I am not a sporting person.
I want to put that on the table immediately, because I think it matters. I don’t play sport. I have never played sport in any serious or organised way. I am the sibling who sat in the stands while the athletes in my family did their thing, the one who watched from the sidelines and noticed things that perhaps the people actually playing didn’t have the headspace to observe. I have spent a lifetime watching sporting culture from the outside — the dynamics, the rituals, the unspoken hierarchies, the way teams either cohere into something greater than the sum of their parts or quietly fracture along lines that were always there, just never quite pressurised enough to show.
And here is what I know from all of that watching: a locker room is a locker room.
The professional version may smell more expensive and have better towels and contain people whose faces appear on merchandise, but the fundamental human dynamics playing out inside it are not meaningfully different from the amateur locker rooms I watched my siblings inhabit across years of weekend sport. The way status gets established without anyone explicitly establishing it. The veteran who doesn’t need to raise their voice because everyone in the room already knows where they stand. The newcomer feeling out the culture with careful, watching eyes. The joke that lands perfectly and the one that lands wrong and how the room responds to both tells you everything about who these people are to each other.
I built the Portland Pioneers’ culture on that knowledge. And I supplemented it with something that didn’t exist when I was a child sitting in the dark watching a fuzzy Olympic hockey game on a screen I was practically touching — social media, behind-the-scenes content, and the extraordinary access that the Washington Capitals have given fans into the living, breathing, bickering, laughing organism of an actual NHL team.
Those two things together — a lifetime of watching amateur locker rooms and years of careful attention to what professional teams reveal about themselves online — gave me everything I needed.
Culture Is Not What Teams Say. It’s What They Do.
Every franchise has a mission statement. Every organisation can tell you about their values, their commitment to excellence, their dedication to community. This is not culture. This is marketing.
Culture is what happens when nobody is watching. It’s the veteran who quietly helps the struggling rookie with his technique without being asked, and without telling anyone he did it. It’s the way the room goes silent when a specific person walks in — whether that silence is respect or wariness tells you everything. It’s the unwritten rules that new players absorb in their first few weeks without anyone ever explicitly stating them: what gets laughed at and what doesn’t, who you defer to and in what circumstances, what kind of vulnerability is permitted and what kind will cost you.
Culture is lived, not declared. And as a writer, your job is to show it rather than tell it — to let the culture of your fictional franchise reveal itself through a hundred small moments rather than through a single scene where someone explains it.
My younger siblings played sport with genuine commitment and I watched that world across many years. I watched how teams that looked similar on paper — same age range, same neighbourhood, same sport — could have completely different feels. One team was tight and raucous and looked out for each other in ways that extended well beyond the pitch or the court or the ice. Another was technically competent and emotionally cold, a collection of individuals who happened to wear the same colours. The difference was never really about talent. It was always about culture, and culture was always traceable back to specific people making specific choices — usually a small number of people, sometimes just one or two, whose values and behaviours set the tone that everyone else either adopted or struggled against.
Your franchise is the same. Somewhere in your roster and your coaching staff are the two or three people whose character is shaping the culture that everyone else inhabits. Find them. Know them completely. Then let them do their work on the page.
What Social Media Has Given Hockey Writers
I grew up watching one game per week on a television set small enough that I could practically hold it. Now I follow the Washington Capitals on multiple platforms and they give me access I genuinely cannot believe is real.
The behind-the-scenes content that professional sports organisations produce for social media is a research gift of extraordinary generosity. Not the polished stuff — the official highlight packages and the interview clips where everyone is saying the approved things. I mean the other content. The practice footage where someone does something embarrassing and gets absolutely destroyed by their teammates for the next thirty seconds. The locker room celebrations that are obviously partially performed for camera and partially completely real and the line between those two things is genuinely interesting to observe. The travel content that reveals how these groups of men actually interact when they’re bored and tired and crammed onto a charter flight for the fourth time in ten days.
What social media reveals, if you watch it with careful eyes, is the genuine texture of team relationships. You learn who is actually funny and who just thinks they are. You learn the genuine affection between certain players that no official team communication would ever make explicit because it’s just the background noise of shared life. You learn which veterans are magnets for the rookies and which ones are slightly untouchable. You learn the team’s sense of humour — what they laugh at, the jokes that recur, the bits that have been running so long that the participants are barely aware it’s still a bit.
