‘If You Don’t Want to Get Hurt, Don’t Play Hockey’: The Uneasy Efforts of Hockey Injury Prevention in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ice hockey is known for its speed, skill and aggression. This paper uses an analyses of injuries in boys’ minor leagues and primary documents to examine competing discourses that surround participant safety which give meaning to broader hockey practices. We problematize a prevailing discourse that preserves the physicality of Canadian hockey and an emerging reverse discourse that prioritizes player safety. Theoretically informed by Foucault’s concepts of discourse, knowledge and power relations, we interpret the relationships between these two competing discursive streams which have created a public controversy, particularly concerning body checking, and intensified a polarizing national debate. Ultimately, we argue that these discourses impact the implementation of progressive injury prevention initiatives in minor hockey and youth sport. Le hockey sur glace est réputé pour être rapide, technique et violent. Cet article utilise une analyse des blessures et documents de ligues mineures masculines afin d’examiner les discours qui circulent à propos de la sécurité des participants et qui sont reliés aux pratiques plus générales du sport. Nous mettons en évidence un discours dominant qui préserve la physicalité du hockey canadien et un discours contraire émergeant qui priorise la sécurité des joueurs. En nous appuyant au niveau théorique sur les concepts foucaldiens de discours, savoir et relations de pouvoir, nous interprétons les relations entre ces deux courants discursifs en compétition qui ont créé une controverse publique, particulièrement en ce qui concerne les mises en échec, et intensifié un débat national polarisé. En bout de ligne, nous avançons que ces discours influencent l’implantation d’initiatives progressistes de prévention des blessures dans le hockey mineur et le sport pour les jeunes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".