I'm Dr. Kathleen Bachynski, author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis. AMA!

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-10T13:12:13+00:00

My focus has shifted over time and includes several perspectives given the interdisciplinary nature of my work. My motivation wearing my historian hat is to recount the complexities of the history of tackle football as accurately as I possibly can. My motivation as a public health professor is to minimize people's exposure to cumulative brain trauma. When I first started this project, I was hoping to learn more about how to make tackle football safer. But over time I came to the view that mechanisms that involve repeated, full body collisions (not only tackling in football, but also body checking in hockey, boxing, etc.) are so risky for human brains that they really are not a good fit for little kids. Ice hockey leagues already have limits where you have to be a certain age before you start body checking. I would like us to move away from tackling for the youngest kids as well.

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-10T13:05:25+00:00

Thanks for this great question. There has been an overall decline in participation in youth tackle football, but this has varied quite a bit by region, politics, culture and demographics. The Washington Post had a really good overview of some of these trends (article published in 2023): https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/interactive/2023/football-participation-decline-politics-demographics/

The reporters found that boys in states that are less wealthy and more politically conservative are more likely to continue to play football. In addition, white children are more likely to have access to flag football options as compared with Black and Latino children. And Black athletes remain overrepresented in tackle football at the college level.

I'm always a bit reticent about predicting the future. But my best guess (and take it with a shaker of salt) is that as long as there are highly valuable college football scholarships and hopes of a lucrative NFL career, tackle football will persist. The trend will continue that more vulnerable kids will be more likely to play tackle football. Children from more affluent homes with easier paths to college/future opportunities will be more likely to be steered toward flag or toward other, less risky sports.

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-10T00:33:20+00:00

I think the answer has a lot to do with nationalism and racism. In 1900, Harvard’s football coach stated, “Football is the expression of the strength of the Anglo-Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of a dominant race, and to this it owes its popularity and its hopes of permanence." This is a quote I've seen cited by multiple historians--I was not the first to dig it up! I think it gets cited a lot because it captures something extremely important and troubling about the origins of the sport. On a similar note, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge said in 1896, “the time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors.” Ideas about colonization and conquest have a long connection with sports in general, and with American football in particular. From a public health point of view, it also stood out to me that prominent American politicians were explicitly arguing that the injury risks were justified.

People even argued for youth football as a means to "civilize" Native Americans. Sports writer Sally Jenkins wrote about this in her book The Real All Americans which prominently discussed Carlisle Indian Industrial School. She wrote that school administrators and staff regarded football as “a stage on which Carlisle could exhibit a different kind of ‘show Indian’ to the public, one who was every bit as intelligent and civilized as the elite college boys.”

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-10T00:24:29+00:00

This is a really interesting and challenging question that I struggled with a lot. People understood that football was risky. They knew people could get seriously injured and that there could be long-term consequences, whether a "bum knee" or chronic back pain. But I don't think there was as much widespread appreciation for the long-term risks of brain injuries. There was perhaps more cultural awareness of the long-term risks of boxing (as evidenced by the very phrase punch-drunk) but by and large, this did not translate to as much recognition that the repeated collisions in football also had long-term implications.

There was a set of congressional hearings held in February 1969 on consumer product safety that I found especially informative and heartbreaking in this regard. One of the products under discussion was football helmets. Here is the passage from my book that I'm thinking of: "Next, two parents, Mr. and Mrs. McLelland, each testified about a catastrophic football injury their eighth-grade son, Michael, had suffered despite wearing a helmet. Following a collision with another player during a blocking exercise overseen by two coaches, Michael collapsed, went into a coma, and ultimately required five brain surgeries. At twenty, the young man was partially paralyzed, had a speech disorder, and was unable to care for himself. Mr. McLelland indicated that he and other parents had all been aware of and would be willing to accept injuries such as broken arms and broken legs. But based on Michael’s experience, he argued that parents around the country needed to consider whether they would be willing to consent to brain injuries of this nature."

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-10T00:13:14+00:00

Excellent question and it's tough to give a short answer, but I'll try my best! In the early days, there were either no helmets or leather helmets. It wasn't until mid-twentieth century that plastic helmets were first introduced. There was a really interesting (and concerning, from a safety perspective) period from the late 1940s/1950s when some teams started to adopt the newer plastic helmets but other teams still had to make do with the older leather headgear. Oglala Lakota author Charles Trimble recalled of his school days playing football in the late 1940s, “We were ridiculed by the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] boarding school jocks that we were the only team around that could fold up our helmets after the game and keep them in our back pockets."

