History

The Governor General, the 4th Earl of Minto (Sir Gilbert John Murray Kynmond Elliot), donated the ‘Minto Cup’ in 1901 for a challenge competition to be awarded to the top Senior ‘amateur’ team among the championship teams of the ‘Senior’ leagues across Canada. Within three years, challengers included both ‘amateur’ and ‘under-the-table’ professional teams.

By 1910, the Minto Cup was taken over by the newly emerging West Coast professional league and became symbolic of lacrosse preeminence in the professional ranks, with the New Westminster Salmonbellies dominating professional play at the time. When the West Coast professional league ended in 1924, the Minto Cup was put into storage and, for a time, ‘lost and forgotten’.

The Minto Cup was transferred to the Canadian Lacrosse Association in the early 1930s and, in 1937, was designated as the top Canadian Junior A box lacrosse championship award. The first Junior A team to capture the Minto Cup championship was the Orillia Terriers, defeating the Vancouver Burrard Bluebirds. Since that time, with a brief interlude during the war years (1943, 1944, 1945) and the Covid-19 pandemic (2020, 2021), the Minto Cup has remained the pre-eminent symbol of Junior A lacrosse excellence across Canada.