Caught Between a Culture of Risk and Precaution: The Inevitability of Deviance in Concussion Safety for Coaches in Minor League Hockey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historically, getting your bell rung, playing through a throbbing headache or returning to the ice after a hard check into the boards was viewed as a badge of honor. However, since the emergence of the concussion crisis in sport, we have seen a shift to a culture of caution and prioritization of brain health. At the youth level, youth concussion legislation, such as Rowan’s Law in Ontario, has been implemented to help safeguard young athletes in sports. However, violent play and body contact remain instrumental to sports. Therefore, an impossible tension emerges between the culture of risk and precaution. At the center of this tension are coaches, the adult actors responsible for ensuring youth athletes’ safety. This paper analyzes interviews of 12 Minor League Hockey coaches in Ontario about their attitudes and responses to Rowan’s Law to understand (a) what strategies coaches employed to navigate the tension between the culture of risk and culture of precaution and (b) how they made sense of these strategies while straddling two cultures that are incompatible with each other. The analysis of this paper demonstrates that as coaches attempt to inhabit both the culture of risk and precaution, they use rhetorical strategies to excuse and justify their actions regarding and perceptions about concussion safety. Ultimately, coaches are destined for an inevitability of deviance in a sporting culture that expects coaches to be responsible for youth safety while valorizing risk, toughness, and performance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".