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Do you remember when you first realized the former name of the Washington Football Team was racist? Maybe it was a gradual shift in thinking or perhaps it hit like a thunder bolt. Either way, once you saw it, you couldn’t unsee it. Such a realization was the result of decades of activism by advocates against Native American mascots. Although the National Football League stalled this progress for many years, now the use of these nicknames in sport is considered taboo.
The culture shift on sexism has been slower. Until recent years it was common practice for schools in the National Collegiate Athletic Association to have a special designation for female athletics. Now that Baylor dropped the Lady Bear nickname from its basketball program, the Texas Tech Lady Raiders and Oklahoma State Cowgirls are the remaining outliers in college. The Ladies Professional Golf Association soldiers on in the professional ranks, seemingly immune to modernity with its archaic nod to the ladies. Hopefully, continued activism will ultimately force these last vestiges to fall.
But even when they do, questions remain about why we even brand professional women’s sports as such, as if the entire enterprise was conjured into existence like Eve from Adam’s rib. The Women’s National Basketball Association had a strong business incentive to include the W when David Stern conceived the league in 1994. The National Basketball Association commissioner was certainly committed to promoting gender equity in the spirit of Billie Jean King and the groundbreaking Women’s Tennis Association, yet it’s safe to say, extending NBA brand awareness had appeal as well. Ever wonder what would it say would about equality if the dominant professional basketball leagues in the United States were the WNBA and the MNBA instead?
The Women’s National Hockey League didn’t have a relationship with the National Hockey League when it emerged in 2015, so its choice of name was confounding from a feministic perspective. It’s even harder to make sense of the National Women’s Soccer League, a name that lacks any sort of Major League Soccer friends-with-benefits marketing privileges, yet still perpetuates the notion male sports are the default position by explicably including “women” in its league name.
As it completes its ninth season of play, the NWSL is reverberating from bombshell reporting in The Atlantic revealing a pattern of sexual harassment and abusive cultural issues by coaches and team officials throughout the league’s history. These public revelations were so daunting that after the story broke on September 30, the NWSL Players Association (NWSLPA) asked the league to postpone all weekend games to give players time to process the news, which league commissioner Lisa Baird approved. Then Baird, a savvy sports marketer who branded the United States Olympic team “Team USA” when she was an executive for the United States Olympic Committee, stepped down just 19 months into her tenure.
How much paternalistic branding impacted its internal problems remains an open question, but with a #Metoo player led reckoning at hand, now is the time to rethink all that is assumed about sports at large. This summer, with the harassment and coercion issue simmering quietly, Baird had admitted on The Fluid Fan, a sports business podcast, she was thinking about dropping the “W “and changing the name to the National Soccer League, or NSL.
Whomever takes the helm of the NWSL next will certainly be aware using the word “women” as a qualifier in sport can be used as a dig or perceived as one. Instead of tacit acceptance of status quo power dynamics, leadership could signal a break from the past and traditional views of what constitutes the very nature of sport and its benefits. Bigger, stronger, faster is not the pinnacle of sport. It is simply the institutional norm established by the men who controlled industry during the commercialization of sport in the 20th century.
Afterall, when you delve deeply into questions about the nature of sport and why it is intrinsically valuable to human beings, gender doesn’t even make the qualifying round. So why put it in there to brand a professional league?
Sometimes, change occurs because activists on the ground won’t give up on a big idea until awareness enters the mainstream and forces the hand of institutional change like it did with The Washington Football Team. As players make their voices heard in soccer, let’s hope new executive leadership also steps up as a disruptor and reconsiders the currently named NWSL so the damaged ecosystem of sport can benefit.