The Language Your Players Borrow
An excellent graphic from @thesensiblesexpert immediately made me think of two places I've heard the word "female" used.
NBA player Michael Porter Jr’s silly self on damn near every podcast he’s ever appeared on talking about “females be like” or “females are my vice”…
In my own team room, it's not something I hear every day, but I've heard it often enough that it caught my attention: "That's just how females are, man."
I think the entire slide show is worth your time, and this is an example of a session you can run as more educational than accusatory. My guess is many high school boys have never actually been taught the distinction. They've simply repeated language they've heard from peers, podcasts, social media, or adults. This doesn’t have to be a lecture from on high session where you come down on them necessarily.
More effective would be to approach it with “Have you heard this before” and “what context/what sentence structure did you hear it used”. Write all those out on the whiteboard and then launch into why using “females be like” should be avoided. As the author in the IG post points out, the issue isn't the word female. The issue is using a biological label in places where we'd normally refer to people as women. It subtly shifts the language away from personhood and toward categorization.
While I am loathe to sanitize any TeamsOfMen sessions (too often we hear people weaponize something like “meet them where they are” and really what they are asking for is “don’t make them feel bad” protection for men) but I do think semantics in language can be nuanced and this is a good opportunity to adjust tone. When the goal is learning rather than winning an argument, coaches can still be direct while helping athletes understand why language shapes the way we think about other people.
Coach Prompts
Where have you heard your athletes casually repeat language from podcasts, social media, or influencers without thinking about what it communicates?
How can you create space for players to examine language without making the conversation feel like a public shaming?
What everyday phrases have become "normal" in your locker room that deserve a closer look?
Player Prompts
Where do you think most of the phrases you use about girls and women originally came from?
When someone refers to a group as "females," what message do you think it sends compared with saying "women" or "girls"?
Can you think of words or phrases you've stopped using because you learned they affected people differently than you intended?
Run Your Program's System Audit
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