How my school took on the Redskin nation and won

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My family and all of the parents and grandparents at our school are exhausted. We've spent the better part of two weeks voting for our quarterback, Mason Worsham, to be the Albany Herald player of the year. The Albany Herald, our local paper usually has two awards. The player of the year by popular vote and another one decided by the paper's sports writers.

Washington City Paper article by Dave McKenna

Little did we know we were up against the whole Redskin Nation and the award winning sports writer Dave McKenna.

We want to win
After having a sophomore year of nail biting losses our team has won 26 games straight in football and 2 back to back state championships.

It was like our last tribute to a fine young quarterback who we admire and appreciate. We wanted it.

You could vote once an hour for each userid you had on the system.We started giving our userids to someone who could take a shift and vote while we were asleep. We set timers. Our middle school was in DC voting on their smartphones and many of us lost sleep!

We kept trying to figure out how the other man, Chris Brown, started racking up tons of votes each minute! We didn't know how it was happening. Little did we know every time Phillip Daniels tweeted or messaged, they were getting a bump.

All we knew was we had to work harder. We called each other! We messaged! We begged our friends!

Our Wildcat Football Team, State champs

Mom called me Saturday in a panic:

“We have got to win. This is our last championship of two perfect seasons and we just have to win. What can we do?”

Never Underestimate the Under-cat!
We wouldn't quit. We voted. We reminded people to vote. We asked our friends on Facebook to vote.

In fact, our boy ended up winning by over 900 votes. That's right,, our school with just 434 students has a support network to the point that we racked up over 10,000 votes for our player.

In the Washington City paper today: Ballot Box Shocker: Ex Redskins Vote Rigging Exercise Falls Short

Yes, it did.

We gave everything we had for over a week.

Everything but pulling in my own network of Twitter followers and blog readers.

Online polls will always be flawed
It is no secret that online polls are flawed.

But the fact is that the Redskins fans now claim the “poll was rigged” when in fact, they were participating in rigging themselves.

What is rigging?

Is it using ids of others while you sleep?
Is it using your Twitter network and Facebook network?
Is it changing your IP address to vote multiple times (as one Redskin fan admitted to doing?)

Perhaps the greatest victory of our Wildcat season was the day we took the Redskin nation down on our very little own without all my tweeps and plus buddies. I can promise no bots were used on our end. I'm the closest thing there is to a hacker here and I certainly don't know how to do that.

I'm sorry this seems silly, but this whole thing means a lot to me. We love our team very much and this is a fitting end to what has been a tremendous season. We just got the official announcement that we will be moving up to AA ball next year because our numbers are up and it will be a whole new ballgame, literally. But none of us will ever forget this year — and we've got one last thing to prove it.

Never underestimate the underdog – in this case the undercat.

Go Cats!

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Vicki Davis

Vicki Davis is a full-time classroom teacher and IT Director in Georgia, USA. She is Mom of three, wife of one, and loves talking about the wise, transformational use of technology for teaching and doing good in the world. She hosts the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast which interviews teachers around the world about remarkable classroom practices to inspire and help teachers. Vicki focuses on what unites us -- a quest for truly remarkable life-changing teaching and learning. The goal of her work is to provide actionable, encouraging, relevant ideas for teachers that are grounded in the truth and shared with love. Vicki has been teaching since 2002 and blogging since 2005. Vicki has spoken around the world to inspire and help teachers reach their students. She is passionate about helping every child find purpose, passion, and meaning in life with a lifelong commitment to the joy and responsibility of learning. If you talk to Vicki for very long, she will encourage you to "Relate to Educate" or "innovate like a turtle" or to be "a remarkable teacher." She loves to talk to teachers who love their students and are trying to do their best. Twitter is her favorite place to share and she loves to make homemade sourdough bread and cinnamon rolls and enjoys running half marathons with her sisters. You can usually find her laughing with her students or digging into a book.

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