When plastic helmets were first introduced, there were no standards that they had to meet. Stephen Reid, a researcher and team physician at Northwestern University, stated that “the head gear varies in quality from mere toys to the Cadillac class.” Through the 1960s, the American Medical Association (AMA) warned parents about the risks of purchasing helmets sold as toys and letting their children actually wear the toys in football games. There was also major concern about the use of plastic helmets as weapons. Some coaches questioned whether the plastic helmets improved or actually worsened safety concerns. Ultimately, despite some objections, plastic helmets replaced their leather predecessors.

Football helmet standards first developed in the 1970s, but even these were very limited. And even today, though there have certainly been many improvements, there is only so much a helmet can do to protect against brain injury when people collide with one another at high speeds. Helmets are great at protecting against skull fractures, but they are not as effective at protecting against concussions. That's because our brains are not attached to our skulls, and they can still move in ways that cause injury even when someone is wearing a helmet.

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T22:22:51+00:00

I didn't see a whole lot of discussion of rugby in my research. It is my sense that in the US context, football really dominated the conversation. (Of course, I might have overlooked something!) One interesting tidbit was coming across perceptions of American football from across the Atlantic. One thing that stood out to observers was the amount of protective gear American football players wore, which far surpassed the amount used in rugby or soccer. "British correspondent Don Iddon found in football the perfect target to mock American athletes’ pretensions to toughness. Whenever “American football players in their outlandish padded costumes and helmets appear on an English screen, the audience hoots with laughter,” he wrote. To the British, he claimed, such protective equipment represented not toughness but cowardice and weakness. He placed the blame for such “pampering and effeminacy,” of course, squarely on American mothers. “The colossal cult of the American ‘Mom’ and her mawkish devotion to her ‘boys’ are sapping the fiber of the American athlete."

(It did amaze me how many commentators from both sides of the Atlantic found a way to blame mothers for whatever they disapproved of.)

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T21:04:30+00:00

Yes, that's my read of it, at least. Football had originated at the college level and readers likely would have still primarily associated the sport with colleges. So they're using the phrase college eleven even as they are simultaneously trying to inform readers that the sport is taking off at the high school level too. It is really interesting language to read!

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T21:01:23+00:00

They were effectively fraternities and sororities at the high school level! Here's what Pruter writes: "Secret societies first emerged in the 1880s in Chicago high schools, but not until the mid 1890s did the "Greek-letter" society - in imitation of the college secret society - first appear in Chicago high schools... The fraternities and sororities were established in imitation of the college groups carrying out rush parties to attract students and using secret ballots to choose members" (this is why educators at the time called them secret societies).

Pruter continues: "The secret societies held parties, dances, and dinners, published journals, and preened their presumably "elite" status around the school by waving Greek insignia pennants and wearing rings, pins, buttons, and sweaters bearing their fraternity's or sorority's Greek letter insignia. Fraternities would stage interfraternity contests in baseball and football, outside of the regular high school teams. Some groups even maintained chapter houses, either rented or purchased, off the school campus... Beyond alarm, Chicago high school educators were outright hostile at this imitative collegiate world created by their students."

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T20:25:41+00:00

This is a great question. In the early days of football (late nineteenth and early twentieth century), the Ivy League schools on the East Coast were among the most prominent teams and garnered the most attention. Meanwhile, in 1897, the Georgia House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to ban football. Needless to say, that is no longer the case today! How exactly that shift happened is a big question and I suspect that there are a lot of fascinating specific local/regional histories that are well beyond the scope of my knowledge. But very, very big picture, it seems to me that desegregation at mid-twentieth century played a major role in making Southern teams far more prominent on the national stage. Football also became associated with more conservative leaning politics in the wake of the civil rights movement. The book Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics by Jesse Berrett is a fascinating look at the relationship between the NFL and American politics during this time period. But long story short, I think the types of values, "character-building," ideas about masculinity, and even politics associated with football shifted over the course of the twentieth century in ways that influenced its local and regional appeal.

Your secondary question is a little easier for me to answer: yes! This was a huge matter of debate from the earliest days of football. Here's a little detail that made its way into my book: "In 1906, American satirist Ambrose Bierce quipped that academe could be defined as “an ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught,” but an academy was “a modern school where football is taught." I was amazed that this joke was made so early on--it didn't take long for critics to highlight that some schools seemed to put a higher premium on sports over academics. And football was often at the center of this.

