Who Are the Best Jr. A Lacrosse Teams of All Time?

Who are the best teams ever in Jr. A lacrosse? That is the guiding question of this article. 

If you are reading this, you likely already have an answer ready. Feel free to leave your opinions in the comments below or on social media, I would love to hear your thoughts. 

Trying to decide on the best team is of course difficult. Going back decades, there is very little historical film, and there are plenty of variables that come into play across eras that make comparison difficult, like rules, competition, and even global events. 

The one thing we do have across eras is statistics, preserved now through the Lacrosse Bible, which is the new internet home of the legendary Wamp’s Bible, which as far as I know is one of the only available collections of Canadian lacrosse statistics. The bible was curated by Larry “Wamp” Power and is now in control of the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame.

The bible includes PDF copies of every OJLL season going back to 1939, and every BCJALL season going back to 1959 (the BCJALL operated under different names until 1999). The first few years of the data were a little inconsistent, but after about 1947, the data is pretty solid. RMLL data is much harder to find, and my database only goes back as far as 2009. 

The Minto Cup has been awarded to Jr. aged teams since about 1937, so we will ignore all the Minto trophies won before then.

The only season missing is the 1969 OJLL season. We know that Oshawa won that year, but the statistics are missing. Unfortunately there is not much I can do here. 

Wamp’s PDF’s were a gift to future researchers and anyone who cares about the sport in Canada, and they follow a very specific format. Each team is listed by standings in the regular season, including wins, losses, goals for and goals against. Then the playoff results are displayed, followed by individual stats. Occasionally, they would feature personal annotations, presumably from Wamp himself. 

Check out the asterisk on this one, describing the 1953 Minto Cup!

I recently compiled all of these statistics into one database, with the goal of comparing teams across eras and years. The full database can be found in a google sheet here. 

Who Are the Dynasties?

Let’s start big picture with a look at the many dynasties that have crossed through Canadian Jr. A, using the commonly accepted practice that a team has to win three championships to be considered a dynasty. For the sake of this exercise, let’s take teams that have won three provincial championships in a row. 

This feat has been accomplished 10 times in the history of the OJLL, at least in the span of the data included in the bible. The first team to do it was the St. Catharines Athletics, who won four straight championships from 1947-1950. The last team to do it was the 2008-2010 Orangeville Northmen. 

Below is a list of every team to ever win three or more OJLL titles in a row. 

Team	Years	Minto Titles
St. Catharines Athletics	1947-1950	1947, 1950
Long Branch Monarchs	1953-1955	1955
Brampton Excelsiors	1956-1959	1957, 1958, 1959
Oshawa Green Gaels	1963-1969	1963-1969
Peterborough P.C.O’s*	1971-1975	1972-1975
Peterborough Century 21**	1981-1983	1982, 1983
Peterborough Maulers	1986-1989	1986,1987,1989
St. Catharines Athletics	2001-2003	2001, 2002
Six Nations Arrows	2004 – 2007	2007
Orangeville Northmen	2008 – 2010	2008, 2009

The greatest dynasty in the history of Canadian Jr. A lacrosse was the Oshawa Green Gaels of the 1960’s. They won seven straight provincial championships from 1963-1969, and won the Minto Cup each year as well. No other team has won the Minto more than four times in a row and it is hard to imagine any team ever coming close to a run like that again. 

Those teams featured some legends of the sport, but also some legends of our country itself. Check out the name third from the bottom on the 1964 Green Gaels.

In the data available, six teams reached dynasty status in BC, including the 1964-1968 New Westminster Salmonbellies who improbably lost the Minto Cup each year to the aforementioned Green Gaels. 

