Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I have watched many… many… hours of the recently concluded Women’s World Cup. The soccer was just brilliant, and of course, seeing the US win their third World Cup was just awesome.
And as a former Girls Basketball coach (and huge soccer fan,) it was incredible to see so many people get excited to watch a women’s soccer match. And while FIFA’s behavior – from turf fields to ridiculously unequal and inequitable monetary awards – shows we still have a long way to go for women’s sports, this was a fantastic moment for all of us who care about seeing women’s sports get the respect they deserve.
And there’s an easy change our high schools can make to take this further:
We can stop calling the girls’ teams at our schools the “Lady <Mascots>.”
This matters more than it seems. When we make the girls teams have a qualifying descriptor but we don’t make the boys teams do the same, we send a none-too-subtle message about which team is the “real” school team. And that message can serve to undermine all of the incredible lessons students – young women and men – can learn from playing on a high school team. In too many schools, the girls teams have had to fight for court time, field time, fans, legitimacy, or even the right to exist. No longer should they also have to fight to have their team name be the mascot of the school with no need to qualify it.
Our language matters, and I’ve yet to see the school that has “Gentlemen <Mascots>” on their uniforms. The era of high school girls teams having “Lady” in front of their name or worse “-ettes” at the end of it needs to end. Our girls teams are Tigers and Rockets and Lancers and Falcons. They need no qualifier in their names. There’s no reason anymore to send the message that the boys teams have any more claim to legitimacy than the girls teams do.
There’s no reason other than tradition not to change, and if the past weeks have taught us anything, it is that tradition cannot be a reason to resist change.
Hi Chris. I’m not sure that the key to gender equity in this situation is to respect women’s sports more. It’s a game. Kicking balls around on a field. Attaching such high societal value to zero sum games promotes escapism and ethnocentrism, and encourages counterproductive competition, among other undesirable contributions.
I think the solution to gender equity in this situation is for us to have less respect for men’s sports.
As someone who has coached boys and girls teams for twenty years, I’m going to say that you and I have a fundamentally different view of the power of sports in kids’ lives.
My daughter, who is 15, was just making this observation about the women sports teams at her school. She isn’t much of a sports fan but she is a fierce advocate for equal rights, opportunity and respect. I forwarded your post to her. Thank you for being an advocate for all kids.
My pleasure… If it causes any change at your daughter’s school, please let me know!