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

What actually separates the boys ballot from the combined Vermont vote count

Two ballots, not one. That's the detail worth knowing before anything else about the Vermont Varsity Insider Athlete of the Week: Burlington Free Press runs the boys race and the girls race as fully independent contests, each with its own nominee pool and its own running vote count, published side by side but never merged into a shared ranking. Land on the wrong half of the page and you're voting for someone who isn't even competing for the boys title.

Confirmed activity on the boys side in the 2025-26 school year clusters into three windows: January, February, and a stretch running from May into June. That's winter (basketball, hockey, alpine and Nordic skiing) followed by the back half of spring, when baseball, track, and lacrosse carry the nominee pool. The program's stated scope covers all three VPA seasons, fall included, but the fall window for the boys ballot specifically isn't part of the confirmed record here. Check the current article at burlingtonfreepress.com if you're voting outside those months.

Delta Dental remains the presenting sponsor across both versions of the poll, same widget, same publisher, same free access. What changes by gender is only the nominee list and the number sitting underneath it. For the combined view of how the whole franchise runs, including the girls side and its own results, the general Vermont Athlete of the Week guide covers both together.

How the boys ballot runs across Vermont's four VPA divisions

The mechanics are simple enough to describe in one paragraph, then worth a table for reference. The boys ballot lives inside the High School Sports section at burlingtonfreepress.com, hosted on the same Gannett widget used across Vermont Varsity Insider's weekly polls. Voting takes one click, no account, no email address, and the running total is visible to anyone who opens the page while the poll is live.

Four divisions is one tier deeper than the three-division structure some Vermont sports use. VPA basketball, in particular, splits boys competition into Division I through Division IV rather than the three tiers used for football or soccer, which means a Division IV program with a fraction of the enrollment of a Division I school can land a nominee on the exact same boys ballot in the same week. Enrollment sets the classification. It does not set who wins the vote.

Because confirmed activity sits in January-February and May-June, the boys ballot reads as most active during winter's basketball and hockey stretch and spring's baseball and track window. Whether a fall boys ballot runs with the same weekly regularity is something the current season's articles at burlingtonfreepress.com would need to confirm; it isn't part of what's documented for this specific ballot yet.

Which Vermont towns carry the boys ballot, and why the map matters

Chittenden County drives a disproportionate share of boys nominees simply because it holds Vermont's largest concentration of Division I enrollment. Burlington, South Burlington, Champlain Valley Union in Hinesburg, and Essex all sit within a short drive of each other, and all four fields regularly produce a boys nominee across multiple sports in a single season.

Vermont schools that recur on the boys ballot

St. Johnsbury Academy sits apart from that geography. It draws boarding and day students from across the Northeast Kingdom, and its alumni network reaches well beyond Vermont's borders, which gives it a wider first-day push than most towns of its size could otherwise generate. Smaller Division III and Division IV programs, in towns without a boarding school's reach, depend instead on how tightly connected the town itself is. A booster list of two hundred families that all get the link in the same afternoon can outperform a much larger, slower-moving fan base.

None of this is guesswork built on a public leaderboard; Burlington Free Press doesn't publish a running tally history for the boys ballot beyond the current week. It's a pattern read off Vermont's basic geography and the confirmed division structure, not a promise about which town wins in any given week. For how this fits into Vermont's wider contest scene, the Vermont contest hub lists the full slate.

What the confirmed record says about running a real campaign

Start with what's actually confirmed: January, February, and the May-June stretch. If a campaign is being planned around a boys nominee, those are the only windows where this specific ballot's activity is documented, so treat any week outside them as unverified until the current article confirms the ballot is live.

Inside a confirmed window, the same principle that governs every Varsity Insider ballot applies here: reach beats patience. Like the girls ballot, boys voting runs on the same Gannett widget with no per-voter cap, so the number of people who find the direct link matters more than how many times any single supporter clicks it. A team group chat, a booster email, and a school's own social accounts sharing the same URL within the first hours of a ballot going live typically builds a lead that's hard to close from behind.

Vermont's small population cuts both ways here. A Division I school's full booster list might only run to six or seven hundred families, and a Division IV school's might be a tenth of that. But a small, tightly wired network activates faster than a large, diffuse one, and on a poll without an hourly reset, speed on day one compounds. A coach's group text reaching forty families within the hour often outproduces a school-wide announcement that trickles out over three days.

When the organic network runs dry and the ballot is still close, some families turn to a paid outreach service that reaches additional real voters rather than automated scripts. Structured vote-support services built for polls of this kind pace delivery to look like normal traffic rather than a spike, which matters more on a widget with no cap than it might on a capped one. Always check the live poll page at burlingtonfreepress.com for the current terms before using any outside service, since Gannett's policies can update between seasons.

Getting a nomination onto the boys ballot, then tracking the result

The Burlington Free Press sports desk builds the boys ballot from performance submissions, typically from coaches, parents, or school athletic contacts. A submission that includes the athlete's school, sport, statistical line, game date, and a short note on why the performance stood out gives the desk what it needs without a follow-up email. Submissions that lack basic context, just a name and a school, are the ones most likely to get passed over for a week's ballot.

Editorial judgment decides who actually appears. Not every strong performance makes the boys ballot in a given week, and the desk weighs the full statewide field before finalizing names. Once the ballot goes live, the boys and girls sides run on the same schedule, typically Monday or Tuesday through a Wednesday evening close, though the exact timing is confirmed only on that week's article.

After the poll closes, results post on burlingtonfreepress.com and across Vermont Varsity Insider's social channels. There's no cash prize attached to a boys ballot win; the value is a published, dated, searchable Gannett credit that a Division III or Division IV athlete, in particular, might not otherwise pick up outside their own town's paper. For the broader mechanics of how online fan polls like this one operate nationally, the online contest voting guide is a useful starting point, and the legality overview covers how the practice is generally treated across different contest types.

For everything else happening in Vermont contests this season, the Vermont contest hub collects the full slate; zoom out further and the national fan-vote index is where this ballot sits alongside comparable Gannett and SBLive programs from other states.