The Locker Room Is a Setting

The locker room is the most underrated setting in romance.

I’ll fight about this. The locker room is half-private, half-public. It’s a space where the characters wear less than they would on the street and more than they would in a bedroom. It’s loud and then suddenly very quiet. It has its own etiquette: who sits where, who showers when, who’s allowed to speak first after a loss.

When you put two characters in a locker room together, you have already done half the work of the scene.

The other settings that earn their keep

The locker room isn’t the only one. Sports romance lives or dies on its spaces. Here are the ones I keep coming back to:

• The tunnel. The walk from the field to the building. Bright lights, cold air, the sound of cleats on concrete. People say the wrong honest thing in tunnels because nobody else is around.
• The bus. Especially the late bus, on the way home, after a loss. Two hours of dim light and the heroine in the seat across the aisle.
• The trainer’s room. Ice baths. Tape. Three pieces of equipment and one closed door. The body the hero has been ignoring all season, finally getting addressed by somebody who knows what she’s doing.
• The press room. Bright, cold, performative. The interview after a bad game where the wrong thing slips out on camera, and the entire reading audience watches it happen with the heroine.
• The diner across the street from the stadium. Open at 2am. Bad coffee. The waitress who’s seen everything. The conversation that should have happened five years ago, finally happening because nobody else is awake to overhear it.

Each of these spaces tells the reader something about the people who go there. The bus tells you about losing. The trainer’s room tells you about bodies. The diner tells you about the town.

What the space does for the romance

A great romance setting puts pressure on the relationship. Forces it into a configuration it wouldn’t choose. The locker room forces vulnerability. The tunnel forces honesty. The bus forces proximity. The press room forces consequence. The diner forces stillness.

This is why sports romance doesn’t run out of moves. The genre has eight or nine of these high-pressure spaces baked into the basic premise. You’re never short of an interesting place to put two people who have things to say to each other.

The thing they don’t have to say

The other thing the right setting does is let people not say things. In a locker room, the silence is the noise of the whole room dropping. On the bus, the silence is the seat across the aisle. In the trainer’s room, the silence is her hand on his shoulder.

A quiet hero in a loud setting is a wall. A quiet hero in a resonant setting is a chord.

Pick the room well, and the room does the work.