Vermont High School Player of the Year: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Vermont Varsity Insider Breakout Player of the Year?

The Vermont Varsity Insider Breakout Player of the Year is an annual statewide fan-vote award published by the Burlington Free Press at burlingtonfreepress.com. Presented by Delta Dental of Vermont, the award runs once per sport at the conclusion of that sport's Vermont Principals' Association (VPA) regular season and playoffs. A separate poll is launched for each sport — confirmed sports include softball, baseball, and lacrosse; others may run in additional seasons. The Burlington Free Press is part of the Gannett / USA TODAY Network, the largest US newspaper group, which runs analogous end-of-season breakout awards at regional publications nationwide.

• Annual cadence, not weekly — the POY poll runs once per sport per school year, making it a season-defining recognition rather than a rolling weekly honour. (The sibling Vermont Varsity Insider Athlete of the Week poll runs every week; the POY is the year-end crown.)
• Presented by Delta Dental of Vermont, a regional dental insurer sponsoring multiple Burlington Free Press high school sports programmes.
• The ballot typically features 13 or more nominees drawn from all four VPA competitive divisions (I through IV), ensuring coverage from Burlington-area schools to smaller rural programmes statewide.
• No per-voter cap — unlike some Gannett polls that enforce an hourly limit, the Burlington Free Press POY polls accept unlimited votes per person.
• Voting takes place entirely at burlingtonfreepress.com; no app, subscription, or account is required.
• The voting window runs approximately six to seven days, closing at 9 p.m. on the final day.

Which Vermont schools and divisions produce POY nominees?

Because the ballot draws nominees from across the entire state rather than a single metro market, the Vermont POY poll is genuinely competitive across the VPA's four competitive tiers. The table below shows the key schools frequently appearing in Vermont Varsity Insider coverage, mapped to their VPA division and region.

Chittenden County schools — CVU, Essex, Burlington, Rice, and Mount Mansfield — dominate nominations because the Burlington metro holds more than a third of Vermont's total population and produces the state's deepest talent pool across all sports. However, the unlimited-vote format means a smaller school with a tightly organised community (like St. Johnsbury Academy in the Northeast Kingdom, or BFA-Fairfax in Franklin County) can absolutely outpoll a larger Burlington-area programme if its network mobilises with more discipline.

Vermont's four VPA divisions use enrolment-based placement, not geography. Division I schools typically have the largest student bodies (CVU, Essex, Rutland) while Divisions III and IV encompass the state's many rural programmes. The POY ballot's multi-division reach means a nominee from a Division III school competes directly against Division I standouts — and wins happen at every tier.

How does the Burlington Free Press Player of the Year vote work?

The mechanics are straightforward. When the VPA season ends for a given sport, the Burlington Free Press sports desk assembles a ballot of standout athletes from that year's field and publishes the poll at burlingtonfreepress.com. The poll widget shows each nominee with their name, school, and sport; readers click the nominee they support and submit — no account, no subscription, no email address needed.

Unlike the sibling weekly Athlete of the Week poll, the POY vote carries no per-voter cap — unlimited votes are accepted from any single device or person throughout the window. That changes the strategy: whereas an hourly-cap poll rewards sustained multi-device effort spread across days, the unlimited-vote POY rewards raw mobilisation volume. The voter who shares the direct link with the most engaged network wins.

The voting window for confirmed 2026 polls ran approximately six to seven days. The softball ballot opened Thursday, May 21, 2026 and closed Wednesday, May 27 at 9 p.m.; the baseball ballot opened Wednesday, May 20 and closed Tuesday, May 26 at 9 p.m. All voting occurs at burlingtonfreepress.com through the embedded ballot on the article page. For a broader explanation of how unlimited-vote newspaper polls function, see our guide to online contest voting.

Live vote totals are visible throughout the window — supporters can check the standings at any time to judge whether their athlete is ahead and whether an extra push before the 9 p.m. close is warranted.

How is the Vermont POY breakout winner decided?

The winner is determined entirely by fan vote total when the poll closes. The Burlington Free Press sports desk controls the nomination stage — choosing which athletes appear on the ballot based on season performance — but exercises no editorial override once voting opens. The nominee with the highest count at 9 p.m. on the close date is named the breakout player of the year for that sport.

