Nothing like staying just behind the curve.

With the announcement of a new identity for Arkansas State athletics, ASU had a chance to avoid a coming hassle and of course passed on that opportunity.

The women’s teams will be the Lady Red Wolves. The national trend is to just drop such designations on at least an official basis, while reporters and fans do pretty much whatever they want.

The complaints are already out there. The rumbles of “its offensive”, “its derogatory”, “its sexist” can already be heard in the distance.

The Missouri Valley is down to one “Lady” team, Missouri State and they only use it for women’s basketball. Nine members of the Big XII don’t use different names for men’s and women’s sports. Oklahoma State uses Cowboys and Cowgirls while Baylor and Texas Tech retain “Lady”.

One recent analysis claims there are only 63 schools left in all of the NCAA and NAIA that still retain a “Lady” modifier on an official basis. Informally the number is probably quite a bit higher.

It would have been simple to not add “Lady Red Wolves” to the name selected by the mascot committee, Dr. Potts, and the Board of Trustees but then we don’t always take the simple route do we.

Why spoil for another pointless fight. Declare ‘em all Red Wolves and be done with it. If fans and media want to throw in the modifier, that’s their business. If it slips into a release from time to time, no big deal. The question is, why pick this fight or more accurately, why let this fight pick us?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under General.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.