What does having all team members blond or brown or whatever color hair have to do with winning?

I have never heard of such a thing.

Well, they get to determine what uniform you have to wear, which, for women, is usually revealing as hell, so I guess if they want to play they’ll die their hair if coach wants.

Yes, dye their hair. By the way there is such a thing, it was a small (very very small considering the kind of news) part of a major news item this past few days.

No in general it seems very inappropriate to me for a sports team to expect players to dye their hair!

It is considered by some as a way of getting all the kids to identify as part of the team. Some of the soccer teams and swim teams around here do it for the playoffs, or for the season finals.

And the kids think it is fun!

It’s kind of like having all the football players wear their jerseys to school on game day.

Charlie Finley paid the Oakland A’s players bonus money if they grew a mustache. Same reasoning: team identity.

Uniformity. Camaraderie. Fellowship.

The camaraderie of shared oppression and suffering, and sharing a common resentment.

Absolutely nothing.

@Zaku IMO, dying ones hair is not as oppressive as women being required to wear very tight and revealing uniforms whether they want to or not. Not nearly as oppressive. Not by a long shot.

If all had to be blond, Neo Nazism? Even if it’s let’s say it’s brown dye why? Hair color is a personal thing!
@Zaku Your 1st response was perfect. What happened on your second?

Clothing choice is a personal thing, too. But they don’t get to choose.

Yes, the clothing thing too is a personal thing. Tha’s wrong too.

They want them to look like a team. No one is forcing them to join the team. If they have a problem with the uniform or dying the hair, then quit.

Ever notice that politicians always wear dark colored suits? That’s the dress code that is required.

@Dutchess_III Ok sure that sounds terrible too, but that wasn’t the question, was it? And isn’t the type of uniform usually pretty much the same for an entire sports league, so it’s something a participant has to decide if they want to choose to participate in on a league basis not a team basis (though if the league changes from something ok with someone to something not ok, that must be awful for some people!).

@flo I was having a reaction to @zenvelo ‘s and @kritiper ‘s responses just before my second post, which I felt called to respond to. If I were to want to play a sport, I would not want to be told I needed to dye my hair whether I wanted to or not, and I would tend to resent it if such a thing were imposed upon me. If I felt any comeraderie in such a circumstance, it would tend to be for people who also had a negative reaction towards it.

They face the same thing if they decided it’s really, really important that they don’t want to dye their hair. Then quit the team! And geez, you know, they DO make temporary dyes that you can just wash right out when you’re ready.

[sarcasm] Yay conformity. Invalidate people who want to be able to play sports without being made to dye their hair. It makes me feel so close to my teammates… [/sarcasm]

Is this even a thing?

Oh I get it now @Zaku, you were doing similar to this:
“I don’t know why just blond, why not blue eyes, (wear blue contact lenses, be 6’ 2” tall, (get a surgery, why just stop at dying hair?”

Well I’d have the same objection if the coach (or even just a group of the players) wanted everyone to look like anything, not just Aryans – that’d be something else.

There can be several aspects to it. Another would be maybe people joined the team under one set of agreements, and then suddenly the coach insists everyone does something semi-permanent to themselves that has practically nothing to do with the game. So it’s an unjustified and unexpected changing of the contract by requirement to do something after the players have committed to the team.

And then there’s the whole aspect of peer pressure, and of athletic director excessive authority overstepping boundaries (which is definitely “a thing”).

And there’s also the assumption everyone is happy and comfortable changing their appearance to be like everyone else and that being required/obliged/pressured into doing so will increase loyalty rather than cause resentment.

All that stuff. Of course, just signing up for organized sports teams tends to involve a lot of surrender to various forms of discipline and obedience, so many may go along, and resistance or speaking out against it is probably greatly discouraged in various ways. Adding hair dying is another layer on top of the others, but also seems excessive to me.

Of course as @Dutchess_III mentioned, if they just mean to use something that washes out, that’s much less intrusive.

By the way it reminds of of hazing culture in university…

I don’t think it makes a difference even if the dye could be washed off.