Vermont Varsity Insider Boys Athlete of the Week (Spring): How Voting Works & How to Win

Boys AOTW in Vermont: general ballot, fall football, or spring track and lacrosse — which one are you on?

Three ballots, one publisher. Burlington Free Press's Vermont Varsity Insider doesn't run one continuous boys Athlete of the Week vote through the school year — it runs three separate slices under the same brand, and the spring one is the version most searches land on without meaning to. The most recently confirmed window for this spring ballot ran May 26 through June 1, 2025, inside the closing fortnight of the VPA's spring calendar.

The year-round boys guide covers the general ballot's confirmed 2025-26 activity: January, February, and a May-into-June stretch, spanning winter's basketball and hockey nominees into spring's baseball, track, and lacrosse field. The fall football version narrows to one sport only, VPA football Divisions I through IV, running roughly August through November. This page covers the third slice: what shows up once football season ends and spring sports take over, with track and lacrosse doing most of the work.

Same publisher, same Gannett widget, same free access, all three. What changes is the sport mix feeding the nominee pool and the stretch of calendar each version covers. The same organizer also runs the Vermont Softball Breakout Player of the Year, a separate girls-softball ballot under the Vermont Varsity Insider / Delta Dental umbrella timed to its own late-spring window — a different contest, a different nominee pool, worth knowing about only so a voter doesn't land on the wrong ballot by mistake.

Why does the spring ballot lean so heavily on track and lacrosse?

Two sports carry the spring ballot, and neither one is baseball, even though baseball shares the same March-to-June VPA season. Track and field produces a nominee almost every week once outdoor meets get underway — several events per meet means several chances for a single standout result, all inside the same six-to-eight-week window. Lacrosse, still a newer varsity sport at a number of Vermont schools compared with basketball or football, tends to produce nominees concentrated later in the season, once tournament seeding is on the line.

That's the pattern behind the confirmed detail: track and lacrosse are the sports that show up most often on this specific boys ballot. Baseball, tennis, and golf all run through the same VPA spring window and do produce occasional nominees, but none carries the same weekly density in the confirmed record for this ballot. A submission from a track coach after a big invitational, or a lacrosse coach after a ranked win, is the kind of performance that tends to clear the sports desk's bar in these closing weeks of the season.

None of that is a formal quota set by Burlington Free Press. It's what the confirmed May 26-June 1, 2025 window and the general pattern of spring submissions point to: a ballot shaped week to week by which sports are producing standout, easily-described performances at the exact moment the desk is building that article — not a fixed slot reserved for any one sport.

What do we actually know about the May 26-June 1 spring window?

Not much beyond the dates themselves, and that's worth saying plainly. Burlington Free Press confirmed the spring boys ballot was live and collecting votes from May 26 through June 1, 2025 — a single week sitting close to the tail end of the VPA's spring sports calendar, right around when track programs head into sectional and state-meet season and lacrosse teams settle into their postseason bracket.

What isn't public: which nominees appeared on that specific ballot, what the vote totals were, or who won. Burlington Free Press doesn't keep a searchable archive of past Vermont Varsity Insider results, spring included, so the record of any individual week lives only in that week's article and whatever a search engine happened to index from it. That gap runs across the whole franchise, not just the spring slice — the fall football version and the general ballot carry the identical limitation.

The safer assumption for a reader arriving well outside that late-May window: the spring ballot's exact publish date likely shifts from year to year, tied to when VPA spring sports wrap up rather than a fixed calendar date. The national fan-vote index lines this ballot's confirmed-but-thin public record up against similar SBLive and Gannett programs running in other states, most of which share the same no-archive limitation.

How the spring ballot's mechanics compare to football's uncapped widget

Mechanically, nothing changes between seasons. The spring ballot runs on the identical Gannett widget as the fall and general versions: embedded inside a High School Sports article at burlingtonfreepress.com, one click per nominee, no account, no email address, live totals visible the moment a vote lands.

What's different is timing pressure, not process. Fall football is a once-a-week sport by rule, so that ballot keeps a predictable Friday-to-Wednesday rhythm. Spring track meets often fall midweek and on weekends both, and lacrosse schedules vary district to district, so the spring nominee pool can turn over on a less predictable cadence than football's clean weekly beat.

Whether the spring ballot carries the same uncapped structure confirmed for its siblings isn't separately restated for this specific window. The Vermont contest hub lists every ballot currently open statewide, which is a faster check than guessing at rules that may have changed since last spring.

Turning a track or lacrosse nomination into a real spring campaign

Getting a nominee onto the spring ballot starts the same way it does for every Vermont Varsity Insider ballot: a submission to the Burlington Free Press sports desk naming the athlete's school, sport, event or opponent, a specific result, and the date it happened. A track submission that names the meet, the event, and the time or distance beats a vague "had a great week" note. A lacrosse submission with the final score and the opponent does the same job.

Once the ballot is live, the late-May timing works against long campaigns. Track and lacrosse postseasons compress into a tight stretch, which means a spring nominee's supporters typically get days, not weeks, to build a push before that article's window closes. That favors networks built to move fast: a team group chat, a coach's contact list, a booster email sent the same day the article publishes — not a slower, multi-week build-out like a fall campaign can afford.

A handful of population centers carry a disproportionate share of Vermont's largest athletic programs, Chittenden County chief among them, and a Burlington or Essex track program starts with a bigger built-in pool to draw from on day one than a smaller program in a rural county. But a tight-knit team and coaching staff that gets the direct article link out within hours, rather than waiting on a school's official account to post it eventually, can close that gap inside a short spring window better than the same size difference would allow across a longer fall campaign.

When the organic push runs out before the window closes, some families turn to structured vote-support services built for fan polls like this one. The distinction Gannett's terms actually draw is between automated, script-submitted votes, which get pulled on detection, and real people voting through an outside push, which isn't a violation by itself. Reading the live poll page before hiring anyone is the safer first step, since publisher policies shift between seasons. For the mechanics behind fan-vote campaigns generally, the online contest voting guide covers the fundamentals, and the legality overview explains how the practice is treated across different contest formats.