We love honoring our best athletes here at LZHS. However, scroll through any Lake Zurich sports coverage and one thing stands out immediately. While boys are simply called Bears, female athletes are often referred to as “Lady Bears,” which re-enforces the view that sports are a boys club and a girl’s involvement in them is something worth pointing out.

According to statistics from the National Federation of State High School Associations in 2015, 41 percent of Illinois high school athletes were girls and that number has been increasing for 27 straight years. So why do we still keep treating boys’ sports as the default?

LZHS has been making great efforts lately to value girls’ sports. The plan for the revived student section involves giving members more points for attending girls’ meets and games, and recognition assemblies have paid just as much attention to our female athletes as our male ones.

This only makes the term “Lady Bear” look even more outdated. We cannot claim to place equal importance on boys’ and girls’ sports and at the same time feel the need to bring up a female athlete’s gender every time she succeeds. Most students would agree that “gentlemen Bears” sounds ridiculous, and that’s exactly how many sporty girls feel when their achievements are qualified by their gender.

In fact, girls may see their fellow athletes being unnecessarily differentiated from boys and be discouraged from participation. Girls still make up a large portion of high school athletes, but by age fourteen, girls are more than two times as likely to quit their sports as boys are, according to thy by the Women’s Sports Foundation.

According to the Women’s Sports Foundation. While logistical factors, budget cuts, and sub-par facilities obviously do influence this, social and societal pressure is the biggest factor. If girls don’t feel like their achievements are treated the same as boys’ achievements, they may very well give up— which is problematic because studies show that when a teenage girl participates in sports, she’s more likely to have better body image and better relationships with her peers and family, according to CNN.

The same CNN study also said that in a survey of girls 16-24 who had quit sports, two thirds of them said they don’t think society encourages girls to participate in athletics. This problem can be remedied by making sure we treat female athletes just as we do male ones– and that starts with the words we use to describe them. So let’s make a commitment to making female athletes feel just as much like real Bears.