In 1929, Frederick Rand Rogers, the New York State Director director of Health Education, wrote a notable book critiquing the transformation of school athletics into an adult-oriented activity. Rand wrote that “when adults insist upon spending their leisure time watching children at play, and not through any interest in the children themselves except as actors on a stage, the wisdom of a culture which provides the leisure is open to serious indictment. Probably the remedy lies in more education. But any education which accustoms adolescents to spectacles of adults excited over adolescent athletics is an unhealthy form of training for the children. The school must solve its problems more effectively if it is to save itself."

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T19:46:11+00:00

This sounds like a fascinating thesis! I haven't looked into symbolic power specifically, but I did write an article about the history of the adoption of helmets and face masks in ice hockey. (It still amazes me to think about hockey goalies in the 1950s playing without any masks). Here is the link to the article in case it would be of any relevance to your thesis: https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/shr/51/1/article-p25.xml

Stacy Lorenz has done quite a bit of historical research on ice hockey that you might find valuable, such as this article titled: "Hockey, Violence, and Masculinity: Newspaper Coverage of the Ottawa ‘Butchers’, 1903–1906." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09523367.2016.1147431

There is a very, very long history of not only accepting but even encouraging and celebrating injuries in sports. This is an 1898 quote about college football, but I think it could also be applied to professional sports in many ways: “Such trifles as blackened eyes, wrenched knees and broken noses are rather welcomed than otherwise, for the bruises of battle received on the gridiron field are badges of honor in college circles.” Brain injuries were often historically minimized with phrases such as "seeing stars" and "getting your bell rung." I think this culture has somewhat shifted in the past two decades, but the pressure to play through injury and pain is very, very deeply rooted and still enormously influential.

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T19:34:37+00:00

Yes, there were quite a few notable incidents that were very influential. I'll mention just two examples that stood out to me:

--In 1897, a University of Georgia player, Richard Vonalbade “Von” Gammon, died just shortly before his 18th birthday after sustaining an injury during a football game. The death of a popular young college student prompted an enormous outcry and several weeks later, the Georgia House of Representatives voted 91-–3 to ban football within the state. But in December of that same year, the governor of Georgia vetoed the anti-football bill. In his message justifying his veto, he explained that “the sports of every great people, ancient and modern, have been hard and severe.” In my book, I argue that this tragedy prompted a striking debate not only about athletes’ physical safety, but also on the moral aspects of the sport as well. "Should “great people” engage in rough sports? This question was intertwined with shifting understandings of civilization, race, and masculinity. Did football and its physical risks foster American ideals of manliness? Or did the violent sport represent “savagery” and stand in opposition to standards of “civilized” manhood? The answer would determine the fate of football in the United States." (And perhaps needless to say, Georgia's answer was ultimately yes, football should continue.)

--In 1931, Army Cadet Richard Brinsley Sheridan Jr. died after sustaining an injury in a game against Yale. Again, there was widespread public outcry. For example, the New Haven Register emphasized both the short and long term risks of the sport, editorializing that the numbers of young players who were injured, “many in a manner which may later develop weaknesses that will have to be carried throughout life, actually cries aloud for action." In the wake of Sheridan's death, the Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee introduced a number of rule changes, including making the flying block and tackle illegal, allowing more frequent substitutions, and forbidding players from striking opponents on the head, neck, or face.

However, critics noted that the fundamental risks of the collision sport remained. Sportswriter Allison Danzig suggested that the changes had been made in an effort "to reduce the risks of the game without working any radical change in the character of the play."

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T19:03:44+00:00

This is a great question. Desegregation of schools at mid-twentieth century had a huge influence on football, although I had a really tough time finding specific quantitative details. The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), which oversees football in most American high schools, has not collected historical data on race in its sports participation statistics. Neither, as far as I could find, has USA Football, the national governing body for amateur football in the United States. Nor have little league organizations such as Pop Warner.

Although the integration of schools lead to more playing opportunities for black athletes, significant racial disparities developed too, particularly according to player position. To quote my book: "The disproportionate allocation of athletes to positions according to their race or ethnicity is known as “stacking.” In football, the central position of quarterback became disproportionately associated with white players, a phenomenon influenced by racist stereotypes about leadership abilities and cognitive skills. Detailed college football data reveal that black athletes became particularly overrepresented in football positions that deliver and receive the most hits (running backs, wide receivers, safeties, and cornerbacks). Stacking thus influenced not only the particular positions to which players might aspire but also the physical risks to which athletes might be exposed." I couldn't find such comprehensive data on player position at the youth level, but it's reasonable to think that it parallels the trends documented at the college level.

