Building a leader: Blues’ Jake Neighbours became an ‘old soul’ on a life journey filled with adversity
ST. LOUIS — Jake Neighbours was 8 years old, playing spring hockey with a regional all-star team in Western Canada called the Mustangs.
The coach, Pat Seeley, was introducing a new player to Neighbours and his teammates.
“Hey, everybody, this is so-and-so, and he’s a Mustang now,” Seeley recalls saying.
Seeley stopped speaking, and Neighbours, without hesitation, stepped to the front of the locker room.
“He walks right up to the kid and says, ‘Welcome to the Mustangs. My name is Jake,'” Seeley remembers. “He sticks his hand out and shakes his hand. I couldn’t believe it. That just doesn’t happen at that age. From that point forward, I was like, ‘This kid is going places.'”
It’s no surprise to those who’ve known Neighbours since childhood that people around the St. Louis Blues call him “an old soul.” It was clear when he arrived in St. Louis at 19 that he was mature beyond his years. At 23, it’s even more pronounced. He seems equally comfortable in conversations with Blues coach Jim Montgomery, 56, and teenage prospects.
“Jake has always been able to connect with people — older than him, younger than him,” Seeley says. “He’s just got that ability to communicate so well. I think that’s just a gift he was given. So ‘old soul,’ yeah, I’ve seen that.”
It’s not just that Neighbours can communicate. He cares.
From extended family members to billet parents, the stories of his compassion, emotional embraces and check-up phone calls are countless.
“It touches your heart when people talk about him that way,” his father, Ed Neighbours, says. “He’s always had that good character kind of thing — always willing to help anybody do whatever they need. He’s just always been an old soul, a throwback.”
“Jake has a responsibility to excel as a hockey player, and no one is cheering louder than me,” his mother, Tanya Lacoursiere, says. “But I tend to concern myself more with the man he’s becoming, and nothing makes me more proud than when I see quotes and comments about his strong character.”
There were some hardships along the way — the divorce of his parents and the tragic passing of two friends in separate car accidents — but they only made Neighbours more resolute in the person he aspires to be and appreciative of the blessings he’s received.
“That’s just how I was raised — how you treat people, how you interact with others, and the respect you give them,” Neighbours says. “It’s really easy to be kind, and, honestly, I feel like it’s much harder to be the opposite.”
Ed had two sons from a previous marriage when he met Tanya. When Neighbours was born in 2002, his two half-brothers, Justin and Geoff, were 14 and 12 years old, respectively.
The age difference didn’t make their battles any less fierce, growing up in Airdrie, Alberta.
The family had a couch in the basement, and when Neighbours was 5, Geoff threw him into the cushions so hard that it tipped over.
“I thought for a second I might have actually hurt him,” Geoff says. “Jake pops up with crocodile tears because he’s laughing so hard and says: ‘Do it again!'”
“That’s one of my fondest memories,” Neighbours says. “I could draw you that couch right now, that’s how much I remember that. They taught me how to take a hit, for sure.”
As Neighbours got older, he wanted to do everything with Justin and Geoff. He loved playing street hockey with their group of friends.
“We kind of joked with Jake, ‘If you’re going to be immature, you can’t hang out with us,'” Justin recalls. “That never became a thing, though.”
The three loved video games. When Neighbours was little, his brothers would always hand him a controller that wasn’t plugged in. That way, Neighbours thought he was operating whichever side was winning.
“I finally started to let him play, and he realized that maybe it wasn’t him playing all that time,” Geoff says, laughing.
“Yeah, they had to sneak in little ways for me to win, so I wouldn’t start crying and ruin it for everybody,” Neighbours says. “I wasn’t good at losing.”
Jake Neighbours loved playing street hockey and video games with his older brothers growing up.
By 7, Neighbours was taking plane flights by himself for a regular two-week summer trip to visit relatives.
Ed and Tanya drove him from Airdrie to Calgary, and he’d fly 1 hour, 20 minutes from Calgary to Saskatoon, where he’d be picked up for the ride to rural Saskatchewan.
“My first flight, I remember being really scared,” Neighbours says.
“I was like, ‘Holy crap!'” Geoff recalls. “That’s pretty impressive for a kid that age to do that by himself.”
The maturity that Neighbours began to show at that age, his parents believe, was one of the reasons he was growing up faster than most.
