The American College of Sports Medicine's Oral History Collection

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has more than fifty thousand members, is headquartered in Indianapolis, and is the world's largest and most influential sports medicine and exercise science organization. ACSM was founded in 1954, and its mission is to educate and empower professionals and the public to advance the science and practice of health and human performance.1In my role as ACSM historian and chair of ACSM's Office of Museum, History, and Archives from 1993 until 2017, I authored Out of Many, One: A History of the American College of Sports Medicine (1995), and in 2006 I began a series of oral history interviews that continued through 2016. These interviews were all professionally video recorded and edited by Healthy Learning, a publisher in Monterey, California, and published in a ten-volume DVD set under the title Distinguished Leaders in Sports Medicine and Exercise Science. It is “a historical project capturing interviews with ACSM's past presidents and leaders of the College.”2 The intent was to provide a resource for anyone who would like to know more about the individuals who have had a noteworthy impact on sports medicine and exercise science. These interviews were conducted at ACSM's annual meetings in Denver, New Orleans, Indianapolis, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco, San Diego, and Boston, and at ACSM's Health & Fitness Summit in Austin, Anaheim, and Las Vegas.I interviewed 133 individuals, and the current ACSM historian, Sean Walsh, interviewed ten more. The total list of 143 interviews includes many notable exercise physiologists such as Jack Wilmore, David Costill, and Per-Olaf Astrand; public health experts, including Steve Blair and Ralph Paffenbarger; and sports medicine physicians Allan Ryan, Stanley Herring, Lyle Micheli, and Gary Wadler, among others. Overall, the individuals interviewed represent a variety of fields and expertise in head and spine injuries, chronic disease prevention, exercise oncology, orthopedics, health education, gerontology, health promotion, sports injuries, psychology, pediatrics, lifestyle medicine, public health, epidemiology, health communications, diet and nutrition, fitness, kinesiology, physical education, biomechanics, college and professional sports team physicians, and physiologists, among others.The entire oral history collection is available free of charge on ACSM's YouTube channel listed as “ACSM's Distinguished Leaders Series.” If you click on any one individual in the group and then click on “View Full Playlist,” you will be able to watch any of the interviews. They are on average about thirty minutes long. We discuss a full range of topics but focus on the subject's education and training, their major work and contributions, and their role in ACSM. The collection is very valuable for sport history scholars interested in the history of exercise, health, physical culture, kinesiology, training, sports medicine, exercise science, college and professional sports, and so forth. Several of these important historical figures have since passed away, making the interviews even more important.