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

What a September search for this ballot usually gets wrong

Search "Vermont girls athlete of the week" in September and the instinct is to assume you've landed too early. The franchise's best-documented windows run January, February, and a May-June stretch, basketball and spring sports mostly. That leaves a real gap for anyone trying to vote for a September or October standout, and it's the wrong conclusion. A separate fall ballot exists, built around field hockey and girls soccer, running on the same Gannett widget the rest of the franchise uses.

Vermont's fall sports calendar isn't the national default, and that's worth sitting with for a second. Field hockey barely registers as a varsity option across most of the country outside a handful of Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states. In Vermont it's a mainstream fall sport with real depth across all four VPA divisions, which means the fall girls ballot leans on it harder than a reader from, say, Ohio or Texas would expect walking in cold. Girls soccer runs alongside it and fills most of the rest of the nominee pool. The boys side of this same fall slice narrows to football for the identical ten-week stretch, a useful comparison for how the franchise splits its year-round ballot into season-specific pages.

What's actually confirmed about the fall girls ballot, and what isn't

Confirmed: field hockey supplies the bulk of nominees once the season opens, girls soccer fills most of the remainder, and the ballot draws from VPA Divisions I through IV statewide. Confirmed also: Burlington, South Burlington, Essex, Middlebury, and Bellows Falls show up repeatedly as nominee schools across the fall window. That's five towns spanning three different counties, which says something about how spread out Vermont's field hockey and soccer strength actually is rather than it clustering in one corner of the state.

Not confirmed: a fixed opening date, a published week-count, or any historical results archive. Burlington Free Press doesn't keep a searchable log of past fall winners, girls or boys, and there's no indication that gap is unique to this ballot; it matches the pattern across the rest of the Varsity Insider franchise. Naming that limit plainly beats guessing at numbers the organizer hasn't published. The live article at burlingtonfreepress.com is the only reliable source for a given week's open and close times.

How the widget works once the fall article goes live

Nothing about the mechanics changes between seasons, and that consistency is one of the few things a first-time voter can rely on. A new article posts to burlingtonfreepress.com's High School Sports section during the fall window, the poll widget sits inside it, and one click submits a vote. No sign-up screen, no CAPTCHA, no email capture. The running total is visible to anyone with the page open, updating in real time as votes land.

Because field hockey and soccer both run on roughly twice-a-week game schedules rather than football's single Friday slot, the fall girls nominee pool can turn over faster within a given week than the boys football ballot does. A midweek game result can produce a fresh nomination candidate before the previous article's poll has even closed. That's a real difference worth knowing before assuming the fall girls window follows football's rhythm exactly.

The uncapped widget carries over unchanged: no six-hour reset, no per-device limit, the same structure documented on the year-round girls ballot. One household voting from three devices repeatedly through the window adds up the same way a two-hundred-family booster list voting once each does; the difference is depth versus breadth, not whether either approach breaks a rule.

Why Bellows Falls belongs on this list and what it says about reach

Four of the five recurring schools sit inside a fairly tight radius: Burlington, South Burlington, and Essex cluster in Chittenden County, with Middlebury a short drive south in Addison County. Bellows Falls breaks that pattern entirely. It's a Windham County town near the New Hampshire line, well outside the Chittenden corridor that dominates so much of Vermont's prep sports coverage, and its regular appearance on this fall ballot says the field hockey and soccer talent pool here isn't concentrated the way basketball nominees sometimes are on the year-round girls page.

That geographic spread cuts against a simple story. A campaign built only around Chittenden County's population advantage misses that a Windham County program with a tight local network shows up just as reliably in the confirmed nominee pattern. Whether Bellows Falls or one of the Chittenden County schools has actually won a given fall week isn't part of the public record; Burlington Free Press doesn't publish that history. What's documented is which towns keep producing nominees, not who takes home a specific ballot.

For the rest of Vermont's active fan-vote landscape outside this fall window, the Vermont contest hub lists what else is running, and the statewide "best of" reader polls (the Brattleboro Reformer Readers' Choice and the Rutland Herald Best of the Best) sit alongside this sports ballot as a different kind of Vermont contest, business categories rather than athletes. On the sports side, the Caledonian-Record's Athlete of the Week covers a smaller Northeast Kingdom footprint, and the Vermont Softball Breakout Player of the Year runs single-sport and seasonal rather than weekly.

Getting a fall nominee onto the ballot, then working the window

Coaches, parents, and school athletic contacts drive most submissions, same as the rest of the franchise. A note naming the athlete's school, sport, game date, and a short line on the performance gives the Burlington Free Press sports desk enough to work with across a full statewide field of field hockey and soccer results. A bare name without that context is easy to pass over when the desk is weighing a busy fall week.

Editorial judgment decides the final ballot, and not every strong performance makes the cut. Once the article posts, the math stays simple because nothing ever resets the count: reach beats patience. Getting the exact fall article link, not a secondhand mention of the athlete's name, in front of the team's own group thread, the booster list, and the school's social accounts within the first few hours of publication tends to build a lead that's genuinely hard to close from behind on a widget with no reset clock.

Field hockey and soccer boosters in a small Vermont town can move fast precisely because the network is small. A hundred-family Bellows Falls contact list, activated within an afternoon, competes on different terms than a slower-moving Chittenden County school still routing a request through several separate parent groups. When that organic reach runs dry and a ballot is still tight heading toward the close, some boosters turn to structured fan poll vote support built for uncapped widgets like this one, paced delivery that reads as ordinary traffic rather than a spike. Reading the live terms at burlingtonfreepress.com before using any outside service is worth the two minutes, since Gannett updates its rules between seasons. The online contest voting guide covers the broader mechanics of how fan-vote polls like this one operate nationally, and the legality overview walks through how the practice is treated across different contest types.