Alden-Hebron, with its burgeoning community of Amazons, is the Giants. Burlington Central and Richmond-Burton, the sites of too many space launches to count, are the Rockets.

Teutopolis, always noisy when it walks with the "clickety-clack," is the Wooden Shoes. Batavia, which starts with the letter "B," is the Bulldogs.

The list of nicknames goes on, and it is especially long when you consider modifications that these schools and others sometimes make to their girls teams.

Freeport's girls teams, for real, are the Lady Pretzels. T-Town actually calls its girls the Lady Shoes. Pretzels and shoes are so masculine that activist Gloria Steinem reportedly refused to use either in the 1970s.

The Tennessee Lady Vols women's basketball team, which Tuesday night played for a Final Fourth berth, almost never is referred to as the "Volunteers."

Calling them the Lady Vols is redundant because – duh! – anybody confusing Candace Parker with someone on coach Bruce Pearl's men's team is, well, a dope. We KNOW she's a lady, already, and she's not going to forget it, either. That's why they call it "women's basketball."

It makes even less sense in high school, where – at least socially – males are "boys" and females are "girls." There are allowances, such as: "Young lady [or man], clean up your room and do your homework before 'The O.C.' comes on!"

So, for Hampshire to call its Whip-Purs girls teams the Lady Whip-Purs, it just makes no sense on any level. When you go to the Chick 'n Dip and order a Whip-Pur Bar, does the clerk ask you "Do you mean a Lady Whip-Pur Bar?" just because a girls soccer game just let out? No! Whip-Pur bars come in several flavors, but they are genderless.

Maybe the naming process was a holdover from the pre-Title IX era, when the concept of women playing sports often was met with doubt, intolerance and resistance, in a time when more people than now believed that femininity was lost on the playing fields.

"OK, you can play ball in Milledgeville," they told their girls. "But we're calling you the "Lady Missiles" so you don't get the wrong idea about your own sexuality."

Some of the feminine modifiers in the IHSA are downright she-larious, from the Newark Lady Norsemen to the Morrisonville Lady Mohawks. Sounds like a couple of Norelco products. Centralia's boys are Orphans; its girls are the Orphan Annies. It's a hard-knock life down there, reportedly.

Cairo, a town in the Kentucky portion of Illinois, calls its boys teams the Pilots. The girls are the Co-Pilots. Funny, if sexist in a 1950s sort of way. At least they're not the Flight Attendants. Or Stewardesses. Stewardi.

Topping – or is it bottoming? – all of them is Valmeyer, the teams for which are the Pirates ... and the First Mates. Yeargh, they need to bury that treasure, pronto.

Other than that, this is a call to wipe "Lady" from jerseys everywhere. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls, and if they go to the same school, the nickname should say so.

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