CIProud High School Mascot Bracket: How Voting Works & How to Win

A community bracket, one round at a time

The CIProud High School Mascot Bracket exists because Central Illinois high schools already have built-in fan bases willing to click through for their own mascot. WMBD-TV runs the bracket under its CIProud news brand on a Second Street voting page at wmbd-tv.secondstreetapp.com, with the 2026 edition confirmed open August 17 through October 16.

That is the program's second confirmed edition, following a first run in 2025. A bracket format means schools face off head-to-head and the loser is eliminated, but WMBD-TV has not published a separate round-by-round schedule outside the bracket page, and no per-voter cap accompanies the listing either.

Treat the last two rows as live-only information. Confirm on the live ballot each cycle, since a two-edition bracket has not yet settled into a fixed round-by-round pattern the way an older format might have. WMBD-TV lists the promotion under its own bracket voting type rather than as a standard ballot, which fits the elimination structure but says nothing about how many rounds the 2026 field actually runs, another detail left to the live page itself.

One account among WMBD-TV's many Second Street promotions

WMBD-TV keeps well over a hundred separate promotions running on its Second Street account across a year, from quarterly sweepstakes to a graduating-seniors photo gallery to a trivia-style World Cup challenge and a Memorial Day trivia contest. The mascot bracket is just one entry among those, which is exactly why a generic search can land on the wrong WMBD-TV page entirely rather than the actual bracket.

Each of those other promotions runs on its own separate schedule and its own separate rules, and none of them feeds into the mascot bracket's own results. A supporter who bookmarks the wrong WMBD-TV link during the CIProud season could easily land on a sweepstakes entry form instead of an actual matchup, so checking the address bar against wmbd-tv.secondstreetapp.com's own bracket URL is worth the extra few seconds.

None of those six business-focused ballots share a bracket format or a results page with WMBD-TV's mascot vote, so a school that wins its round gains nothing toward any of them. The safest route to the current matchup is following a link from the CIProud site itself rather than guessing at a URL.

Central Illinois schools, and how far the bracket's reach actually goes

WMBD-TV broadcasts to Central Illinois under its CIProud brand, a coverage area built around the station's own signal rather than a single city's limits. The mascot bracket follows that same regional shape, drawing schools from across the CIProud footprint rather than one town alone.

Nothing in what WMBD-TV has published sets a firm cutoff for which schools qualify to enter a given year, and the station has not broken that eligibility question out separately from the bracket page. A school sitting right at the edge of the CIProud coverage map is not automatically shut out just for being borderline; confirm on the live ballot each cycle for exactly which schools are in the current bracket.

Rallying a school's fans through a multi-round bracket

A bracket rewards fans who keep showing up, not just the ones who vote once when a school first appears. Because CIProud has not published a separate schedule for each round, the practical approach is checking wmbd-tv.secondstreetapp.com regularly through October 16 and rallying students, parents, and alumni each time a new matchup opens.

Second Street platforms flag irregular voting patterns across every bracket and ballot they host, and getting a matchup flagged costs a school its round regardless of how strong the mascot's fan base actually is. is buying votes legal lays out the difference between a legitimate rally and a risky shortcut before any school spends real effort chasing a later round. Buying votes online walks through where paid support fits into a format that eliminates a school after just one bad round, and award-vote campaign planning covers pacing a push across more than one round instead of a single deadline.