Looking at a picture of the Roseville Girls Lacrosse Team, you might notice something different than most other sports in Roseville Area School District: they are wearing skirts. Members of the RAHS Lacrosse Team have mixed feelings about their uniforms.
Mia Huntley, a freshman on the team, says, “I don’t mind wearing skirts… I don’t think they’re uncomfortable.”
Huntley also explained how every kind of bottom is different. She said, “I prefer our skirts over some shorts I’ve had to wear in the past, but I’ve also worn shorts I like more than our skirts. It really depends.”
According to junior Lenora Devries, “almost every high school team wears skirts, same with college.”
However, some teams are beginning to transition to shorts, because the players realize that the game is not meant to be played in a skirt.
Lacrosse is one of the oldest sports in the world. It began as a stick and ball game with the indigenous peoples of North America. More and more communities began to pick it up, leading to the first organized women’s lacrosse game being played in 1890’s Scotland.
According to Wavelength Sports, up until the early 1900s women’s uniforms consisted of a ankle length button up dress with a collar and belt. Over the course of the following decades, the dresses gradually got shorter and the uniforms evolved into the skirts we know today.
As to why the majority of uniforms are still skirts? It’s just tradition. As with many sports, lacrosse is old enough that it’s hard to change the cycle of how it’s run. Junior Ainsley Jakoboski said, “they can be sexist when players are not given the choice to wear a skirt or not.”
For example, the team played a game in the early season, when it was below freezing. Jakoboski explained, “we wanted to wear sweatpants instead of our skirts, but we had to wear them over our pants. We looked so ugly!”
Even though it might be a bit inconvenient, it seems most Roseville lacrosse players don’t mind wearing their skirts. Jakoboski said, “Personally, I like to wear them because it’s fun to play a sport and still have the opportunity to be ‘girly’.”
Being able to show their “girliness” when playing a sport dominated by men is important to this team, and that femininity is shown through not just skirts, but also fun hairstyles, makeup, and jewelry.
Junior Addie Bugher added “it can get a little hot when you have to layer shorts underneath, but mostly I don’t mind.”
