For coaches, teams and schools
Your guys will listen to you before they listen to anyone.
A coach has the room that a parent, a teacher and a poster do not. Here is a talk for this week, a plan for the season, and how to get the materials.
The locker-room talk
Four minutes. Before a party weekend.
- 1Name it. “Some of you are going to be at a party this weekend where a guy, maybe one of you, is about to do something to a girl who can’t say no. I want to talk about what you do.”
- 2The rule. “If she can’t stand up, she can’t say yes. If she said no, that’s the end of it. If one of you is still going, the rest of you stop him. Not later. Right there.”
- 3The cost. “You will get called a buzzkill. Somebody will say you ruined the party. Good. I would rather you ruin a party than let that happen on this team.”
- 4The backing. “If you step in and it gets ugly, you call me. Any hour. You will not be in trouble with me for doing the right thing. Ever.”
Then send them to Be the guy, which has the words for the eight situations they will actually hit.
The season plan
Use the one that has been tested.
Coaching Boys Into Men, from Futures Without Violence, is twelve fifteen-minute talks a coach has with his team over a season. The CDC funded a three-year evaluation of it, and athletes who went through it were significantly more likely to step in when they saw abusive or disrespectful behavior. The card series is free.
We are not going to rebuild that. We are going to point every coach at it, and give you the shirts, the wristbands and the words so the message is on the bus and in the group chat when the talk is over.
For athletic departments and schools
It’s On Us has an athletics playbook and student chapters on more than 500 campuses. If you are at a college, there may already be one on yours.
Bring it to your team
Tell us what you need.
Posters for the locker room. A box of wristbands. Somebody to come talk to the team. A version of this page for your program’s site. Materials that organizations can hand straight to young men are the next thing Ruin the Party is building, and what you ask for here decides what gets built first.