The final votes have been tallied and Mishawaka High School has learned they didn’t win $1 million to upgrade their football stadium. As it turned out, few schools came close to the votes collected by a small Arkansas high school.
If you need help pronouncing the winning school’s name, their superintendent, Grover Hill, offers this:
“It’s DAIR-icks if you live here. If you do not live here, it’s Dierks.”
Dierks High School, in a town with about 900 residents, amassed over 1.8 million votes in T-Mobile’s Friday Night 5G Lights contest to help renovate their roughly 100-year-old stadium. T-Mobile picked 25 schools from more than 2,100 that applied.
Mishawaka’s stadium is also about a century old but they finished 23rd with just over 100,000 votes. Fans could vote once a day from the same email address.
So how did tiny Dierks High School receive 18 times Mishawaka’s votes? Hill says it seemed the entire South rallied behind them after receiving a video testimonial from southern comedian Jeff Foxworthy.
“It was posted that we had votes from every state in the United States, even overseas," Hill says. "So social media is like a wildfire.”
Mishawaka did win $25,000 for being a finalist.
