Body Factory: Exploiting University Athletes' Healthcare for Profit in the Training Room [Paperback]

A university’s athletic training room is meant to care for and heal college athletes and ensure they are receiving the help they need. Although sports medicine staff members are sincere in their goal of centering athletes and providing the best healthcare possible, organizational constraints affect their approach. Chief among them is the pressure sports medicine staff members feel to keep athletes from profit-generating sports healthy enough to perform.

Body Factoryenters an NCAA Division I athletic training room to examine the disconnect between what the NCAA states as its goal of athlete healthcare and what is actually happening. Kaitlin Pericak conducts observations in this space and interviews injured athletes and sports medicine staff members to show how institutional control over “best interests” often ends up exploiting the individual athlete. The influences at work are part of a neoliberal paradigm that explains why interest in an athlete’s care is greatly diminished once they are injured and can no longer play.

Body Factoryconsiders how race, gender, and health before and after injury are deciding factors in these university training centers. The bureaucratic organization has a goal of maintaining power to generate profit, and Pericak shows this is almost always at the expense of the athlete.“Body Factorymakes a strong case that ‘collegiate jock capitalism’—the incredible pressure within gendered and racialized big-time college athletic departments to protect their power to generate revenue—consistently overwhelms the standard of care that should be provided to college athletes. The organizational issues identified inBody Factoryresult in athletic administrators, coaches, athletic trainers, and even athletes redefining what it means to be ‘injured’—negatively affecting the care college athletes receive. This book is a must-read for anlÃp