When It Was Your Teammate Who Did It

This one is harder to talk about than when it happens to you.

When another team takes a cheap shot at one of yours, the locker room is unified. The anger has a clear direction. But this is different. This time the player who did something that hurt another person, embarrassed this program, and possibly changed the outcome of the game is sitting right here.

And everybody in this room is processing that differently. Some of you are angry. Some of you are covering for them. Some of you are embarrassed. Some of you are not sure what you are supposed to feel.

So let us talk about it honestly, because this is one of the moments that either pulls a team apart or makes it something that can handle hard things together.

Read both passages slowly — both deserve a breath after them.

And then this one:

Let those sit for a second before you move.

There are two wrong responses to what happened, and a team will almost always drift toward one of them.

The first wrong response is to pile on. To use this as a moment to finally say what you have been thinking about that player, to let the anger become something personal, to treat the thing they did as evidence of everything that is wrong with them. That destroys the team. And it is not what accountability actually looks like.

The second wrong response is to circle the wagons and pretend it did not happen or was not that bad. To minimize it, to deflect, to say the other player had it coming or the refs were already against us. That also destroys the team, just more slowly, because it tells every player in this room that this program does not actually mean what it says about character.

Galatians 6:1 gives us a third way. Restore that person gently. Not softly. Gently. There is a difference. Gently means you go toward them, not away from them. It means you say the hard thing to their face, not behind their back. It means the goal is not to punish them or cut them down. The goal is to get them back.

But the verse does not stop there. It says watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. That is not a footnote. That is the most important part. Because the person who did this is not the only one in this room capable of doing something like it. You are capable of it. The difference between you and them right now is a half second and a particular situation. Humility is not optional here. It is required.

Proverbs says wounds from a friend can be trusted. What that means for this locker room is this: the most loving thing you can do for your teammate right now is not to protect them from the consequences or the hard conversation. It is to be the person who tells them the truth because you actually care what happens to them. An enemy will tell them what they want to hear. A teammate tells them what they need to hear.

That player needs to know what the foul cost. They need to hear it from people who are for them, not from people who are using it against them. And they need to see that this team is not going to either throw them away or pretend nothing happened. Both of those things would leave them alone with it. That is not what teams do.

What does this team do? It stays in the room. It says the hard thing. And then it gets back to work together.

That is what character looks like when it is inconvenient. And it is almost always inconvenient.

This question often surfaces the fact that pile-on feels like accountability and accountability feels uncomfortable. Give the room time to sit with the distinction. If the player involved is present, keep this question general rather than directed at them.