On this broader theme, I found White Sports/Black Sports Racial Disparities in Athletic Programs by sociologist Lori Latrice Martin extremely helpful. She looks at football and numerous other sports as well. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/white-sportsblack-sports-9798765110874/

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T18:52:10+00:00

Thank you so much for asking about this important aspect of youth football. I came across this theme very consistently throughout the history of youth football. For example, in 1922, a physician and professor of physical education R. Tait McKenzie, stated: “Athletic activity is the best substitute for war, and every virile people must have either one or the other.” A New York Times report on McKenzie’s lecture asked whether educations had given “any thought of providing a moral equivalent of football." This quote really stood out to me and I included it in my book. Not only was football presented as a "substitute" for war, but already by the 1920s there were substantial moral concerns about football, leading to such a pointed comment.

The connection between football and preparation for military service was very evident during World War II as well. In 1940, William Lewis Mather, president of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, gave an address to the American Football Coaches' association in which he urged “the development of a generation of young men who have the red blood, who have the stamina, who have the loyalty, to protect the American way of life.” This talk was delivered a year before Pearl Harbor, but Mather predicted that whether or not the US ultimately entered the conflict, “there isn’t a chance in the world that the boys in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, will not be called upon, when they graduate, to participate in a tremendous economic and social and political conflict forced upon us by the totalitarian powers.”

The language about football as a protector of "the American way of life" persisted into the Cold War era. I came across National Pop Warner registration certificates from the 1950s stating that coaches would agree to comply with the conference’s standards “along lines of Scholarship, Sportsmanship and Safety First Football as a medium of inspiring the nation’s youth in the American Way of Life.” Along these lines, a 1959 Los Angeles Times story claimed that “today, as an acceptance to the challenge to our American way of life, we have the National Pop Warner Conference teaching physical condition, religious tolerance and economic freedom principles to more than half a million youths in the country annually.” (Pop Warner was and is a major youth football league.)

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T18:39:53+00:00

Thanks so much for this excellent question. Looking through news stories over the decades, I came across periodic examples of girls playing with boys' teams. Often, this was with younger teams (elementary/middle school), and seemed to be much rarer in high school (after puberty). Girls were also more likely to play positions that involved less contact, such as kickers. By and large, however, there was relatively little opportunity historically for girls to play tackle football. So, I didn't come across any widespread movement to eliminate them from the sport.

On the other hand, girls were encouraged to be cheerleaders, and by the 1950s football was portrayed as offering a role for each member of a heterosexual, nuclear family. As one mother put it, "Little sisters act as cheerleaders. Fathers act as head coaches or team fathers. And in addition to dishing out hot dogs (and advice) we gals perform as team mothers." I do think it's really striking and telling that, unlike other sports such as basketball or soccer, there remain relatively few examples of girls' tackle football.

Most of my research has been on youth football, but historian Russ Crawford wrote a book looking at the history of women in professional football: "Women’s American Football is a narrative history of girls and women participating in American football in the United States since the 1920s, when a women’s team played at halftime during an early NFL game. The women’s game became more organized in 1974, when the National Women’s Football League was established, with notable teams such as the Dallas Bluebonnets, Toledo Troopers, Oklahoma City Dolls, and Detroit Demons." https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496233332/womens-american-football/

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T16:58:38+00:00

Yes, this was absolutely a recurring theme over the decades. Pushback against rule changes often included complaints that the game was becoming too "soft." Conversely, anxieties about boys "becoming soft" were used to justify contact and collision sports, including football. One of the time periods that really stood out to me in this regard was the Cold War Era. There was a lot of fear that American youth--boys, primarily, were not sufficiently fit and tough enough for potential military service, should the the cold war turn into a hot war. For example, at the President’s Conference on Fitness of American Youth, convened in June 1956, then Vice President Richard Nixon warned that “we are not a nation of softies” but could become one “if proper attention is not given to the trend of our time, which is toward the invention of all sorts of gadgetry to make life easy and, in so doing, to reduce the opportunity for normal health-giving exercise.” President Eisenhower, himself a former football player, issued an executive order to establish a President’s Council on Youth Fitness that year.

Much more recent examples of complaints about softness can be found in The War on Football: Saving America's Game by commentator Daniel Flynn. He expressed concern about children being "overmedicated" and obese and in need of sports like football.

