The "L" Word

If there is no crying in baseball, as Tom Hanks' Jimmy Duggan explained so succinctly in A League of Their Own, why do high school sports teams still call their girls' sports teams Lady this or Lady that?  The high school I teach at, our mascot is the Trojan.  Many of our female athletes are referred to as Lady Trojans and this makes me crazy and incensed for many reasons. I am glad to say that our soccer team dropped the "lady"part years ago.

First, when one thinks "lady" one thinks of drawing rooms, vapors, and tea.  One does not think of sports fields and turf burn and competition.  The word lady evokes thoughts of ghostly moors and fainting couches.  For me, personally, I think of the story in Free to Be You and Me, where the girl always cries "Ladies first" and gets eaten by the tiger and even as a child, I thought "good riddance".  Lady denotes delicate, dainty, and demure.  None of this applies to an athlete.

Second, we do not refer to the boys' sports teams as Gentlemen anything, so what kind of micro-messaging are we sending to young girls?  That they are less then?  That less is expected from them?  Or are we simply continuing to instill Victorian ideals of purity and chastity onto young girls and letting boys be boys?  

I spend a great deal of time at Cross Country meets and on a soccer field and always look to see what the female athletes are called. I mentally applaud the ones where I do not see a lady and wonder why it still prevails when I see so many with it.  Let's talk about the lady teams I have seen and how the name makes no sense.  First up, Lady Tigers.  Would that not make them a Tigress and does not Tigress sound so much fiercer??  Lady Vipers.  A snake is a snake, friends. And my favorite of all, Lady Hippos.  Lady Hippos.  What teenage girl wants to be known as a Lady Hippo?  Unless they mean Gloria from Madagascar who is confident and sexy in all of her hippo-ness, but you know that they do not mean Gloria.  They mean lady hippo.

I thought that maybe this lady thing was just here in Texas being that we were part of the South, sort of, and our own weird country, for awhile, but it is true even in my hometown of Lancaster, NY.  Lancaster High School recently got rid of a horrible, offensive, and racist mascot and became the Legends. And the female athletes?  Lady Legends.  Two steps forward, one step back.

I caused a real ruckus at a faculty meeting a few years ago asking why we used the lady moniker.  And by real ruckus, I mean I stirred shit up.  A few colleagues were so incensed they went years without acknowledging that I existed.  Others jumped up and in and said "PREACH".  And this was before I coached.  This was before I stood on turf, and blacktop, and grassy fields and watched girls run and play at a sport they excel at and love.  This was before I saw all the turf burn and concussions and ACL tears and shin splints.  Before I saw them tape their ankles before each game.  Before I watched them jam cotton up a bleeding nose so they could go back in to play.  Nothing about that says lady but it says absolutely everything about being an athlete.  

I just ask you to consider next time you are about to say Lady This Team or That Team, why are you saying it and what does it say to those girls?  While I can't even get the teams at my school to stop using it, I can keep trying and I will keep trying.  And until we are all just Trojans, or Tigers, or God help me, Hippos, I will make the change where I can.

going to need more Sharpies