The Call Is Coming From Inside the Locker Room
We have all heard the old adage “The call is coming from inside the house,” and it’s calling to mind Drew Barrymore’s character in Scream realizing the terrorizing voice on the phone was coming from inside her home. The article above—recently published by William Bigham in his university’s student newspaper and shared with me via our partners at Partnership for Male Youth—should land as that same type of chilling moment for coaches of male athletes.
With statements like “Men are taught throughout their entire athletic careers that they need to be quiet about their feelings and they are considered weak if they express vulnerability,” and “Toxic masculinity from locker room culture is a contributor to the mental health problem affecting male athletes today,” all coming from a CURRENT member “of the trenches”—as is so often assigned to line play on the gridiron—this becomes more than an opinion piece. It’s a window into the lived reality of the very spaces we oversee.
This is a clean bridge into what TeamsOfMen has long pushed toward: norm change inside locker rooms. When you pair Bigham’s perspective with the statistics he cites around U.S. college student-athlete suicides, and the documented spikes in anxiety around competition windows, the connection isn’t hard to see. There are threads running between the climate of the place athletes are supposed to call “home” and the way they end up feeling, coping, and behaving within it.
It is worth not only reading, but grappling with the way our spaces contribute to the day-to-day experience of simply being a part of our program. We love to hide behind the idea that “our cultures” of hard work and discipline are stand-alone inputs to growth. But either through naivete or willful ignorance, we ignore the climate of existing in our program. The language. The tone. The moments we let slide.
Until we as coaches embrace the idea that you can, in fact, have hardworking, successful teams without leaning on old tropes of power and dominance—courtesy of Manbox-influenced thinking—we will keep seeing these numbers and outcomes move in the wrong direction.
Coach Prompts
What language is “normal” in our space that we no longer even hear?
Where have I confused discipline with silence?
If one of my players wrote this article about our program, what would hit too close to home?
Player Prompts
What gets said in our locker room that people laugh at—but probably shouldn’t?
When was the last time you held something in because you didn’t think it would be received well here?
What would need to change for this to feel like a space where you could be more honest?
