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

Four Vermont prep polls, one Wednesday click; where the girls ballot fits

Four fan polls compete for a Vermont sports reader's attention most weeks of the school year, and only one of them runs a girls-specific ballot confirmed separate by an outside source. That source is unlikely: Yahoo Sports. Gannett content, including Vermont Varsity Insider's Athlete of the Week posts, syndicates out to Yahoo's sports vertical, and the syndicated links show up as two distinct articles: one tagged boys, one tagged girls, rather than a single combined post with a shared comment thread. That's a cleaner confirmation of genuine separation than the Burlington Free Press site alone offers, where the two ballots can sit close together on the same section page.

Compare that to the other three Vermont polls sharing this market. The Caledonian-Record's Athlete of the Week also splits by gender, but its footprint stops at the Northeast Kingdom and spills across the state line into New Hampshire's North Country. That's a bi-state readership this Burlington-based ballot doesn't touch. The Vermont Softball Breakout Player of the Year runs single-sport and seasonal, not weekly. And the boys Varsity Insider ballot shares this exact platform, sponsor, and cadence. It is the closest sibling this page has, differing only in which roster of nominees fills the widget. For the wider slate, the national fan-vote index lines up Vermont's polls against comparable programs from other states.

Why the girls-specific article is the one worth bookmarking

Landing on the wrong half of a Varsity Insider page wastes a vote. Because the two ballots run as separate widgets with separate nominee pools, a vote cast on the boys article never touches the girls tally, and vice versa. There's no shared leaderboard reconciling the two behind the scenes. Bookmarking the girls-tagged article, not just the general burlingtonfreepress.com sports section, is the only way to guarantee every return visit lands on the correct ballot.

The statewide reach matters too. Set next to the Caledonian-Record's regional footprint, this poll pulls nominees from Chittenden County to the Northeast Kingdom to Windham County on a single ballot. The competitive field is wider, and so is the voter base a campaign can draw on, which is a real trade-off against the tighter, faster-to-mobilize community a regional bi-state paper offers its own nominees.

Mechanics: VPA divisions, the Wednesday close, and what's confirmed for 2025-26

The girls ballot lives inside the same High School Sports section at burlingtonfreepress.com as the boys version, on the identical Gannett widget. One click submits a vote. No account, no email capture, no CAPTCHA gate. The running total updates and stays visible to anyone with the page open.

Basketball explains most of the winter cluster. VPA girls basketball splits into four divisions rather than the three-tier structure some other Vermont sports use, so a Division IV program can land a nominee on the same weekly ballot as a Division I school many times its enrollment. The classification sets who a team scrimmages, not who wins a fan vote. Spring brings softball, track, and lacrosse into the nominee pool during the May-June window. Whether a confirmed fall window exists for this specific girls ballot the way it does for winter and spring isn't part of the documented record here; the current article at burlingtonfreepress.com is the source to check before assuming.

Which Vermont towns and schools actually carry the girls ballot

Chittenden County holds the largest concentration of Division I enrollment in the state, and that shows up on the girls ballot the same way it does on the boys one. Burlington, South Burlington, Champlain Valley Union in Hinesburg, and Essex all sit within a short drive of one another and regularly produce girls nominees across multiple sports in the same season.

Rice Memorial breaks that pattern. It's a small, private Catholic school in South Burlington with a long-running basketball and field hockey tradition and an alumni base that stays connected well past graduation. That network can turn out for a nominee faster than its enrollment number would suggest. St. Johnsbury Academy sits apart for a different reason: it draws boarding and day students from across the Northeast Kingdom and beyond, giving it a reach that outpaces most towns its size. Smaller Division III and IV programs elsewhere in the state depend on how tightly wired the town itself is, not on a boarding school's pull or a private school's alumni chain.

None of this comes from a public leaderboard. Burlington Free Press doesn't publish a running results archive for the girls ballot beyond whatever week is currently live, so this is a pattern read off Vermont's basic geography and confirmed division structure. It isn't a prediction about which town wins in any given week. The broader slate of Vermont contests, including the two statewide "best of" reader polls, the Brattleboro Reformer Readers' Choice and the Rutland Herald Best of the Best, sits at the Vermont contest hub.

Getting a girls nominee onto the ballot, then working a confirmed window

Coaches, parents, and school athletic contacts drive most submissions. A note that includes the athlete's school, sport, game date, and a short stat line gives the Burlington Free Press sports desk enough to work with; a bare name and school, without context, is the kind of submission that gets passed over when the desk is weighing a full statewide field. Editorial judgment decides the final ballot. Not every strong performance makes it, girls or boys.

Once the ballot is live, the campaign math stays simple, because there's no cap math to do at all: no six-hour reset, no per-device ceiling, nothing standing between a supporter and a second click. Reach wins over patience on a widget shaped like this one. Getting the exact girls-tagged link, not the athlete's name by itself, in front of a squad's group text, the booster club's email list, and the athletic department's social feed within the first few hours after publication tends to build a lead the rest of the field struggles to erase later. Passing along a bare name instead of the link risks sending a well-meaning supporter to the boys ballot by mistake.

Vermont's small population cuts both directions. A Division I school's full booster list might run six or seven hundred families; a Division IV school's might be a tenth of that. But a small, tightly wired network activates in an afternoon, and speed on day one compounds on a poll with no reset clock working against it. When the organic network runs dry and a ballot is still close heading into Wednesday, some families turn to a paid outreach service that reaches additional real voters rather than automated scripts. Structured vote-support services built for this kind of uncapped fan poll pace delivery so it reads as normal traffic rather than a spike. Reading the live terms at burlingtonfreepress.com before using one is the right first step, since Gannett updates its rules between seasons. For the general mechanics of how online fan polls operate, the online contest voting guide is worth a read, and the legality overview covers how the practice is treated across different contest types nationally.