The Women's United Soccer Association, or WUSA for those of you who like to sound like a cape buffalo who didn't get the soy latte he'd just ordered, opens Saturday, and already there is a severe structural problem that endangers the league itself.

The team nicknames. They're, well, awful.

	High comedy alert: "We're joined in the booth now by WUSA star Mia Hamm."

Now, a few caveats. This is not an anti-soccer diatribe. This is not an anti-women's-sports diatribe, either. Soccer, when played well, is just fine. And women, when not telling you to re-tar the roof, re-trim the hedges, or reacquaint yourself with your kids, are just fine, too.

But as WUSA begins play with the most modest of goals (get better ratings than the NHL, don't have any stadium riots, don't lose all the money in one year), it also starts with a list of tedious self-help/civics-class nicknames that no self-respecting citizen of either gender would say without first spitting.

The Atlanta Beat. No. The Philadelphia Charge. God, no. The Carolina Courage. Hopeless. The New York Power. Doesn't rise to the level of hopeless.

And then there are the two worst, the Washington Freedom and the San Diego Spirit. Not only are they dreadful, they are copies of earlier nicknames of teams that failed so hideously that only archaeologists and debt counselors can find any traces of them now.

The Freedom is an offshoot of the old World Team Tennis Philadelphia Freedoms, which gave birth to the single worst Elton John song ever --- and that's going some, kids. The Spirit well, frankly, we can't even remember, although it does get close to The Spirits of St. Louis, the loopiest franchise in American Basketball Association history.

The main problem here is the singular surname. It has long ago been rejected as a concept, and is used now only by MLS and XFL franchises who didn't get the memo on not sounding like the grand marshal in the Geek Parade. The WNBA even abandoned it, although it replaced it with the simply silly substitution of "s" with either "x" or, worse, "zz".

(We except from this diatribe D.C. United, a nickname which sounds and feels like a soccer team; whoever thought of that one should get a raise. We do not, on the other hand, except the Columbus Crew, largely on the failure of its workmen-in-hardhats team logo to do anything but remind us of half of the Village People).

The singular surname also brings to us life lessons (Courage, Spirit, Power, Freedom) that made us all fall asleep in seventh grade social studies class. We want nicknames we can sink our teeth into --- stuff like Fighting Weasels, Eye-Pecking Hawks, Sallow-Faced Plague-Carriers, Crazed Zoo Chimps From Hell.

But if that's not a T-shirt you want your seven-year-old daughter to wear to sleep-overs at the neighbors, consider as an alternative some of the finer minor league baseball nicknames of the past decade. Lugnuts. Intimidators. Mud Hens. SeaWolves. Travelers. River Bandits. Rainiers. Blue Rocks. Sand Gnats. Timber Rattlers. Warthogs.

No, none of them have the lofty, pretentious, deadly dull ring of "Endurance," "Pride," "Gumption" or "Moxie". But you remember them a whole lot quicker, and they stay with you longer, which is, after all, the whole idea if you're planning on the league lasting longer than Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy.

Which brings us to the other two surnames --- the Bay Area Cyber Rays and Boston Breakers. No, and again, no. The Breakers was an old USFL franchise that did so well that it left for Portland and then, viewing the landscape and the market, died.

And the Cyber Rays? Well, the dot.com market has gone toilet-side, and Rays reminds us of the baseball team in Tampa-St. Petersburg, which on its face is a bad idea.

There may not be a solution here, either. I mean, the sweatshirts have already been ordered. But there isn't a new league anywhere that hasn't tweaked a few things here and there to make the product better. The XFL changes rules every week, and are now down to battle lances on punt returns and no blocking on third downs.

Thus, there's hope for the WUSA. Not because it has a sensible financial plan (which normally means it doesn't), or that it has modest goals (which are usually abandoned after a year or so), or that it wants simply to expose young women to the joys of playing sports (if they don't know it by now, one more cable show isn't going to do it for them), but because today's nickname can be tomorrow's discard.

The idea? Let every grade school and high school kid in the fan base area vote on a name before next season. No suggestions from marketing genii, no 'pick one of the following three." Just take what they send it, throw out the obscene and legally actionable ones, and find the one they like the best, period.

And remember, this isn't a women's issue. Men came up with more than their share of singular nicknames, and they were wrong, too. They even came up with the nickname Metros-Croatia for the soccer team in Toronto, and I don't think we need to examine that one any closer.

So be bold, be decisive, and give us all nicknames we can be proud of. I understand nobody is currently using "Death Spirals," "Knees In The Stomach" or "Gandolfinis."

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com