“That’s where he got a lot of it,” Dad says.
“Absolutely,” Mom says.
Nothing, however, would have as profound an impact on Neighbours as when he found out that his parents were divorcing.
Neighbours, then 8, was returning from one of those trips to Saskatchewan when Ed and Tanya told him.
“Mom was moving out, and I was staying with Dad,” Neighbours says.
“He wasn’t happy about it,” Ed says. “He was pretty mad at both of us.”
“It’s still to this day the most difficult day of my life, and I know it is the most life-changing day of his,” Tanya says. “Jake was always the type that was very protective, and he just wanted everybody to be happy.”
In fact, in the midst of that devastating moment, Neighbours was indeed thinking of others.
“The first thing Jake said to me was, ‘I’m sorry you have to go through this again,'” recalls Geoff, who was 20 at the time. “For him to be that young, oh, that broke my heart. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ That was when you knew that he was a lot older than his actual age.”
“He was very much concerned to make sure that we were all right,” Justin recalls.
How does a kid that age have that level of compassion?
“I care a lot about other people’s feelings,” Neighbours says. “My mom wasn’t their mom, but they were very close with my mom, and it’s still their dad. When you’re as close as you are with your siblings as I am, you’re just worried about them.”
Outdoor hockey was a love of the Neighbours family growing up. From left: Justin, Geoff, Jake, cousin Dreycie and Ed.
Neighbours realizes now that it could have been worse. His mom and dad have maintained an amicable relationship, and when each remarried — Ed to Jake’s stepmom, Malia, and Tanya to his stepdad, Shaun Lacoursiere — the four even co-hosted his NHL draft party in 2020. When they travel to watch him play with the Blues, they share a post-game beverage, too.
“The way they continued to co-parent, it was probably the best way you could do it,” Neighbours says. “For a young kid going through that, they made it very easy on me.”
His life now included a stepbrother and two stepsisters: Malia had a son, Carter, and Shaun had two daughters, Dayna and Courtney. That can be “a little weird” at that age, he admits, but he quickly grew to appreciate a family that had grown to five siblings, four parents and eight grandparents.
“It helped me socially in terms of having more people to talk to and being able to open up to different people,” Neighbours says. “It was a lot of support that was much appreciated.”
He never refers to any siblings as “half” or “step.”
“Jake always says, ‘They’re my brothers and sisters,'” Ed says. “I never told him to do that. That was just him.”
It wasn’t always perfect, but his parents’ handling of the situation led to the best-possible outcome.
“There was never a lot of animosity, and I think that helped Jake,” Ed says. “But he probably grew up a little bit faster than he had to because of that.”
“I can honestly say, we did a damn good job, I think, at seeing him through it,” Tanya says. “We were both there and tried to make sure he didn’t feel the burden and could just be that 8- or 9-year-old boy. As heartbreaking as it was, it can also make people stronger, right? There’s no doubt it shaped him in some way.”
One day during his time with the Mustangs, Neighbours put on Seeley’s suit jacket and imitated the coach in the locker room.
He had notes in one hand and a hockey stick in another, using it as a pointer on the blackboard. He playfully called out teammates for not getting to the net, lifting sticks, backchecking.
It was all in jest, but the details that Neighbours was poking fun at would become the foundation of his future in the NHL.
“All the stuff that a coach wants to see a player do, Jake would do as far as development goes,” Seeley says. “Instead of making excuses, he would take them head on. He is a highly intelligent human, and if it makes sense to him, he will do it.”
It took more time and work for Neighbours to corral his emotions on the ice. The scoreboard could shut him down, meaning if his team was losing, it had a severe effect on his performance.
“He was so serious and wanted to be so successful, but he wasn’t in control at all,” Seeley says.
“I definitely remember being a ‘snap show’ — breaking a lot of sticks, yelling at people, crying,” Neighbours recalls. “I used to be quite the hothead.”
It wasn’t just video games. It wasn’t just hockey games.
“He never wanted to lose — ever!” Dad says. “We’d be playing Snakes and Ladders, and he’d get mad because he couldn’t beat me. He’d say, ‘It’s the dice.'”
When he was 13, Neighbours was playing on a different team with a coach who he didn’t like, and the losses were piling up. Despite leading the league in scoring, he told his parents, “I’m done. I’m quitting hockey.”
