Editor’s note: This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering leadership, personal development and performance through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.
The photo appeared online in the early-morning hours of Sept. 7, not long after the Vanderbilt football program had finished off a 44-20 victory against Virginia Tech. The image captured a simple scene: a spotless road locker room at Lane Stadium in Blacksburg, Va., with the red carpet pristine and not a piece of trash in sight.
A member of the Virginia Tech grounds crew stumbled upon the locker room, snapped a photo and posted it to X, thanking Vanderbilt. By the next day, it was all over, a straightforward act of team discipline and character on display.
From the custodian crew at Lane Stadium, thank you Vanderbilt for leaving the locker room clean.#hokies pic.twitter.com/Rq0jbEwIMR
— VT Grounds Crew (@VT_groundscrew) September 7, 2025
For Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea, the meaning was much deeper than that.
Growing up in Tennessee, Lea was a regular at basketball camps at Lipscomb University, then a private NAIA school in Nashville. The basketball coach at Lipscomb was Don Meyer, a legend with an endless supply of motivational mantras and life lessons. Lea, a precocious young athlete not yet a teenager, was inspired enough to bring along a notebook and jot some of them down.
Meyer liked to say that “happiness begins when selfishness ends.” He subscribed to the Greek concept of “Arete,” or being the absolute best version of yourself. But at his core, he had one big philosophy for life: “The whole idea is to leave every place a little better than you found it.”
When Lea became the head football coach at Vanderbilt in 2021, taking over a team that had gone winless the previous year, he brought the idea back to Nashville. It pervades every corner of his program, which at 5-0 and ranked No. 16 heading into a showdown with No. 10 Alabama on Saturday, remains on the rise after a bowl victory last season.
But it is a philosophy perhaps best symbolized by the image of a spotless locker room.
“We always talk in our program about ‘winning the response,’” Lea said earlier this month. “There’s a respect that we have for all the things we come in contact with, and that certainly includes the spaces where we prepare for our games and execute for our games.
“There’s an appreciation, and we never want to be entitled when it comes to those things. How we show respect is we try to leave a place better than we found it.”
Of course, Lea is far from the only college football coach who believes in the power of a clean locker room. A hallmark of service academy programs like Army and Navy, it’s also become a touchstone of programs at all levels. When Southeastern Louisiana, an FCS program, traveled to No. 4 LSU in late September, it lost 56-10. It also left the visiting locker room spick-and-span, a priority under longtime head coach Frank Scelfo.
“Everything about our program is centered around that,” Scelfo said. “The way we do small things is the way we do all things. When you go to somebody’s house, you don’t leave it dirty. You clean it. If you finish eating, you pick up your plate. There’s manners involved.”
The maxims are slick, but coaches like Lea and Scelfo believe that it goes beyond words. Simple habits can yield significant results; a focus on routine and process can be crucial to achieving the desired outcome.
In fact, studies have shown that physical work environments have a surprising impact on performance. The presence of clutter can increase stress and anxiety. A messy office, researchers say, can affect decision-making, relationships and even cognition. It’s one reason leadership experts like William H. McRaven — a retired four-star admiral and Navy SEAL — have promoted the virtues of starting your day with one habit: Making your bed.
Lea, a voracious reader, has studied a wide range of coaching styles and leadership ideas. One of those was the team culture of the All Blacks, New Zealand’s national rugby team, whose practice of “sweeping the sheds” was chronicled by author James Kerr in a 2013 management book called “Legacy” about the team.
In a culture focused on humility and teamwork, even the most veteran All Black players take turns cleaning the locker room. For Lea, the story caused him to adopt a simple postgame routine. Win or lose, his first response after a game is to clean up.
“It’s always been something I’ve done for myself as a way to initiate renewal — begin again,” Lea said. “And it helps me focus on what I can control.”
Or, as his mentor Meyer once put it: “Coaches must understand that they will at times have to suck scum.”
For Scelfo, the coach at Southeastern Louisiana, the practice of cleaning took off during his first year, when his program opened the season with a 34-31 loss to Louisiana-Monroe. In the moments after the game, a staffer took a picture of a spotless locker room. A standard was crystallized.
“I just think it is the way you live your life,” Scelfo said. “And there’s an orderly fashion that you can go by that allows structure.”
The process of tearing down and cleaning a visiting locker room following a college football game can be surprisingly complex. Most programs employ a team of equipment staffers who track game balls and other essential items. According to Cade Genovese, the head equipment manager at Southeastern Louisiana, the entire process typically takes around 30 to 45 minutes, including 10 minutes of cleaning once the coaches and players have departed for the bus.
“We’ve done it enough between home games and away games that it’s a bam-bam process,” Genovese said.
No matter the outcome. Always leave it better than you found it. Thanks for the memory of a lifetime @LSUfootball @LionUpFootball pic.twitter.com/WKA8FZMUdN
— Cade Genovese (@genovese_84) September 21, 2025
For Scelfo, it’s an easy lesson to impart to his players.
“One guy can’t do all of that, man,” he said. “It’s just too hard. But if everybody would just do their part, then it becomes easy.”
When Genovese posted a photo of the Southeastern Louisiana locker room after the loss to LSU, it was the fourth time he’d done so in four seasons as the program’s equipment manager. The image was the same as always, so he was surprised when his tweet garnered a larger response than usual.
Maybe that says something about society in general, Scelfo mused. Lea sees it as a simple act that can hold meaning.
“Hopefully that becomes a legacy of the program,” he said, “leaving it better than we found it.”
— Joe Rexrode contributed to this report.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
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