How nominees reach the ballot

1. Season-long performance: the Vermont Varsity Insider sports desk monitors VPA results throughout the season, tracking standout individual performances via coach submissions, box scores, and game coverage.
2. Ballot assembly: at season's end the desk compiles a slate of typically 13 or more nominees who demonstrated genuine breakout trajectories — athletes whose season as a whole distinguished them, not just one game.
3. Public vote opens: the ballot goes live at burlingtonfreepress.com, announced across the Burlington Free Press website and social channels, with the voting window running roughly six days.
4. Winner declared: at poll close, the Burlington Free Press publishes the winning athlete on the Vermont Varsity Insider platform — a searchable Gannett byline with statewide sports reach.

The "breakout" framing matters: nominees are athletes who emerged this season, not simply the best-known name from a perennial powerhouse programme. A sophomore at a Division III school who had a dominant first varsity season stands on equal footing with a senior all-state player from CVU or Essex — both appear on the same ballot, and the vote decides.

POY vote by sport and typical Vermont season timeline

The Burlington Free Press publishes a separate breakout POY poll for each sport at that sport's season close. Confirmed 2026 spring sports polls ran in late May; additional polls may run for fall and winter sports. The table below maps the VPA sports calendar to when POY voting typically opens and closes.

Spring is the most confirmed season for POY polls — softball and baseball ballots have been documented running simultaneously in the third week of May 2026, with overlapping close dates. Voters supporting spring athletes should monitor the Vermont Varsity Insider section of burlingtonfreepress.com starting in mid-May each year to catch the polls on the first day they open.

For context on other Vermont prep recognition votes and contest polls, see the Vermont contest guide and the full US contest index. Tactics that apply across all unlimited-vote statewide polls are covered in our how-to voting guides.

How do you build vote totals for the Vermont POY poll?

Because there is no hourly cap, the entire strategy centres on reaching as many real voters as possible before the 9 p.m. close. The first action is always to place the direct ballot link — not a general URL, not the athlete's name alone — in front of every realistic supporter network. For a detailed universal playbook on online fan poll strategy, see our full guide to contest voting; the Vermont-specific notes below reflect what works in this market.

Vermont-specific vote-building tactics

• School and booster club emails: Vermont booster clubs at CVU, Essex, St. Johnsbury, and Rutland maintain organised parent email lists. A single email from the athletic director or booster president to a few hundred parents — sent within hours of the poll opening — typically generates a large first-day spike.
• Community Facebook groups: Vermont towns rely heavily on local Facebook groups for community information. Posting the ballot link in groups for the athlete's town, school, and county reaches voters beyond the immediate school community.
• Town community centres and regional networks: Vermont's small-state geography means alumni of a school often live within 30 miles of it. Alumni Facebook groups and community newsletters (common at schools like St. Johnsbury Academy and Lyndon Institute in the Northeast Kingdom) can generate hundreds of votes from people who graduated years ago.
• Team group chats: teammates, parents of teammates, and family group chats are the fastest first-wave mobilisation. Send the link the day the poll opens.
• Repeat voting: because the cap is unlimited, remind supporters to vote repeatedly throughout the window — not just once. A supporter who votes 20 times over six days contributes meaningfully to the total.

When organic networks have been fully tapped and the nominee still needs more votes, some families use a paid promotion service to extend reach. If you take that route, choose a service that delivers genuine, paced votes from real users — rapid-fire bot submissions produce detectable traffic patterns that can result in removal from the tally. Our contest votes service is designed around natural-paced delivery.

Rules and the buy-votes question for the Vermont POY poll

The Vermont Varsity Insider Breakout Player of the Year is a reader-engagement poll with no cash prize and no sweepstakes law framework. The relevant restrictions are the Burlington Free Press platform's own terms, which typically prohibit automated scripts and bot traffic that generate unnatural vote patterns. For a full, balanced review of legality across online polls generally, see our buy-votes guide.

Two categories of activity apply here:

• Automated bot scripts — programs that submit votes in rapid-fire batches, ignoring natural session timing. These violate standard poll platform terms, produce detectable traffic anomalies, and typically result in votes being removed from the counter.
• Real human voters casting manual votes — whether reached organically through a booster email or through a paid promotion service — are the same from the platform's perspective. Each person is a real user submitting a genuine vote through their own browser, indistinguishable from any other organic visitor.

The practical consequence of flagged bot votes in this format is tally removal, not athlete disqualification or legal action — there is no account to ban and no formal prize to forfeit. The reputational consideration is real, however: a win that later appears inflated relative to the nominee's actual profile can draw community attention in Vermont's tight-knit sports environment. Each family and booster group should weigh that against the recognition value of a statewide breakout POY title before choosing a strategy.