Team	Years	Minto?
New Westminster Salmonbellies	1964-1968	0
Richmond Roadrunners	1971-1975	1971
Burnaby Cablevision	1977-1979	1977-1979
Esquimault Legion	1985-1988	1988
Burnaby Lakers	1996-2007	1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005
Coquitlam Adanacs	2009 – 2015, 2017-2019	2010, 2016, 2018

The second greatest dynasty in Canadian history was likely the Burnaby Lakers, who won 11 straight BC championships from 1996-2007, winning five Minto Cups in that span. They were the last BC team to win the cup in back-to-back years after accomplishing that feat in 2004 and 2005. 

The next closest run of dominance was Peterborough throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. Notice I did not say Lakers, because the Peterborough organization cycled through quite a few names in these years, including the Peterborough P.C.O’s, the Peterborough Gray Munros, the Peterborough Century 21, the Peterborough James Gang and the Peterborough Maulers. 

There were basically three separate dynasties in this span, but the most dominant was the P.C.O’s / Gray Munros, who won the OJLL from 1971-1975, and the Minto Cup from 1972-1975. More on that group later. 

The last team to win four straight championships was the Six Nations Arrows, who won Ontario every year from 2004-2007. They won the Minto in 2007 and are the only team to win the OJLL four straight times in the 2000’s.

It’s worth noting as well that we are currently in the midst of a dynastic run for the Coquitlam Adanacs, who won 7 straight BCJALL titles from 2009-2015, three more from 2017-2019, and look to be on their way to a third straight this year. 

The one year they missed in 2016? The Adanacs rebounded in the Minto Cup after losing the BCJALL to Delta, and became the second team in history (2006 Peterborough Lakers were the first) to win the Minto despite losing their provincial championship. 

Dynasties have been more common in the RMLL, with the Miners in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, and the Edmonton Eclipse from 2007-2009. The only dynasty in my data however was the then Okotoks Raiders, who won three straight from 2017-2019. 

Town by Town

One of the great things about looking through the historical data are the variety of team names you find. But that can make it confusing to group the teams by the actual town they are from (such as the Peterborough teams listed above). To help mitigate this problem, I grouped the teams by town, and assembled some of the results from there. 

One important note here is that Victoria competed under the Esquimault banner for several years, including most of the Gait’s tenure. I am counting that as Victoria for this exercise. 

Also of note, though BC teams competed in the Minto Cup prior to 1959, the BCJALL officially traces its history back to 1959 in what was then the Inter-City Junior A Lacrosse League. These provincial titles are all within that span.

Town	Provincial Championships
Burnaby	19
Peterborough	13
New Westminster	13
Coquitlam	13
Victoria	11
Orangeville	11
Whitby	10
St. Catharines	9
Six Nations	9
Brampton	9

In total, the town with the most championships depends on where exactly you want to draw the line. Burnaby has the most provincial championships in total, while Peterborough has the most Jr. A titles of any Ontario town, with 13 OJLL championships. 

Though that would count Oshawa and Whitby as separate towns, which would ignore the fact that both towns have fed into one consolidated Jr. A program for most of their history. Oshawa has 7 titles under the Green Gaels banner, while Whitby has 11 of their own under the Warriors (and Red Wings in 1961) banner. If you count “Durham” as one town, they would have the most in Ontario.

The future of Jr. A lacrosse changed significantly in 1990 and again in 1991 with the introduction of two powerhouse organizations. Six Nations made their debut under the Braves name in 1990, before changing to the Arrows name in 1991. Meanwhile, the Orangeville Northmen made their introduction to the league in 1991. Since then, these two organizations have won a combined 20 provincial championships, and the two programs sit first and second in the standings this season. 

Also near the top of the rankings is St. Catharines, where the 2025 team will host the Minto Cup, and will look to win the city’s first Canadian Championship since 2003. The Athletics brand is one of the most successful and enduring in Canadian history, with the organization competing and winning under that brand for close to a century. 

In BC, Burnaby teams have won a combined 19 championships, with the 11 won under the Lakers name and several more under the Burnaby Cablevision name in the 1970s. New Westminster has won 13 titles in that span, as has Coquitlam. Victoria based teams have won 11 BC championships. 

