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.

Tackle football has been one of the most popular sports for boys in the United States since the mid-twentieth century. This dissertation examines how debates over the safety of football for children at the high school level and younger have changed from 1945 through the present. After World War II, the expansion of youth tackle football leagues, particularly for pre-pubescent children, fostered a new range of medical and educational concerns. Yet calls for limits on tackle football were largely obscured by the political and social culture of the Cold War, including beliefs about violence, masculinity, and competition. A broad range of groups and individuals were involved in debating the safety of youth football throughout the remainder of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. These groups included doctors, coaches, educators, lawyers, engineers, parents, athletes, journalists, and sporting goods manufacturers. Their arguments over the risks and benefits of youth football involved not only the sport's effects on physical health, but also on social and emotional well-being.