The National Lacrosse League Hall of Fame is a very important place. It contains players, coaches, GMs, journalists, and officials that have had a significant effect on the league during their careers. However, it’s also not a place at all, in the sense that there is no specific location associated with it. You can’t go and visit the NLL Hall of Fame like you can the Ontario Lacrosse Hall of Fame (in St. Catharine’s, Ontario), the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame (in New Westminster, BC), or the National [American] Lacrosse Hall of Fame in Sparks, MD.

It also seems to have fallen off the radar of the league itself, since only one group of people has been inducted into the Hall in the last ten years.

The list of players in the NLL Hall of Fame is, as expected, the best of the best. Paul and Gary Gait. Tom Marechek. Jim Veltman. Dallas Eliuk. More recently, Colin Doyle, John Grant, Jr., Shawn Williams, and John Tavares. As I mentioned, there are non-players as well: league founders Chris Fritz and Russ Cline, legendary coach Les Bartley, GM Johnny Mouradian, writers Tom Borrelli and Neil Stevens, coaches Chris Hall and Terry Sanderson, and officials Roy Condon and Bill Fox.

There is frequently talk in podcasts and blogs and such about which players should or should not be in the Hall, which of the recently-retired players will be inducted, and often which of the still-active players will get in once their playing time is done. But today I’m going to look at the non-players who at the very least deserve consideration to join this elite group. I’ve split it up into four groups: Owners, GMs and Coaches, Broadcasters, and Officials.

I"m not going to go over each individual in great detail or this article would go on forever, but I’ll talk a little about why I think each one belongs in the Hall. Even still, this started to get long, so I split it into two articles.

Owners

The owners category is a bit weird since some teams don’t have a specific owner. Calgary, Vancouver, Philadelphia, and others are not owned by a person or a group of people, they are each owned by huge sports conglomerates who own other sports teams in the same city (and in some cases, other cities). The owner is usually the guy that hires the President and GM, and then those people hire staff, coaches, and players. There are some cases where the owner literally does nothing else for the team than that. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt Terry Pegula or Stan Kroenke could name a single player on the Bandits or Mammoth, because they run a handful of other teams that likely make them more money. But that’s not always true. In the cases below, these owners cared enough about their teams to take on the GM role themselves, but I think each brings even more to the table than that.

Curt Styres

Styres was the owner of the old Rochester Knighthawks and when they left Rochester, he was very vocal about the fact that he tried to make it work there but eventually had little choice but to move. He took the team to Halifax and gave them a new name and logo which reflected his own Indigenous heritage.

Before the team’s first season, he and a group of players and staff paddled canoes all the way from McKenzie Creek in Six Nations, Ontario along Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River to Halifax, a distance of over 2,000 km. There was some coverage of this trip in the lacrosse media but it wasn’t loud and in-your-face. I don’t know how much coverage it got in Halifax. I say this because it seemed to me that it was an important thing to Curt and to the team, but it wasn’t a media thing. He didn’t use it as a photo-op. This was Curt Styres literally bringing the team to Halifax in an amazing and unique way.

The Thunderbirds have flourished in Halifax. Part of that is because of the team’s success but part of it is also Styres being a hands-on type of owner and embedding the team in the city.

Jamie Dawick

Jamie Dawick took over ownership of the Toronto Rock in 2009, and the Rock went to the Championship in each of the next two seasons, winning in 2011. They haven’t won a title since then, though they got to the finals in 2015. But while most owner’s legacies are measured by the number of Championships won, Dawick’s includes something else: the Toronto Rock Athletic Centre.

The TRAC is an impressive box lacrosse-specific facility that opened in 2013. It houses not only two full-sized box lacrosse rinks, one of which has seating, but also the Toronto Rock offices, a snack bar, and a lacrosse equipment store. The Rock practice there weekly during the season and hold a few pre-season games there every year. Other NLL teams practice there as well, the Oakville Rock of MSL (both Senior A and Senior B) play their home games at the TRAC, and many local youth leagues make use of the facility as well. It has also hosted a couple of NLL Entry Drafts and NLL Combines. There are probably many players in the NLL today who grew up playing games at the TRAC, and that number will steadily increase in the future.

Many people talk about “growing the game”, but Jamie Dawick is living it. He spent millions of his own dollars to build this facility which has helped immeasurably in growing the game in this area.

Broadcasters

All four of these guys have been NLL broadcasters for many years, and all four have won the Tom Borrelli award for Media Person of the Year; Jenner and Elliott have each won it twice. All four are excellent broadcasters but in a nutshell, Rybczynski and Gurtler should be in the HOF because of their incredible longevity (if you’ve watched a Knighthawks or Bandits game in the last twenty years, you’ve definitely heard them), and Jenner and Elliott should be in because of their podcasting and outreach, growing the game both inside and outside of the broadcast booth (if you’ve listened to a lacrosse podcast in the last ten years, you’ve very likely heard one of them).

Craig Rybczynski

Ripper has been the voice of the Knighthawks for well over two decades – and I’m talking about both the original Knighthawks (1995–2019) and the new Knighthawks (2020-present). Ripper started broadcasting in 2001 and called 415 straight games, home and away, for the two different franchises over the next 24 years. His streak only ended because his son was playing in a college basketball playoff game and Craig wanted to be there for him. Then he was right back in the play-by-play chair the next week. I don’t know the numbers, but Ripper called a lot of those games by himself, doing both play-by-play and color commentary.

John Gurtler

As much as Rybczynski is the voice of the Knighthawks, Gurtler is the voice of the Bandits. Similar to Ripper, Gurtler has also called over 400 straight Bandits games since his debut in 2004, and also travels with the team to Bandits away games to broadcast those on Buffalo radio. His distinctive voice and legendary “scoooooooooores” calls have been entertaining NLL fans, Bandits fans or otherwise, for over twenty years.

Teddy Jenner

Teddy is not only a former first-round draft pick and NLL player, but has also been a writer, in-arena host, colour commentator, and play-by-play announcer for several different teams, and has been one of the key play-by-play guys on TSN broadcasts for a few years. He’s been heard on so many broadcasts that I’ve heard him described as “the voice of the league”.

He’s also the man behind Off the Crossebar (“Crossebar has an ‘e’, it’s a lacrosse pun”), probably the longest-running lacrosse podcast anywhere. It started off as a radio show in Vancouver way back in 2011 (even had me on as a guest back in 2013 or 2014!), and moved to a podcast a couple of years later. Teddy did the show himself for many years before bringing Pat Gregoire in as co-host a few years ago. Teddy’s passion and love for lacrosse, not to mention his knowledge of the game, comes through in all of his work.

Jake Elliott

Like his good friend Teddy Jenner, Jake has been calling NLL games and making podcasts for well over a decade. He was a scout for the Minnesota Swarm and started up a podcast about them called Inside the Hive in 2012. When he was later hired as a play-by-play man for his hometown Vancouver Stealth, he brought the podcast idea with him, creating a new show called Stealth Classified. He changed the format to a general box lacrosse podcast a few years later, renaming it Lacrosse Classified, and it’s still one of the top lacrosse podcasts. He’s also been a broadcaster for a few different teams – last season, he was broadcasting for both the Vancouver Warriors and the Las Vegas Desert Dogs. Also similar to Teddy, Jake’s love for lacrosse is evident when you hear him talk about it.

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Coming in Part II: Coaches, GMs, and officials.