The Duty of Their Elders

After World War II, as the subspecialties of injury prevention and sports medicine developed, doctors and coaches sought to establish their authority on matters of youth football safety. The framing of football safety knowledge was gendered. Not only were sports doctors and coaches almost exclusively men, but particularly in the absence of epidemiological data, their experiential knowledge of sports was valued as a key element of safety expertise. Doctors and coaches particularly emphasized adult supervision—in other words, their own professional involvement in the sport— as essential to protecting players. As sports medicine developed as a sub-specialty, the more favorable attitudes of team physicians toward competitive youth sports increasingly diverged from the more cautious recommendations of pediatricians and educators. The tension between promoting football and studying its risks influenced how many doctors and coaches conceived of the sport’s dangers and constrained the solutions they proposed.