Being an NHL On-Ice or Off-Ice Official requires lots of training and patience. It can also be a roller coaster of a journey. You don’t simply wake up one morning and get a call from The NHL to come be one of their officials. No, there’s a lot that goes into it. 

Jim Doyle knows this all too well. His career as a hockey official goes back several decades and he’s experienced all the ups and downs that have come with this job path. He’s worked across several levels of the minor leagues, spent time in The NHL and even been part of the fabled 1980 Winter Olympics. 

“I was hired by The NHL back in the summer of 1980,” Doyle explained. “At that point in time, they had an Officials Training Program that allowed us to work in the minor leagues. Back then, the leagues we worked in were the American Hockey League, the old International Hockey League, the Central Hockey League and they also had us do some games in the Western Hockey League, the Junior League and the OHL. 

“I was in that program for four years. In the very beginning, Scotty Morrison was the Officiating Director and between the second and third year, John McCauley came off the ice because of injury and took over that program for the last two years that I was involved. What initiated that, I think, probably was my experience working the Olympics in Lake Placid in 1980.”

For those wondering about how Doyle got into the program, it wasn’t as straightforward as him applying and being accepted. Instead, it was his work in the minors and at the aforementioned 1980 Winter Olympics. 

“They reached out to me,” Doyle recalled. “I had already been working in the American Hockey League as a Linesman since the ’77-’78 season. At Training Camp for the American Hockey League, they always have representatives there from The NHL. So, I think between my experience in the American Hockey League as an official and the spotlight of working the Olympics, that certainly catapulted me.

“You may or may not be aware of the fact that I did the game at Madison Square Garden between the USA and the Soviet Union before they went up (to Lake Placid). There were no officials assigned to that game and by coincidence, I wound up refereeing that game in Madison Square Garden that Saturday afternoon back in February of 1980.”

In case you don’t recall, Team USA and the Soviet Union played an exhibition game a couple weeks before the now iconic “Miracle on Ice” game. Of course, the exhibition match went very differently from the rematch a few weeks later. This matchup took place on February 9, 1980, and was won by the Soviet squad 10-3. 

“I was a local official with USA hockey back then,” said Doyle. “I’d gone to a couple of national championships, which kind of pole vaulted me into the opportunity to work at the pro level. USA Hockey had, back then, National Sports Festivals. So I’d worked the National Sports Festival out in Colorado Springs and one in Syracuse. Based on those experiences, I was selected to work a pre-Olympic tournament in December of 1979. 

“Hal Trumble was the Executive Director of USA Hockey back then and based on my efforts there, as a linesman at that point in time, I was selected to work the Olympics in 1980 in Lake Placid. So that’s how it came to fruition, working that pre-Olympic tournament and being observed by Hal Trumble. 

“I was appointed to work at Lake Placid and was asked by Walter Yaciuk, who was the USA Hockey National Coach-In-Chief and also was a liaison for the Soviet Union team when they came into The US for international competition, if I wanted to watch the game at Madison Square Garden and go up with him to Lake Placid? I said, ‘That would be great, but you just gotta check with the national office to make sure it’s okay.’ 

“It was confirmed I could do it. So, I went to Madison Square Garden. I had my equipment with me, ’cause I was going up on a bus afterwards. And lo and behold, there were no officials assigned at all to that game. No referee, no linesmen. It was a three-official system. I was in Madison Square Garden and I was paged over the loudspeaker to come to the Ranger locker room. I was then told there were no officials and that they needed me to referee the game. 

“Fortunately, two other members of our local referees association were in the building. So, the three of us jumped on the ice and did that game between the Soviet Union and USA, where, I believe, the score was 10-3 on that Saturday afternoon, just prior to going to the Olympics.”

Quite the turn of events. One minute, Doyle is getting ready to watch an exhibition game and the next minute, he’s on the ice as the referee. Sometimes life just comes at you that fast and in this instance, he was able to be part of a rather famous event. Lucky for him, his experiences to that point helped him “go with the flow.”

“The first thing you realize is that you’re in a situation that you haven’t really been prepared for,” Doyle recalled. “And the most important thing to do is make sure that you officiate the game and everything is fair. The other portion of it is that player safety is the most important thing. Obviously, the game wound up, very quickly, the Soviet Union got out front. When you’re out there in the middle of the game, you’re just focused on doing what you do as an official, which is doing the very best you can to make sure the game is called fairly and so forth. 

