Glossary of terms

The language of team culture.

Words shape what people notice, permit, challenge, and change. These plain-language definitions establish what Locker Room Talk means when it uses the terms below.

A working language

These definitions are educational, not exhaustive legal definitions. Laws, school policies, league rules, and safeguarding procedures may define some terms differently.

Belonging: The experience of being accepted as a legitimate member of a group—without having to hide who you are, endure harm, or earn your place through someone else’s humiliation.
Camaraderie: The trust, fellowship, and mutual loyalty that grow among people who share effort, responsibility, and experience. Healthy camaraderie strengthens belonging without requiring a victim.
Coercion: Pressure, threats, manipulation, or the use of a power imbalance to make someone participate. A choice is not freely made when refusal carries a real or implied social, physical, or institutional penalty.
Consent: A clear, voluntary, informed, specific, and ongoing agreement. Consent can be withdrawn. Silence, freezing, or going along because of pressure should not be treated as agreement.
Degradation: Treatment that lowers someone’s standing or dignity, including treating a person as an object, spectacle, or source of entertainment rather than as a teammate.
Dignity: The inherent worth of every person and their right to be treated with respect. Dignity does not depend on age, skill, seniority, status, or whether someone made a mistake.
Exposure: Being made visible or having something private revealed in a way that compromises safety or dignity. Exposure can involve a person’s body, image, personal information, or private experience.
Harassment: Unwanted conduct that intimidates, targets, degrades, or humiliates someone, or contributes to a hostile environment. Laws and institutional policies may define harassment differently.
Hazing: Conduct connected to joining, belonging to, or maintaining status in a group that humiliates, degrades, coerces, abuses, or endangers someone. Laws and institutional policies may define hazing differently.
Hierarchy: An ordering of people by age, authority, seniority, skill, role, or status. Hierarchies can organize responsibility, but they can also concentrate power and raise the social cost of refusing.
Humiliation: The act or experience of having one’s dignity lowered through ridicule, exposure, degradation, or shame—especially when other people are made into an audience.
Intervention: An action that interrupts, questions, redirects, stops, documents, or reports harmful conduct. Intervention can be immediate or delayed, direct or supported by another person.
Leadership: Responsibility for the conditions a group creates—not only for one’s own behavior. Leadership includes what a person prevents, names, rewards, interrupts, and helps others challenge.
Privacy: A person’s ability to control access to their body, image, personal information, and private moments. Being part of a team does not erase that boundary.
Retaliation: Punishment, intimidation, exclusion, or mistreatment directed at someone because they refused to participate, spoke up, sought help, supported another person, or reported a concern.
Safeguarding: The policies, practices, and everyday actions used to protect people—especially minors and others who may be vulnerable—from abuse, exploitation, neglect, and preventable harm.
Team culture: The shared expectations a team creates through what it says, repeats, rewards, laughs at, ignores, and interrupts. Culture is expressed through behavior, not only through written values.
Tradition: A practice handed down or repeated over time. A tradition can create identity and connection, but its age or popularity does not make it harmless or place it beyond question.
Vulnerability: A state of increased exposure or reduced power. In team settings, vulnerability can be physical, emotional, social, developmental, or connected to status and authority.

The governing idea

True camaraderie never needs a victim.

The glossary gives us shared words. The standard gives those words a direction.

Read the standard