The Capitals have an extraordinary culture that I have studied with the intensity I once reserved for sitting three inches from a fuzzy television screen. They are physically affectionate in a way that reads as genuinely unselfconscious. They are fiercely protective of each other in public. Their sense of humour is specific and layered and has the quality of in-jokes that go back years. The veterans carry themselves with the particular ease of people who have been somewhere long enough to know that they belong there, and the newer arrivals move into that ease at different speeds and in different ways that are fascinating to observe.
None of this is directly transcribed into the Portland Pioneers. But all of it informed how I understand what a team with genuine culture actually looks and feels like from the outside. That understanding is in every scene I’ve set in the Pioneer locker room.
Building a Culture That Is Specific to Your Team
Generic team culture is useless. Your fictional franchise needs a culture that is theirs and theirs alone — that couldn’t belong to any other team in your universe, that is the product of this specific combination of people in this specific city at this specific moment in the franchise’s history.
To build that, you need to know the origin. Culture in sports teams is almost always traceable to founding conditions — to what the organisation was built around and what it was built in reaction to. Was your franchise built on grit and defensive hockey by a coach who believed offence was overrated and toughness was everything? That choice, made fifteen years ago, is still living in the walls of the building even if the current roster looks completely different. Was your franchise built on a particular kind of player that the founder loved — creative, offensive, willing to take risks — and did that philosophy attract a certain kind of character that then reproduced itself through the culture they created?
For the Portland Pioneers, the coaching staff and the ownership structure are the origin of the culture. A head coach who is also the father of players on his own roster has created a family culture that is genuine rather than performed — these people are actually looking out for each other in the way that families do, with all the complication that entails alongside all the warmth. The front office full of women who belong to this world on their own professional terms has created an organisational culture where the assumptions that sometimes poison sports environments never got the foothold they might have had elsewhere.
That culture attracts certain kinds of players and repels others. It creates an environment where specific kinds of stories are possible and others are not. It is the invisible architecture that every book in your series is built inside.
Culture as the Source of Conflict
Here is the craft truth that took me longest to fully articulate: team culture is not just atmosphere. It is conflict engine.
The friction between individual characters and the team culture they inhabit — the player who doesn’t fit, the newcomer who challenges assumptions, the veteran whose methods worked for twenty years and are suddenly inadequate in ways they can’t quite name — is the source of some of the richest character drama available to you in sports fiction.
A trade brings someone into your franchise who was shaped by a completely different culture. They’re a good player. They want to contribute. But the way they understand what it means to be a good teammate is different from the way your franchise defines it, and that difference is going to create friction before it creates understanding. That friction is story.
A young player whose talent is undeniable arrives and finds that the team’s culture demands a kind of humility that doesn’t come naturally to someone who has been the best player in every room they’ve ever entered. How they navigate that — whether they fight it or learn from it or find a way to be themselves within it — is character development that the culture is generating for you.
Your culture is not the backdrop for your conflicts. It is actively producing them. The more specific and real your franchise culture is, the richer the conflict it generates — because culture that is truly lived, rather than gestured at, has edges. And edges create the friction that stories need.
The Amateur Truth in the Professional World
I said at the beginning that a locker room is a locker room, and I want to return to that because I think it carries something important for writers who feel that their lack of professional sports experience is a gap they need to apologise for.
The fundamental human dynamics of a team environment — the belonging and the exclusion, the loyalty and the betrayal, the way status is negotiated without anyone ever discussing it explicitly, the particular kind of love that forms between people who have been through something genuinely hard together — these are not exclusive to professional sport. They are human. They happen at every level, in every sporting context, in workplaces and families and communities that have nothing to do with sport at all.
You have been watching these dynamics your whole life. In the stands, on the sidelines, in the carpark afterwards. You’ve watched teams that had it and teams that didn’t, and you know the difference in your bones even if you’ve never had the language for it.
Trust that knowledge. Supplement it with everything you can find — the social media, the memoirs, the journalism, the conversations with people who have lived inside professional sport. But trust the fundamental human understanding you have already built, because that is what your characters are made of.
The locker room on a bad night after a bad loss, when the room has to find its way back to itself — I promise you that is not so different at the amateur level and the professional level that your experience of the first cannot illuminate the second.
Human nature is the research. You’ve been doing it your whole life.
Bella Bruce 