An athlete-led initiative in development
Every team has a culture. Every culture teaches something. We’re building an athlete-led initiative to investigate those lessons—and ask what carries into the rest of life.
Beyond the room
A team teaches more than a sport.
Trust. Resilience. Care. The best parts of athletics are worth understanding and protecting. Teams can also teach exclusion, silence, or the pressure to fit in.
We learn through what leaders model, what gets a laugh, what earns respect, and what goes unchallenged.
What, if anything, carries into our relationships, workplaces, and everyday encounters? That’s our central research question.
Read the thinking behind itBeyond the room
What carries
over?
Our three questions
Understand the lessons. Explore where they go. Develop thoughtful ways to change the conversation.
Investigate
Look closely at how leadership, humor, hierarchy, and belonging shape the everyday experience of a team. Explore the positive lessons alongside the harmful ones.
Potential approaches: athlete interviews, surveys, existing research, and academic collaboration.
Educate
Explore whether expectations about respect, boundaries, consent, and accountability travel into friendships, relationships, workplaces, and other communities.
Behavioral transfer is a question to investigate. We have not established it through our own research.
Change
Develop an educational series with athletes, coaches, and educators. Turn everyday team moments into opportunities to think about dignity, responsibility, and how we treat each other.
Our ambition: make “locker room talk” a phrase associated with respect and accountability.
A proposed video & discussion series
Start with a familiar moment. Ask what it means. Invite athletes, coaches, and educators to work through it together.
The opening question / Pilot concept
Appearance? Belonging? Who has power—and who gets to use it?
Explore the series conceptMore conversations to explore
Who notices? Who checks in? Explore how a group decides whether a joke is shared—or comes at someone’s expense.
What would it look like to respect a boundary without requiring someone to defend it?
Explore the difference between agreement, uncertainty, and the fear of speaking up. What makes a different response possible?
Consider how responsibility, seniority, and authority shape the way a team understands leadership.
What might loyalty to a teammate—and responsibility to everyone else—ask of us at the same time?
These are proposed topics. Videos and educational materials have not yet been produced.
Built with athletes
Athletes bring lived perspective. Coaches, educators, and researchers bring different ways of asking—and answering—the questions.
Our intention is to build the initiative together: athlete-led, informed by research, and grounded in the realities of team life.
Locker Room Talk is an emerging public-interest project founded by Nick Madison. We’re seeking collaborators to shape the research and educational work. We have not yet established a research team, advisory council, partnerships, or completed studies.
The public invitation
Help investigate what teams teach and develop thoughtful ways to change the conversation.
Start here · Adults 18+
Get occasional project updates, contribute your perspective or expertise, or explore a future pilot. You choose what you hear from us.
Have a general question? hello@lockerroomtalk.org
One standard. Different conversations.
Help redefine
locker room talk.