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In 1926, the Amateur Athletic Union of Canada (AAU of C) wrote that the “physical welfare of its children and adolescents is a matter of the utmost concern in the life and development of a nation.” The rules and norms of ice hockey, however, challenged such a position in the years to come. Indeed, a decade later, an Alberta representative to the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA) put it bluntly: “the conduct of the juvenile and midget competition is not a matter in which the CAHA is interested.” During the early years of WWII, some branches of the CAHA fostered minor hockey, while others left the sport to provincial and local authorities. The Maritimes did not have organized juvenile hockey, featuring player between 16 and 18, until the 1940 season. That same season in the Ottawa Valley Branch the situation was quite different, with a robust minor hockey circuit, including 61 bantam, midget, and juvenile clubs. With so little coordination between branches, administrators sporadically addressed the safety and well-bring of young hockey players in various regions over the next 30 years. This paper examines how shifting social norms in and around sport generated a process of administrative innovation, sparking the reorientation of the CAHA from an organization that cared little about youth hockey, to one that – viewing the players as the future labour for junior, intermediate, and senior squads – steadily increased its attention to the on-ice safety and development of young players.
