Victorville Daily Press Joe Orthodontics Team of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Joe Orthodontics Team of the Year and who runs it?

The Joe Orthodontics Team of the Year is a reader vote published by the Victorville Daily Press, the daily newspaper covering Victorville, California. The sponsor's name sits inside the programme title, and the paper ran the honour within its high school sports coverage, the same desk behind its Athlete of the Week features. Balloting happened on Crowdsignal, whose dedicated page sat at https://poll.fm/17135650, and any reader who loaded that page could take part.

The shape is a straight popularity count. The ballot named three school teams, visitors picked a favourite, and the page displayed a running percentage and raw count beside each option. On the closing ballot those nominees were Barstow football, Victor Valley boys basketball and Riverside Prep softball. Nothing in the vote required payment, and the paper's promotion encouraged fans to return repeatedly.

Who backs the award

Which dates and editions are settled for this ballot?

A single edition year is on file for this programme: 2026. The paper's sports desk printed the endpoint in its own story, setting the close of voting at 11:59 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026. The ballot page now carries a closed notice, so the live window for that run has passed.

Other basics went unprinted. The publisher never posted the day voting opened, and the ballot page lists no wider category structure beyond the three named teams, so a reader wanting those details has to rely on whatever a future ballot displays. No follow-up edition has been announced either.

This is the first confirmed edition; whether it returns next year is not yet published; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How does a supporter actually vote on the Team of the Year ballot?

Supporters reaching the Team of the Year page saw a compact layout: three labelled options, each showing a live percentage and a raw count, with a control for registering a choice. Selecting a team and submitting logs the vote immediately, and the displayed tallies adjust. Because the paper had switched to new polling software that season, its story carried a practical warning: if the poll above does not load, try refreshing the page.

The arithmetic updated in plain sight as well. Each option carried its own share and tally, and the counter beneath them rolled up to 8,859 votes once the poll shut, so a booster group could watch a push register within minutes rather than waiting for a results story. Whatever drove a spike, the ballot kept it visible to every visitor.

Repeat participation sat inside the rules rather than outside them. The publisher's line was that fans can vote as often as they'd like in all three polls, so a household returning through the evening acted within the stated policy. No signup step appeared on the ballot face; the choices sat directly on the page.

Teams reached the ballot through a nomination lane. The paper asked that nominations be received for consideration by Sunday morning following that week's games, which tied each slate to the local playing schedule. After a team appeared among the options, its supporters controlled the outcome.

Reading the final standings

The closed ballot preserved its arithmetic in full:

How does this Victorville vote compare with other California ballots?

This ballot is unusually narrow beside the broad business rounds that anchor California's public-vote scene. Sibling programmes such as Best of Central Valley Business and Best of Silicon Valley sort entire industries into categories and let readers crown favourites across a region. Coastal metros run their own versions, including Best of San Diego & Best Restaurants, and charity drives such as the 2024 GGBR Calendar Contest occupy a different corner again. The Victorville honour instead goes to a single school team, decided within a single newspaper's coverage.

That narrowness changes the campaign calculus. A regional business round rewards name recognition accumulated over months; the Joe Orthodontics ballot rewarded concentrated turnout from a school community inside a compressed window, with 8,859 votes spread across just the three nominees. Best of Marin illustrates the other extreme, where merchant loyalties compete across a whole county's shopper base.

Timing discipline matters more here as well. The Victorville close arrived on a printed date and stuck to it, while multi-category regional contests usually leave longer windows. Anyone following several California votes at once should plan effort against each ballot's own calendar, because a missed deadline in a narrow field costs far more ground than it would where dozens of categories dilute the competition.

What moves the needle for a team campaign in this poll?

The publisher's open-ended voting rule makes volume the lever a campaign can actually pull. A booster club that times its appeals to game nights, when local attention peaks, turns the paper's invitation into steady gains. The nomination deadline carries equal weight: a missed Sunday-morning submission removes a team from that week's consideration regardless of enthusiasm.

Tactics worth adapting to this ballot include syncing reminders to weekend results, briefing voters on the refresh fix so a stalled poll never costs a click, and watching percentages rather than raw counts, since the page displays both. Generic reach-building advice transfers poorly unless reshaped around a weekly school calendar, so start from the schedule the paper sets. Wider techniques for earning support are gathered in our votes guide.