No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis

Studies in Social Medicine

by Kathleen Bachynski

From the untimely deaths of young athletes to chronic disease among retired players, roiling debates over tackle football have profound implications for more than one million American boys—some as young as five years old—who play the sport every year. In this book, Kathleen Bachynski offers the first history of youth tackle football and debates over its safety. In the postwar United States, high school football was celebrated as a "moral" sport for young boys, one that promised and celebrated the creation of the honorable male citizen. Even so, Bachynski shows that throughout the twentieth century, coaches, sports equipment manufacturers, and even doctors were more concerned with "saving the game" than young boys' safety—even though injuries ranged from concussions and broken bones to paralysis and death.

By exploring sport, masculinity, and citizenship, Bachynski uncovers the cultural priorities other than child health that made a collision sport the most popular high school game for American boys. These deep-rooted beliefs continue to shape the safety debate and the possible future of youth tackle football.

Genres: Sports, History

296 pages, Paperback

Published November 25, 2019

Reviews

[Peter Cashwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a longtime football fan who has grown disenchanted with the game, I found much of this book sadly familiar. Bachynski's approach is not in the least sensationalistic, but is instead patient, thoughtful, and academic. She lays out evidence that from the game's earliest days, the medical history of football has been at odds with its social history, and that the latter has been a major reason why the former is still underpublicized. Accounts of young players killed or disabled by the sport pepper the narrative, and the reader soon comes to understand that the benefits of youth football seem to land disproportionately on the adults who organize it, rather than on the players risking their health. The later chapters, where the so-called "concussion crisis" gives way to the discovery that even minor impacts have a devastating cumulative effect on the brain, are particularly gripping. For those of us who grew up marveling at the prowess of players like Payton, Rice, and Manning, this is not an easy read, but it is an important one.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner of the North American Society of Sports History Prize for the Best Monograph in Sports History, 2020.

It should be no surprise that across a whole range of high impact contact sports we see repeated expressions of concern about player safety. At key points we have seen intense debates in codes such as rugby union and American football. In the early years of the 20th century, concern about player injuries and deaths saw the intervention of the President (Teddy Roosevelt) and rule changes. Similarly, in the mid-1970s concern about serious injury and deaths in rugby union saw a series of rule changes after the intervention of the Women’s Weekly shifted the terms of the debate (if my aging memory serves me well – there’s a research project). While in many sports there have been changes to training, coaching and the like, many of the responses to these concerns have seen rule changes, but it seems that much of the response in American football has been equipment focused.

Kathleen Bachynski’s excellent blending of health and sport history explores and opens up this question of player well-being in youth football. This is welcome on three fronts. First, this is an impressive multi-stranded approach to doing history building on debates and developments in sub-fields that should talk together more often. Second, she focuses on youth and not professional football, taking a national perspective and in doing so developing an approach seldom seen discussions of American football. Third, she brings her historical insights across both fields to a significant contemporary public health issue. Bachynski brings an impressive set of skills, as a health historian she has keen medical insight with a grasp of the techniques of epidemiology, while also bringing the insights of social history to emphasise health and not medical history. As a social historian of sport she also brings skills and insights to her reading of the social forces – institutional, corporate, and cultural – that shape the identification of these issues and response in the wider sport cultural complex. In this she has given us a vital engagement with these questions of sport, health and injury that significantly extends other important work in the field such as Allyson Pollock’s important public health analysis, Tackling Rugby .

The analysis draws out several key strands. First, Bachynski is very good on the gendered aspects of the issue throughout the 20th century including the language of masculinity surrounding football, but also the gendering of concerns about injury leading to a focus on mothers in much of the response. Second, she is alert to the impacts of technological developments gently drawing out the ways that enhancements in technology have led to enhanced medical understanding (for instance in the shift in emphasis from limb, neck and back injury to growing concern about brain injury). Third, and most significant, she unpacks the various social forces in and around football that have shaped responses to the issue and especially the steps taken by football’s institutions and corporate sector, especially equipment manufacturers that have sought to protect their interests. She repeatedly highlights the way that concerns about rule changes as having the potential to present an existential challenge to football led to technical and equipment based responses.

In a style that demonstrates both the complexity of this field and an impressive analytical ability, Bachynski weaves together a wide array of individual and institutional characters. This includes scientists, medics, engineers and other researchers some of whom respond directly to issues in football, others for whom football safety is a consequence of work elsewhere – such as those involved in motor racing concerned about safety in the wake of the death of a fellow driver. Many of these individuals have multiple forms of association with sport research, practice and engineering, as academics, manufacturers, policy advisors, as well as fans, parents and players themselves, not they all finish up on the same ‘side’. Alongside these individual actors, Bachynski emphasises the more powerful influences of the institutions. These include the drive to formalise amateur youth football in colleges and universities (the NCAA and its predecessors) as well as high schools and community leagues, especially the Pop Warner network), and while she emphasises these as forces of conservatism more concerned to ‘save football´ than necessarily protect its players, she is also sure to identify the cultural power of the professional game as shaping key aspects of football culture.

The other key institutional players she identifies centre on product safety, both in policy development and in the vital role that the manufacturing industry play in taking control of and shaping those developments. An essential part of the argument then is the identification of the common interests of the sports goods manufacturing sector and the games’ institutions, which is not to suggest that she claims a conspiracy, but highlights the common interests of those who seek to ensure the game continues in the way it is currently played and those who profit from supplying that game’s equipment.

This, then, is a powerful analysis of football’s place in images and discourses of American masculinity and of the forms that gender takes, of the power of sports institutions, and of the influence of the industries that surround both amateur and professional sport. It is also a compelling and richly crafted exploration of the ways that scientific evidence is developed, contested and deployed both within scientific communities and in public policy development; a key part of this element is how as both scholars and analysts we all bring preconceptions, some of which are conserving and some of which produce serendipitous insights. For sports historians it is an excellent analysis of the development of youth football; for health historians it is a rich analysis of diagnosis and interpretation in and around a demanding and emotionally powerful public health question; alongside these, its most potent cultural resonance might be in identifying the forces at work in the current debates about brain injury. In this latter point the book resonates well beyond football to debates in (ice) hockey, rugby (union and league) and I expect other high intensity contact sports, challenging us to look at who is engaging in debates and what their interests are.

All in all, then, this is a hugely important historical analysis that not only traverses fields within the discipline but also engages with one of contemporary sports’ key public issues. It is essential reading.

[Emily]

Bachynski's argument is simple but shocking: medical and sports officials have known since football's inception in the late nineteenth century that the sport causes significant bodily harm; and yet it is America's favorite sport, not just the NFL on TV but played by young men and boys. She asserts that football's known physical and emotional toll on children was never fully studied nor even actively prevented, as responsibility for risk instead shifted to ever-changing football equipment and warnings to use it properly. She also persuasively argues that supporters view football's brutality, specifically in collisions, as necessary and even laudatory for creating good men with strong character, a promise made all the more complex when made to players from disadvantaged backgrounds.

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the beginning of football, there were devastating injuries and deaths among players, but the game's proponents persisted in advocating that the game was safe, or safe enough, for adolescents and even children with proper equipment and adult supervision. Kathleen Bachynski details the history of youth football and how adults have continued to make decisions that put children at risk; even the American Academy of Pediatrics has not called for the elimination of tackling in football. With newer data supporting the risks of repeated sub-concussive head injuries, it seems like this should be an easy decision. It does make me wonder what data will be enough. Highly recommended.