Dixon proud to make history for Canada at World Para Ice Hockey Championship

BUFFALO -- Adam Dixon never could have imagined that his hockey career would reach these heights.

When the forward for Canada’s National Para Hockey Team took the ice on Saturday for the team’s opener at the 2025 World Para Ice Hockey Championship at LECOM Harborcenter, he became the leader in para hockey games played with Hockey Canada at 252, breaking the record set by the retired Billy Bridges.

“If I told myself I was going to be playing hockey for the rest of my life and that's going to be my job and I just got to have fun and play hockey, what a wonderful life I'd be living,” Dixon said. “And here I am living it, and to be this far into it, 35 years old, still doing it, that's awesome.”

Diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare type of bone cancer, at 10 years old, Dixon had surgery to remove his right tibia. It was replaced with a donor bone, metal plate and screws.

“You can't control all the stuff around you, but you can control your attitude towards it,” Dixon said. “So I've always been very positive towards everything that's happening, and I think that's kind of been my success story -- just to be positive as you're going through everything.”

Canada coach Russ Herrington first met Dixon nearly a decade ago. He has watched him grow not only as a player, but as a person.

“I think he's always had the joy for the game of hockey in particular,” Herrington said, “but just the amount of care that he shows towards disabled youth and trying to improve the inclusivity of arenas and facilities for a variety of sports, but in particular para hockey, it's just great to have someone around that has that passion and that kind of rubs off on the rest of us.”

Dixon grew up embedded in hockey in Midland, Ontario, about a two-hour drive north of Toronto. In addition to Dixon’s time as a player, his father, Wayne, played Senior-A hockey, so Adam was always at the rink, sometimes as a timekeeper or a referee.

Then, in the blink of an eye, it was taken away.

“I'm no longer the kid who plays hockey, I’m the kid with cancer,” Dixon said. “To kind of have that taken away from me, and then I was in my recovery phase, I was always finding a way to, if I do this, I'd be able to skate again, if I did that, I'd be able to skate again.

“So my rehab was all about how I could play hockey again, and those days never really came. When I found para hockey, that was kind of the light at the end of the tunnel for me, like, OK, now this is what I'm going to achieve. This is what I'm going after.”

He found motivation from former Montreal Canadiens center Saku Koivu. Dixon, a Canadiens fan, was recovering when the then-Montreal captain was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma in September 2001.

“Having Saku Koivu go through the same things I was going through was kind of kind of neat at that time for me,” he said.

Dixon started playing para hockey at 11 years old, but at the time, in his mind, it was a stopgap until he could return to stand-up hockey. He even bought goalie equipment with the thought of playing that position because he could no longer skate the same way as a forward or defenseman.

He played six years with the Elmvale Bears Sledge Hockey Club before earning an invite from the national team when he was 17 years old. That changed his perspective on his future in hockey.

“I was all in. I was very excited,” he said. “All of a sudden, training was very important to me. I was in high school, and I was in gym class and all of a sudden I was focusing all that on all that stuff, and really listening and paying attention, because I could see that that was my new goal.”

Dixon would have reached his milestone game years ago, but he decided to pause his hockey career after the 2018 PyeongChang Paralympic Winter Games in South Korea. He put himself to work with a friend, building his own house.

Though he was happy to be able to do that and pursue other ventures during his hiatus, it wasn’t the same without the camaraderie of hockey.

“To see the fun of the locker room and the guys, yeah, [I] obviously missed playing hockey,” Dixon said, “and that competitive nature of hockey was something that was really hard to find elsewhere in life.”

Three years later, he returned to the national team as a forward after playing his career to that point as a defenseman, and one of the top players at the latter position in the sport.

“He now plays a completely different role with us,” Herrington said. “I think he really enjoys the mentorship of being one of the older players on the team. And I think for any athlete that's grown up in a team setting, it's very difficult to step away because it's hard to replicate that feeling of being in something together with people, something bigger than yourself, and it's hard to replicate that in the workplace and as an entrepreneur.

“… I think he's come back with a gratitude and trying to cherish every moment that maybe he didn't have five or six years ago.”

And though the script Dixon had in mind as a kid didn’t go as planned, he’s grateful for what it became.

“Imagine 10-year-old me not being able to play hockey anymore, just kind of that sad story you could write,” Dixon said. “And then all sudden, here, 35 years old, I've been traveling the world playing hockey. My family's been able to go to four Paralympic Games and watch me succeed and have success on the world stage. What a turn of events that is.”