I heard on ESPN that the Sacramento Monarchs are playing the Detroit Shock for the WNBA championship. Since I don’t follow WNBA, I’m not familiar with the team names. It then hit me that Monarchs is just a flat out idiotic name for a team. For one thing, just the prefix mon- denotes singularity, which is simply not appropriate since there’s no “I” in “team”. And how the heck can a team with all monarchs expect to win? You’d have too many leaders and not enough workers. You’d have all kinds of power struggles, attemped assassinations and claims of divinity.
With other sports, I’m so familiar with the team names that I never realized how dumb some are. The Sacramento Kings, Los Angeles Kings and Kansas City Chiefs are all just as dumb as Monarchs. The Kansas City Royals is a fine name since a group of royals can work as a team, since some will be princes, queens, etc.
Another dumb name is the Montreal Canadiens. Thanks, but I figured out you were Canadian by the Montreal.
As you probably figured out, the woman’s team is called the Monarchs as a play on the men’s team being called the Kings. Calling them the Lady Kings would be really silly and The Queens has other connotations especially being so close to the Bay Area.
I can’t really agree with you about the Chiefs. The implication is that all the chiefs from the Kansas City area got together and worked as a team to solve problems that affect all of them. That doesn’t strike me as illogical. (Fanciful logic, perhaps, but not illogical.)
I’ve often wondered about our local arena football team, the LA Avengers. What exactly are they avenging? Perhaps the fact that they weren’t good enough to make it to the NFL? “My team is LA Avengers. You kill my dreams; prepare to die.”
My other nomination is the Denver Nuggets. Yeah, I get it, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid.
I always hated teams that had the “Whatevers” and the “Lady Whatevers.” It’s a stupid and sexist convention–why can’t the girls’/women’s team just be the “Whatevers” too? Since it doesn’t occur in professional sports but just in schools, it wouldn’t be that hard to just specify which team you’re talking about in advertising or the sports page, would it?
Besides, it gets even stupider when you have teams like the “Lady Gentlemen.” (I can’t find a cite for that one, but I remember hearing it awhile back).
I went to USF. The Bulls. I don’t know if they still call the women’s sports teams the Lady Bulls, but they used to, and that one just defies all possible logic.
No, the word “Canada” came first. You just don’t understand what the word “Canadien” means in French; it has two separate meanings. It can be the possessive of “Canada,” or it can refer to a specific group of pioneers who settled New France in the 17th century. “Montreal Canadiens” is generally taken to be the second definition; hence the team’s nickname, “Les Habitants,” which is the same concept.
It’s kind of like “New York Yankees.” I mean, isn’t that stupid? They’re in New York, which is in the United States, so of course they must be Yankees.
But “Yankee” can mean very different things depending who’s saying it and what they mean. I, not being American, would refer to someone from Georgia as a “Yankee,” for instance, whereas they would think a “Yankee” was only a person from the northern U.S., and many people in the northern U.S. would think it referred only to some people in New England.
I’d have to agree with the OP that as a league, the WNBA has the weakest names. My total least favorite name is the Indianapolis frachise of said league, the Indiana Fever.
When the name was introduced 7 years ago and was immediately diss’ed by all who heard it, the COO who picked it explained the choice like this: “We aren’t talking about sickness, we are referring to the OTHER meaning of Fever.”
:smack:
I’m generally not a big fan of team names that are singular and/or collective nouns. I can’t help imagining some member of Miami’s basketball team saying, “I’m a Heat” or some member of Orlando’s basketball team saying, “I’m a Magic.”
And that situation in the CFL where the two teams had pretty much identical names – Roughriders and Rough Riders – was just ridiculous. In the interest of fairness, I’d have told both of them to rustle up some new names.
More of you should take a look at this thread. It deals with stupid athlete interviews, which exist for much the same reason. Sports is not a world of ideas.
It’s the nickname used by the women’s teams of Louisiana’s Centenary College. Actually, it was – the linked page refers simply to the basketball “Ladies”. Similarly, Ohio’s Kenyon College fields squads of Lords and Ladies.
Besides being a play on Kings (a franchise which began as the Rochester Royals, then became the Cincinnati Royals, then the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, then the Kansas City Kings before landing in Sacramento), the WNBA Monarchs’ name also echoes the Old Dominion Lady Monarchs, one of the most storied college women’s hoops programs. Old Dominion began as the Norfolk division of the College of William and Mary, whose namesakes served as co-monarchs of England from 1689 to 1694.
Another of the traditional powers in women’s college basketball has been the Louisiana Tech Lady Techsters, even though the men’s teams at the school have long been known as Bulldogs. When Sonja Hogg was named the first coach of the women’s squad, she wanted to stress that her players were true students in the classroom, athletes on the court, and ladies in everyday life. Thus, the masculine-sounding term “Bulldogs” was not feminized; instead, Hogg (pronounced “hoag”) strove to create and reinforce the impression that her charges were delightful young women receiving a good technical education when they weren’t recording victories on the hardwood.
I agree whole-heartedly with this one. I’m the arena announcer for our local college teams. The mascot is the Plainsmen. Fortunately, the female teams are called Plainswomen, so we don’t have the “lady” stuff to contend with. But when other teams come in (the Rattlers, the Rams, the Knights) we have to use “Lady” in front of the mascot name. Since I get to script my own stuff, I use it once in team introductions, but then I just use the college name.
The stupidest team name, to me, is Lamar Community College in southern Colorado. Originally, the mascot was the Antelopes (which are plentiful in the area) but the jockstraps were too lazy to say the entire word, so they shortened it to ‘Lopes. So now, Lamar’s offical mascot is the Runnin’ Lopes, which makes absolutely no sense at all. The school doesn’t even have a visual of the mascot – I guess nobody in Lamar knows what a “lope” is.
I thought Kansas Wesleyan was going the same way, as some of their athletic department materials had “Yotes” emblazoned on them, but they’ve returned to Coyotes.