So Who Was the Best Team?

As we begin to narrow down towards a specific team, let’s start with some filters. For a team to be considered, they had to have won the Minto Cup. 

From there, I decided to get aggressive, and filter for teams that have both won the Minto Cup and have gone undefeated in the regular season. That cut it down to just eight teams. Somewhat surprisingly, there have been five teams who have gone undefeated and not won the Minto Cup, most recently the 2023 Orangeville Northmen. 

Of those eight teams, all of them came from the dynasties discussed above, beginning with the 1968 Oshawa green Gaels and following with several of the dominant Peterborough Programs of the 1970’s and 1980’s. 

From there, I looked into each individual season, and how each team did in the postseason. All of the undefeated regular season teams dropped at least one game on the road to the Minto Cup. The 1986 and 1987 Peterborough teams made it out of Ontario unscathed, but both dropped games at the Minto Cup before winning the trophy in the end. 

Only one team has ever gone fully undefeated, and must be considered the greatest team in the history of the OJLL if not of all Canadian Jr. A lacrosse, and that is the 1974 Peterborough P.C.O’s. That team also had the highest goal differential of any OJLL team in history, finishing with an astounding +362 goal differential. 

Led by leading scorer Paul Evans (who would go on to play in the NHL), the P.C.O’s scored 21.64 goals per game and allowed just 8.71 goals against. Only one other team has even had a differential above 300 goals, so the P.C.O’s were easily the most dominant team. 

This group has also been immortalized in a book, entitled “Peterborough’s Perfect Season: With Benny and His Jets,” which can be found on Amazon. 

The second best team statistically is likely the 1998 Burnaby Lakers. They were the only BC team to ever win the Minto Cup, the BCJALL playoffs. and complete a regular season with no losses, finishing a perfect 25-0. They did lose one game to the Six Nations Arrows in the Minto Cup that season, but won the series 4-1. They scored 15.3 goals per game and allowed just 5.88, good for a +236 goal differential on the season. 

They were led by future NLL legend Kaleb Toth, who won the scoring title by more than 20 points, finishing with a whopping 69 goals and 130 points in 24 games in BC. They were also backstopped by goaltender Anthony Cosmo, an Ontario native who would go on to become one of the great goaltenders in history. 

The other teams to have won the Minto Cup while going undefeated in the regular season are the 1968 Green Gaels, the 1972 P.C.O’s, the 1981 Century 21, the 1986 Maulers, the 1987 Maulers and the 2016 Adanacs. 

The 2016 Adanacs went undefeated, lost the provincial championship, then won the Minto. That’s one of the oddest collections of facts in the sport’s history. 

On a per game basis, the best goal differential in history was actually the 1990 St. Catharines Athletics, who beat teams by an average of 13.3 goals per game. They lost just one game on the season in Ontario, and would defeat the Richmond Outlaws 2-1 in the Minto Cup Finals. 

That team was led by the three-headed monster of the brothers Kilgour in Darris and Rich, along with Randy Mearns. Darris led the league in scoring that season by 32 points, finishing with 153 points in 19 games, in what has to be one of the best individual seasons ever. 

The most dominant champion this century could have been the 2007 Six Nations Arrows, who actually didn’t lose a regular season game. They did tie one, and they lost three combined games in three rounds of Ontario playoffs. Six Nations had four of the six first-team all-stars that year, including the league’s two leading scorers in Shawn Evans and Cody Jamieson. 

And lastly, the two one-loss Minto Champions of this century from BC were the 2004 Burnaby Lakers and the 2010 Adanacs. The Adanacs did drop one game in the BCJALL finals that year before an undefeated Minto, while the Lakers didn’t drop a single game in the playoffs. 

In summary, there seems to be little debate about the best team ever, but there are certainly plenty of arguments for a number of teams who are close. 

Who do you think is the best team and why? Let us know in the comments below!