“Other than the one hit where one of the USA hockey players got hurt, nothing else happened in that game that was very aggressive. And that was just a collision between two players. It wasn’t even a stick foul or something that was a penalty that needed to be called. I was just in the right place, right time to wind up on the ice. 

“But that pole vaulted me into going to the Olympics and with the confidence that I gained in working that game, it really put me in a position to have a successful tournament in Lake Placid during the two-and-a-half weeks of the competition I was up there.”

And what a tournament it was at Lake Placid! It’s so legendary that, even 45+ years later, it’s still talked about all the time. Doyle may have been the referee during the exhibition match, but he was a linesman during the actual tournament. He worked through the initial rounds and then was assigned to “the other” semi-final game between Sweden and Finland. 

An interesting wrinkle, though, was that during the actual tournament, Doyle wasn’t allowed to work any Team USA games. “At that point in time, you could not work any games involving your country,” Doyle explained. “So I did not work any games that the US played in. But I did a number of the games that the Soviet Union participated in.”

Beyond his game assignments, Doyle also had the challenge of working with officials with whom he didn’t have a prior relationship; therefore, he didn’t know their tendencies. Language was also a bit of a problem, as there were roughly 28 different officials from all over the world assigned to the tournament.

“I think there were 28 of us who were part of the Olympic contingent,” Doyle recounted. “Officials from Japan, Romania, Germany, the Soviet Union, obviously Canada, Sweden and Finland. You form a bond over the course of those two-and-a-half weeks, ’cause you’re not paired together consistently with any one partner, whether it be another linesperson or a referee. 

“One of the challenges in any type of international competition is the language barrier. There’s always an interpreter in the locker room before and after the game or during periods if something needs to be discussed at length. It was a different time (back then). (There was a lot) of tension throughout the world, in reference to politics. But when those teams are on the ice and they’re playing, that’s all you’re focused on as an official. Those two teams that are out there and making sure you do the very best you can to make sure it’s done properly.”

The language barrier can be a tricky problem to overcome, even if the primary language is that of hockey. 

“Most of the communication is body language,” Doyle explained. “As a linesman, you’re just calling the offside, the icings and those types of situations. When there were penalty situations, you read the body language and make a determination as to what the referee’s trying to do. If there was some kind of delay or confusion, you got together. There was always an interpreter in the penalty box at that point in time, because again, you’ve got players who speak different languages and you could have three officials that could even be (from) three different countries. 

“There’s gotta be a common denominator. And the common denominator back then was English and German. Those were the two languages that the officials had to be comfortable in, either one of those two languages.”Talk about having to be adaptable! Different crews, different languages and oh, the entire world watching. Well, Doyle clearly did well enough because he was then invited to be part of The NHL’s Officiating Program and that brought with it its own set of challenges. 

“Initially, we went to Toronto to the NHL Training Camp,” Doyle recalled. “At that point in time, it was probably four to five days. So you’re sitting with the existing NHL officials who are on staff. There were five of us who were invited to participate in that program back in 1980-81. When that training camp was done, you got your assignments from The NHL. Quite honestly, they started me in the Western Hockey League and then I worked my way back into working games in the Central Hockey League and the IHL. I don’t believe I worked my first game in the American Hockey League as a referee until the second half of the ’80-’81 season.”

“In respect to training, once the season was underway, there would be officiating managers, which is what they call them now, we called them supervisors back then, who would observe your games,” Doyle continued. “You would get a pre-game meeting with your supervisors and then a post-game. In some cases, they would travel with you for the course of the weekend. So what you might have done on Friday night, you had a chance to make some adjustments on Saturday. And the same thing would apply. The adjustments that you did or didn’t make on Saturday, when they were with you on Sunday, were another opportunity to learn and to grow as a referee at that level of the competition.

“Going back to that point in time, in my development as an official, there were very few leagues that you worked with or worked in that you had any kind of direct supervision. So having the opportunity to work with those officiating coaches or managers in The National Hockey League back then in the early eighties was a terrific opportunity to learn and to listen to them and to take their insight and apply it and so forth. So it was a great opportunity. It was a great experience for me to travel all throughout North America, obviously in Canada and the United States, to work those games in all four different leagues that I had mentioned before.”

It is that wealth of experience that has allowed Doyle to remain in the game for as long as he has. Even now, in 2025, he is still active in The NHL as an Off-Ice Official while also serving as an Officiating Manager/Supervisor in The AHL and ECHL. And as you can see, while the game continues to evolve, so too do the challenges that are faced by those who are tasked with ensuring the game runs as smoothly as possible.