women's hockey: Same team, different names
Jake Troughton, The Gateway (University of Alberta)
As anyone who has been referred to by their last initial throughout elementary school can tell you, it's no fun sharing your name. Particularly, if the other four Joes are all bigger and more popular than you. This rule applies just as much in the world of team sports.
For example, the University of British Columbia Thunderbirds' hockey team, tied for the final playoff spot in Canada West, visited the University of Alberta to face the Pandas. If you're like most people, until the last word of that sentence you thought I was talking about UBC's men's team.
It could have gone either way (both of UBC's hockey teams were indeed tied for the final playoff spot, and both visited Alberta), but it almost never does. When a school's men's and women's teams share a nickname, the women, without exception, are shunted to second-tier status: there are the Thunderbirds, and then there are the Lady Thunderbirds.
It's been suggested that the University of Alberta is displaying sexism by having separate names for its men's and women's teams. It seems to me, though, that they're saving us from it, allowing us the good fortune to not have to hear about the Lady Golden Bears. That's no small matter: rather than being second-class citizens within their own name, our Panda teams have a strong, unique identity of their own they can be proud of. They're named after one of the world's most fascinating creatures: a unique, strong, noble and resilient species.
And yes, pandas are also cute- but then, so are golden bears (Winnie the Pooh, anyone?). That won't stop either of them from tearing you apart (Okay, maybe Pooh Bear was a bad example), and it shouldn't affect anyone's perceptions of the teams' names, particularly since the Pandas' logo is much scarier than the Bears'.
That's not to say that the U of A has gender parity among its varsity teams. For instance, the athletics department's PR machine, to the limited extent that it exists, tends to favour the Bears over the Pandas, and even on the department's website, amid the stories on women's basketball, there's a headline referring to Brandon's team as the Lady Bobcats. There is, to my knowledge, no parallel reference to the Gentlemen Bobcats.
But whatever problems exist, they're no worse, and in most cases much better, than at other schools. The Pandas hockey team, for example, hasn't been utterly dominant merely by chance, but because the department has made a commitment to excellence that hasn't been matched by other schools - and far from being a problem itself, the Pandas name is another example of University of Alberta being ahead of the game (or at least less behind it) in the treatment of women's sports.