After a career that spanned nearly two decades, Neil Doddridge is being recognized as one of the best Canadian lacrosse athletes to ever play the sport.
In July, Doddridge was named to the 2025 class of the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame. In November, the West Vancouver resident will travel to Caledonia, Ont. for a formal induction ceremony.
Over a professional career spanning 1991 to 2005, he had success with multiple teams in the Major Series Lacrosse (eastern Canada), Western Lacrosse Association and National Lacrosse League.
Doddridge, who's now 55 years old, has a career record of 461 regular season points and 199 in the playoffs, for a total of 660 points.
After 20 years retired from professional play, Doddridge still holds the record for the most consecutive Mann Cup wins: six in a row. He then won a seventh following a one-year dry spell.
Those trophies include two with the Brampton Excelsiors (1992-93), three with the Six Nations Chiefs (1994-96) and two with the Victoria Shamrocks (1997 and 1999).
Doddridge's first international play was with the 1988 U-19 Field Lacrosse Team Canada, followed by two stints with Team Scotland and Team Canada in 2002 at the senior level.
But Doddridge’s stunning lacrosse career almost ended before it began.
When he was a teenager, Doddridge was also an aspiring skater, playing NCAA hockey for Oswego State University in New York, 1989-1990.
The two sports clashed when he found out that a lacrosse training camp for the national team landed right in the middle of junior hockey playoffs.
“We couldn’t quit on our junior hockey teammates,” he said. But that wasn’t good enough for the lacrosse coaching staff. Doddridge and his friend Randy were both cut from the team.
“So you have two 18-year-olds come out of the meeting – I’m crying, he’s crying,” Doddridge recalled.
His dad, a 250-pound Harley Davidson rider with a handlebar mustache, said that he had to take a quick bathroom break before they left.
It wasn’t until after his father’s death many years later that Doddridge learned that his father had a few words with the coach instead.
“I think he might have grabbed the guy,” Doddridge said. Three weeks later, the boys were back on the lacrosse team.
Lacrosse playoffs in the '90s were 'wars'
During the height of his playing career in the ’90s, Doddridge described some of the playoff games as “wars.”
The Mann Cup finals in ’95 – when his Six Nation Chiefs beat the New Westminster Salmonbellies in Queens Park – was probably the roughest series ever played, he said.
“We had four bench-clearing brawls that lasted between 20 minutes and half an hour,” Doddridge said. “They just would go on – there was nothing stopping them.”
In play, he described himself as a guard dog.
“If anybody went near [my top players], then I was right there,” Doddridge said.
Apart from the rougher aspects of the sport, Doddridge said lacrosse is a Creator’s game, and has deep respect for its Indigenous roots.
“It’s a medicine game. The First Nations people invented it,” he said. “It’s good for the soul.”
After coaching national teams in Finland and Switzerland from 2015 to 2024, Doddridge is now the lacrosse director for Avenue Sports Management, an agency that helps youth athletes get sports scholarships to universities.
Doddridge, who has lived in West Vancouver for the past 20 years, praised the new state-of-the-art lacrosse facility built by the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), and said he plans to help coach there.
“Hopefully we’ll get junior lacrosse back to prevalence on the reservation,” he said.
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