They say a picture is worth a thousand words and they may be right.

As the high school football season was about to start a photo of St. Frances players with their coach drew an e-mail from reader Mike Greenhill who posed this question:

"Why is it that everyone in [the St. Francis photo], including the coach, is not smiling?"

Baltimore Sun photo by Monica Lopossay / Aug. 29, 2008

Greenhill contends this has been going on for "at least 20 years". He says high school girls smile in their photos, "but 99 percent of the time" boys, in a posed photo, do not.

"Why do they all have to look [so tough]?" he asked. "It must be the ESPN Magazine cover syndrome, though it started before that rag was formed ... Is there some code that says if a guy smiles, then he’s a wimp? And the coaches, too?"

Our Millersville reader is not the only one to have observed the trend.

So why is it that male athletes don’t smile?

I think it is an act.

A macho thing. Scowls equal toughness; smiles being a wimp.

Katherine Dunn, who covers girl’s high school sports, says she has noticed even the girls on some teams -- especially the girls’ basketball teams -- tend to leave their smiles in the locker room when having a picture taken.

"I think they’re just putting on their game face," Dunn said.

In the case of the boys, I think they’re repeating what they’ve seen the older players, their predecessors, do. If they’re going into a big game, do they want to smile and look like a bunch of pushovers? Or, do they want to be a little intimidating and get the opposing team thinking about how difficult the coming game may be?

But Greenhill says it has to stop and wonders if the reporter, the photographer or the coach can simply say, "We’re not leaving here and the photo’s not being taken until you’re all SMILING!"

Which opens up a whole different issue.

The face a player displays for the camera says everything about the message he or she wants to convey. If someone says, "Smile!" and the player smiles when he doesn’t want to, is that telling a player to lie? Is the picture a misquote -- a misinterpretation or a misrepresentation?

In my e-mail conversation with Greenhill, he says the more important issue is "the inability of males to smile spontaneously is so detrimental to their development (and society’s) that I think that making them smile needs to be attempted. It’s almost like what Jim Palmer once said about Earl Weaver: "He’s not happy unless he’s not happy."

But I don’t think the lack of a smile in a sports photo indicates unhappiness or meanness. While I’d like to see the players smiling, showing the enjoyment they get from playing their sport, I think the gruff exterior is just a pose.

Behind the stone faces just might be a kid who is laughing at the very idea of looking tough.

-- Sandra McKee