Long, sharp stiletto nails. Glittery purple monochrome details. Nails that look like obsidian crystals. These expressive acrylic nail designs can be difficult to maintain due to the risk of easily snapping and chipping. Yet, they can be seen everywhere in U-High: tapping against phones, clicking keyboards and even setting volleyballs.
Despite the risks of having long nails in sports, which include breaking nails and cutting others, a devout U-High athletics community insists on wearing them, going as far as to associate their painted nails with confidence on the court.
This is true for junior Freddie Neater-DuBow, who is the JV volleyball captain.
“It makes me more confident,” Freddie said, “and I think also, when you look good, then you feel good and play good.”
Freddie’s teammate, sophomore Madison Vicknair, agrees. She has recently gone from solely wearing press-on nails to full-on acrylics.
“Now I get acrylic nails,” Madison said, “and it just makes me feel more confident because I can show my hands, and I start pointing everywhere because I have them.”
While some student athletes are allowed to wear whatever nails they like, others are not. According to IHSA rules, members of school dance teams must keep their nails “at an appropriate length (short, near the end of the finger) to minimize risk for participant.” Additionally, on the dance team, members have to strip off colored nails to remain uniform.
Dance team member Savannah Woodson understands this rule but is still disappointed by it.
“I feel like we should be allowed to have some color and just have it be short. But I mean, it’s understandable and, like, it’s fine, it’s tolerable,” Savannah, a junior, said.
Savannah feels that without nails, which she’s had for her entire life, she feels uncomfortable.
“I honestly had to adapt because most people think it’s harder to do stuff with long nails, but for me, it’s almost the opposite,” Savannah said. “I had to get used to how to do normal things like putting on my necklaces and such without having my nails.”
Nails becoming a form of self-representation in sports isn’t just happening in high school; in professional sports at the Olympics, some female Olympians — from Florence Griffith Joyner in 1984 to Gail Devers in the ’90s to Jordan Chiles and Sha’Carri Richardson more recently — have used artificial nails as a means to express themselves and their personal style, despite the risks of performing sports with nails.
While Freddie does not suggest getting exceedingly long nails while playing sports, she thinks that having some form of nails has positively affected her volleyball play.
“I’ve bit on nails [and] I kind of get self-conscious about them, and then I think about them a lot,” Freddie said. “So then having them in the game allows me to not worry about that, and worry about less how I’m looking and more how I’m playing.”
