newspaper based in Lubbock, Texas, whose sports desk follows high school athletics across the coverage area it serves through lubbockonline.com.

Readers are asked a single question, which squad deserves the yearly honor, and the answer options are entire teams rather than individuals. Football, volleyball, baseball and girls basketball programs from communities around Lubbock all appear on the slate, so the final tally reflects which programs held their towns' attention across the school year.

Crowdsignal hosts the ballot at poll.fm/17242914, the polling service the publisher uses for its reader votes generally.

The same desk also stages a shorter recurring feature that asks readers to pick a weekly standout athlete, so the team ballot arrives as the season-closing piece of a longer stretch of reader balloting rather than appearing out of nowhere.

Because the honor goes to a whole squad, a campaign's backers rally behind a shared badge instead of a personal profile, and that shapes how a community argues for its entry.

When does the team of the year vote run, and how often has it appeared?

Two editions of the vote are confirmed, in 2025 and in 2026, and both windows fell inside July. The ballot therefore behaves as a summer event on the newspaper's calendar, arriving after the school seasons it judges have finished.

The 2026 ballot carries the title "Who should be the 2025-26 team of the year?" and is currently marked Poll Closed, so the published page shows final standings instead of live options.

Sundown softball led the published standings throughout, with All Saints volleyball the closest challenger and the baseball entries trailing well behind.

The publisher has not printed an opening day or a closing day beside either tally; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Supporting text is similarly thin: no written eligibility terms, no repeatability rule and no round schedule from the platform travel with the results. On the two-cycle pattern, a further edition would arrive in 2027, although no successor ballot sits at the published address yet.

How does a supporter cast a vote in the team of the year poll?

Casting a vote is deliberately simple. The ballot poses its question, lists the nominated teams beneath it, and lets a reader mark the squad they back before submitting.

While a cycle is live, that click is the whole transaction: no purchase, no registration screen and no entry form stand between a supporter and the tally, as far as the published page shows.

Once the deadline passes, the page turns into a results board, displaying each team's percentage share alongside the raw count it gathered.

The publisher attaches no written guidance covering how frequently a supporter may return, whether a sign-in is expected, or which devices the ballot favors. None of that changes the core action, which is choosing a team and confirming the choice.

The named nominees above come straight from the published answer list, and the finalists tabulated in the previous section rose from that same slate. Those entries also carry the names of smaller communities, Jayton, Idalou, Nazareth, Spur, Shallowater, New Home, Ropes and Sundown among them, which shows how far beyond the city limits the paper's school coverage reaches.

How does this ballot sit beside its Texas neighbours?

Within Texas, the nearest relatives of this ballot are the large metro reader polls: the Best of Austin Readers Poll, Best of Dallas Readers' Choice, Best of El Paso, Best of Houston, Best of San Antonio and Best of Fort Worth.

Those contests rank local businesses across broad category lists, while the Avalanche-Journal's vote crowns a single high school squad.

The subject matter separates it from every metro ranking: school spirit rather than commerce, and a verdict delivered by fans of particular programs instead of general readers scoring restaurants and shops.

Scale differs as well. A metro-wide readers poll measures an entire city's businesses, whereas this ballot measures loyalty to teams from smaller communities around Lubbock, where a devoted booster base can move a real share of the count.

For anyone deciding where effort pays, the practical difference is concentration. Every one of those six metro ballots spreads attention across many categories; the Avalanche-Journal's summer question funnels everybody who clicks toward the same short list of nominated squads, whether the trophy ends up with a softball, volleyball, football or baseball team.

How can a team's base build stronger support in this vote?

A single-question ballot rewards early, visible momentum, because every supporter who arrives sees the same standings and a named squad to back. The 2025-26 count ended lopsided, and a board shaped that way tends to recruit followers who either join the front-runner or organize an upset.

The practical levers for a team's base are the ordinary ones: mobilizing families connected to the roster, timing posts for the moment the next July window opens, and keeping reminders steady until the deadline. Our guide to gathering more votes online collects those tactics in greater depth.

Before any booster group spends money on outside help, it should study the terms the publisher attaches to this ballot, because those terms alone decide what a paid push may accomplish here. A comparison of paid options for honors-style ballots lives at our award votes page, and no package changes what the published rules allow.