Wisconsin High School Football Team of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

Wisconsin runs six prep-football fan votes at once. Here's where the team poll sits

Two organizers, six ballots, one football season. High School on SI splits its Wisconsin coverage into a weekly Offensive Player of the Week poll and a separate weekly Defensive one, then layers three more annual awards on top once the season ends: Offensive Player of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year, and Special Teams Player of the Year. Bound Wisconsin, an independent outlet, runs a seventh, combined weekly ballot with its own cap and close day. The Team of the Year poll is the odd one out in that list. Every other ballot names a person. This one names a program.

That difference matters for anyone deciding where to point supporters. A quarterback's family votes for a person. A program's booster club, coaching staff, and every family with a kid on the roster, starter or third-string, votes for the same team entry. Confuse the two and half a program's supporters end up on the wrong article. Outside this SI/Bound Wisconsin cluster entirely, regional newspapers run their own separate weekly ballots, like the Appleton Post-Crescent's Athlete of the Week poll in the Fox Cities. For how fan-vote polls like this one are structured more broadly, the online contest voting guide covers the general mechanics before the Wisconsin specifics below.

A program vote asks a different question than a player vote does

Nobody's stat line decides this one. A Team of the Year nominee gets judged on a season, not a single highlight, which means the pitch to voters is necessarily different. "Vote for our quarterback's 300-yard game" doesn't translate. "Vote for the program that went undefeated through region play" does.

That reframes who has a stake in the outcome. On a player poll, the campaign lives or dies with one family's network and whatever social reach the athlete personally commands. On the team poll, every senior's parents, every underclassman hoping to start next fall, the booster club, the marching band, and the coaching staff all have equal standing to ask people to vote. A 300-student program like Darlington in the Illini Conference and a much larger Fox Valley Association school like Kimberly aren't just fielding different rosters; they're drawing on communities of very different size to fill out that same one ballot line.

No searchable, aggregated record of past Team of the Year results sits anywhere on si.com. Each year's outcome lives inside that year's own dated article, the same limitation that applies to SI's other Wisconsin award polls. Anyone trying to confirm a specific past program's win needs to search the site directly rather than expect a consolidated list.

What the record actually shows, and where it stays quiet

SI's other Wisconsin award articles open with a consistent headline template: "Vote: Who was the [year] Wisconsin High School [category] Player of the Year?" The Team of the Year article follows that same house style, swapping the category for the program-level award. That's a platform pattern, not a guess specific to one year.

How nominees reach the ballot

SI's Wisconsin editorial desk compiles the nominee field after the WIAA state championship weekend in November, drawing from playoff results, regular-season records, and regional standing across all seven enrollment divisions. A Division 1 finalist and a Division 7 finalist can both land on the same ballot; the fan-vote format doesn't sort by classification.

What isn't published, and what this page won't invent, is a confirmed 2025 winner. No aggregated results page exists to check against, and guessing at a name would be worse than saying plainly: check that year's dated article on si.com/high-school/wisconsin directly. The mechanics around the poll are well established from SI's other Wisconsin ballots; the specific outcome of any single year belongs to that year's own article.

How the December ballot actually runs

One article, one widget, one closing date. Unlike the roughly twelve weekly ballots that run each football season, Team of the Year has a single window per year, and it opens after the last playoff game is played, not before.

Casting a vote takes seconds once the article is live: open it, find the embedded widget, click the program's name. No email address, no login, no app download. The widget shows running totals for every nominated program throughout the open window, which gives a trailing program's supporters a real signal about how much more reach they need before the article's stated deadline.

Bookmarking a link here carries real risk. Prior years' Team of the Year articles stay live online after their poll closes, so a shared link from a past cycle can look active when it isn't. Confirming the publish date, and the fact that a live vote widget still appears on the page, matters before sending a link to an entire program's supporter base.

The wider set of Wisconsin's football fan-vote mechanics, including the weekly offensive and defensive splits, sits at the Wisconsin contest hub; the national fan-vote index shows how this program-level format compares to team polls SI and other outlets run elsewhere.

Running a program-wide push instead of a highlight-reel campaign

A single graphic with the quarterback's face doesn't work here. The ask has to reach every family on the roster, not just the households whose kid scored touchdowns, because every one of those families has an equal reason to share the link.

The coaching staff's own network is worth activating early. A head coach with fifteen years at one program has relationships with feeder-program coaches, officials, and rival coaches who respect the season even while wishing their own team had won it. That reach extends well past what any single player's personal following can generate. The pacing tactics behind any deadline-driven fan vote, timed reminders, staged outreach, a final-week push, are covered in general terms in our how-to guides, and they translate directly to a whole-program campaign.

Small-enrollment programs carry a real structural edge on a ballot like this one. A 300-student school where the football team is the whole town's Friday night, not one of several fall sports competing for attention, tends to convert its realistic voter pool faster than a large suburban program with a bigger roster but a more fragmented fan base spread across multiple sports. That dynamic showed up on SI's individual Wisconsin awards too; a compact, tightly connected community outperforms raw enrollment when everyone who could plausibly vote actually does.

Once the coaching staff's contacts, the booster email list, and every player's family have been reached and a gap still remains before the published deadline, structured fan-poll vote support exists for polls shaped like this one, and the same principles that apply to individual award-style campaigns carry over to a program-wide push. Reading the legality breakdown for buying contest votes before committing any budget is worth doing regardless of which side of the ballot a supporter is voting on.