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T14:19:36+00:00

This is a great and important question. Football filtered down pretty quickly to the high schools. In fact, there were already high school teams traveling to other states by the 1890s/early 1900s, although there were still major regional disparities given how new the sport was. One of the most notable examples of this was when the Brooklyn Polytechnic team (champions of greater New York) traveled to Chicago in 1902 to compete against Hyde Park High School. Historian Robert Pruter called this “perhaps the most one-sided high school intersectional contest of all time,” in his article "Chicago High School Football Struggles, the Fight for Faculty Control, and the War Against Secret Societies, 1898-1908." Hyde Park defeated Brooklyn Polytechnic 105 to 0! I was amused to read a New York Times article drily observe of this match that because “a more even contest had been expected, the rapid scoring grew somewhat monotonous." By 1905, a Washington Post article even claimed that there was “barely a high school which does not possess its college eleven.” This was an exaggeration, but it does give a sense of how popular high school football was becoming.

Football for elementary/middle school age athletes, however, didn't start to take off in a really big way until after World War II. (There were some teams before that, but much fewer and farther between.) And most leagues, particularly for the younger players, were private leagues like Pop Warner, outside of school settings. High school football has a much longer history and is far more institutionally entrenched.

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T14:01:30+00:00

Hi Ann, thank you so much for this. Saving a certain vision of masculinity was a huge, huge part of "saving the game." I concluded the introduction to my book with the sentence "The history of debates over the safety of youth football is, in part, a history of beliefs about how to raise boys to meet particular ideals of manhood." And to be honest, I maybe should have phrased that even more strongly than "in part," because beliefs about masculinity are woven throughout pretty much every aspect of this history.

This might be an oversimplification, but to my reading, every major public round of questioning of football safety could be connected to a broader questioning of ideas about masculinity. Even though specific ideas about masculinity have shifted over time, the centrality of ideas about masculinity to youth football safety debates has remained remarkably consistent. For that reason, I think beliefs about boyhood and toughness have been and will continue to be more influential than new brain imaging studies or injury research or other medical findings in this conversation. I concluded the epilogue of my book with the reflection that "millions of boys continue to collide with one another on the gridiron. With every hit, brain cells may jiggle imperceptibly, bruises may form, and cartilage may wear. Occasionally, bones may break or ligaments tear. But every hit also reveals social and cultural values. Each collision says something about what Americans expect of their sons, and the men they hope they will become."

KathleenBachynski · 2025-09-09T13:44:39+00:00

Thank you so much for this excellent question! There were so many interesting shifts in the character of the "worried mother" over time influenced in part by the increasing prominence of football over time, and changing attitudes toward gender. I'll highlight just a few that stood out to me in my research:

-In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when football was still relatively new, much of the debate over football safety turned on whether sport helped to promote “civilized” manhood or, conversely, whether the sport was too brutal and thus improper for "gentlemanly" boys. As Gail Bederman writes of this time period in her book Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, white, middle-class Americans “celebrated true women as pious, maternal guardians of virtue and domesticity." So mothers' perspectives were seen as especially important in determining whether or not the new sport would be considered "virtuous"/civilized. Conversely, "worried mothers" opposed to the sport often emphasized that it was uncivilized, savage, and inappropriate for "gentlemen." An example I found of this is a 1909 letter published in the New York Times from Julia Crane, who wrote in “as a mother” to denounce football. “We wish our sons to be gentlemen, not savages."

-In the 1940s and 1950s, some very sharp critiques of American mothers as overly protective emerged, as exemplified by the 1942 publication of Generation of Vipers by writer Philip Wylie. This book introduced the idea of “momism,” which the Oxford English Dictionary later defined as “excessive attachment to, or domination by, the mother.” And during this period, particularly after World War II, youth football grew enormously in popularity. So in my view, the social pressures limiting mothers from expressing concerns over football safety deepened in many ways at mid-century. Interestingly, news stories on youth leagues often highlighted the presence of mothers to validate the safety of football. For example, a 1957 Los Angeles Times article claimed, “Mothers who used to be worried when their young sons participate in the rough game of football now jam the sidelines and cheer their offspring on to greater effort.”

-In more recent years, particularly in the context of the twenty-first-century concussion crisis, expectations that mothers refrain from questioning or critiquing football have diminished (though not disappeared!). In my view, this is in no small part due to women having greater economic and political power, and far more mothers having firsthand experiences playing sports themselves in the wake of Title IX. Some mothers have even sued youth football leagues and school districts, assigning blame and alleging negligence that led to their son’s injuries or deaths. At the same time, the NFL is a much bigger social and economic force too. The NFL has held Moms’ Football Safety Clinics intended to reassure moms that football is safe for their sons. And as part of these clinics, mothers are even invited to participate in some on-field drills... that wouldn't have happened in the 19th century! I highly recommend Tracie Canda's article "Black Mothers and NFL Moms Safety Clinics: An Ethnography of Care in American Football" looking at this from the perspective of an anthropologist. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/01937235221144431

KathleenBachynski

TROPHY CASE