Every year for the past 3, I've worked concessions at each home football game for my highschool. With this season, I've noticed a few things that got me ranting yet again - why do schools feel the need to add the word 'lady' in front of the team name in order to designate the gender of the players?

I mean, seriously? It's the school's team/mascot, not the team/mascot of that one particular group of twenty-or-so females or males going to the school, so why change the name just to point out whether or not the players have to wear cups? I kind of understand it if the school's team name is the Cowboys, so they change it to the Cowgirls(because how dare a women's team have the word 'boy' in the name), but other than that I really don't get it.

This topic was brought into my head this year by the worst example of this I have seen so far - a school who's mascot was the Bulldogs named their girl's team "The Lady Dogs."  Gah, why not just go ahead and write "bitches" on all their uniforms?

Anyway, your perspective on this?

I think most women like this sort of thing. I work at a department store that sells jerseys and stuff. I've heard women say they were happy to get the pink versions and that they were glad they sell those now because they didn't like wearing the regular ones since they were considered manly.

Originally I thought it was nothing more than a form of segregation...but after talking to a lot of girls at my school involved in teams like that, most of them like it.  I always figured it was a "girl power" thing...they interpreted the name to mean "yeah, we're girls, but we can still kick ass."  At least that's how the majority acted, lol.

We do have women's football (soccer) teams here in the UK and also national leagues and we participate in the Women's World Cup. Nearly all of the teams  have gender specific names: Arsenal Ladies, Doncaster Belles, Millwall Lionesses and so on. Sadly the league no longer has professional teams and the England national team is only fractionally more successful than the men's team (in other words it isn't!).

I suppose part of my view comes partly from my despising gender specific things, and partly from my mother having the same view on the team names, so I just kind of picked up on her rants over the years.

The teams I was thinking of were all high schools or lower where the school's mascot may be, say, the Tigers, so the boy's football/basketball/etc team is called the Tigers, but the girl's basketball team is called the Lady Tigers. I have nearly no knowledge on professional sports of any kind.