Commentary
Alabama’s sports information staff, Hopf took it upon herself to start referring to the women’s basketball team as the Crimson Tide rather than the Lady Tide, receiving plenty of hate mail from fans who were offended a women’s team would dare stake claim to the football program’s storied nickname.
Baylor coach Kim Mulkey has long defended her program’s distinctive nickname, which certainly hasn’t been a drag on the team’s success. The Lady Bears have won three national titles over the past eight seasons and are positioned to make a run for another championship.
Mulkey said any opposition to the school’s nickname is largely a cultural issue. She grew up in Louisiana and played at Louisiana Tech, one of the early powerhouses in women’s college basketball. The school carved out an identity separate from the men’s teams (known as the Bulldogs) by adopting the nickname Lady Techsters (which remains to this day).
“We’re from the South,” Mulkey told USA Today in 2012. “And ‘Lady’ is not offensive to anybody who lives in our area of the country.”
Jason Cook, who is Baylor’s vice president of marketing, said there has been no sentiment within the administration or from the fan base to even consider dropping “Lady” from the moniker.
“The Lady Bears simply represents the longstanding tradition of excellence by our women’s basketball team,” Cook said in a telephone interview Friday.
The issue stirred up plenty of debate a few years ago when Tennessee, long one of the nation’s top women’s teams under the late Pat Summitt, moved to scrap the Lady Volunteers nickname and a brand that even included a separate logo for the hugely successful program.
Facing furious opposition that stretched all the way to the state legislature, John Currie backed off the idea after taking over as athletic director in 2017. He decreed that all female teams, not just the basketball program, could use the Lady Vols nickname again if they wanted — and all quickly jumped back on board.
It was easily the most popular move Currie made during his brief, divisive tenure in Knoxville.
“That’s their name, that’s their brand,” Mollie DeLozier, a Tennessee alumna who helped lead the fight to restore the Lady Vols nickname, said Friday. “The fact that it uses the word ‘Lady’ in it, I don’t know why that should matter. That’s how they are known. That’s how they made their reputation. Why would you do away with something that has done nothing but bring accolades to the university and the state?”
DeLozier said she could understand the opposition to female-oriented nicknames at schools that treat women as second-rate athletes. But, she said, that’s never been the case at Tennessee.