Instead, Neighbours agreed to see Matt Brown, a mental trainer and counselor in Calgary. Brown worked with him on setting goals and reminders of why he was on this journey. And it worked.
Tanya remembers that after starting to see Brown, Neighbours printed out a speech by Inky Johnson, a former NCAA football player turned motivational speaker, and taped it to his nightstand.
“When he crawled into bed every night, he would read this speech word for word,” Tanya says.
She also recalls walking into the family’s hallway bathroom one day and seeing the mirror covered with her son’s handwritten notes to himself.
“The very top note was all the things he needed to do to make it to the NHL, and the very bottom note was the NHL emblem,” Tanya recalls.
When Jake Neighbours was about 13 years old, he put notes on his bathroom mirror that he hoped would help him get to the NHL.
Some of the goals were very specific: “In shape, but still thick and heavy, good cardio.”
How did he have the awareness as an early teen that he’d need to be “thick and heavy” in the NHL?
“It was just one of those things with the style of play that my dad wanted me to play and that I liked to play,” says Neighbours, now one of the Blues’ most bruising hitters.
Justin laughs when he thinks back to his brother leaving home for a year to attend the Pursuit of Hockey Excellence Hockey Academy (POE) and returning with a bulky base.
“It was like, ‘Whoa, what happened to your legs?'” Justin says. “They were twice the size of my legs.”
At POE, Neighbours was on the ice for five two-hour practices and three to five games per week.
“That’s where my career transitioned,” Neighbours says.
By then, he was getting his emotions in check.
“We really worked with him on, ‘You’ve got to learn how to lose, but not take that passion away,'” Ed says. “He used to always blame it on himself, but we said, ‘It’s not all about you. You can’t shoulder all of that. It will eat you alive.'”
Mom remembers something Seeley said that stuck, too.
“Pat said, ‘You’re bulletproof. Nobody can get to you!'” Tanya recalls.
That phrase brought back old memories with Seeley.
“‘Bulletproof,’ yeah, that was our slogan,” he says. “There’s just times when you have to let stuff bounce off you.”
Neighbours began writing “BP” on the butt end of his stick.
“I still do,” he says. “I’ve had it on there ever since, probably 10 years.”
Jake Neighbours writes “BP” on his sticks, for “bulletproof.”
As he got older, at times Neighbours felt maybe a bit too bulletproof.
Ed recalls one particular incident that led to a late-night phone call from the police.
Neighbours was 15 and was spending the night at a friend’s house. They wanted a cheeseburger. McDonald’s was just a few blocks away, but it was cold outside. Neighbours had a learner’s permit but no driver’s license. His friend had neither but did have a car.
“We were hungry!” Neighbours says.
“So they take this car …” Ed says, laughing.
After Neighbours pulled away from his friend’s house, he spotted a police car. His plan was to turn into a parking lot, and if the car kept going, they were fine. If it followed them, “We’re screwed.”
They were screwed. The officer asked, “Do you know why I stopped you?” and Neighbours responded, “Nope!” That’s when he was informed that his lights weren’t on.
Neighbours received tickets for no lights, driving without a license and driving during prohibited hours. The fines totaled about $300, and typical of the way he was raised, his parents made him pay it out of allowance and birthday money.
“If I made mistakes or did things they didn’t agree with, it was, ‘OK, you’re mowing the lawn, doing the dishes, or you’ve got to pay for it.'” Neighbours says. “I learned the hard way, for sure.”
The Neighbours family in their Blues gear. Back row, from left: sister-in-law Lindsey, Ed, brother Carter, stepmom Malia. Front row, from left: brother Justin, nephew Brandt, brother Geoff.
Meanwhile, Neighbours was learning how to hold teammates accountable.
In 2017-18, he was 15 playing on the Midget AAA Calgary Buffaloes. During one home game, the team had a terrible first period. The coaches went into the locker room during the intermission to chew out the players.
“The captain told them, ‘You don’t have to say anything! Jake’s already done it! We just got ripped!'” Ed remembers.
Dad had always told him to be vocal in the room.
“I pushed him along, but he’s always taken the bull by the horns,” Ed says.
“It’s just being a competitor,” Neighbours says. “If I saw guys not working as hard as I was, it pissed me off.”
Drafted by the Oil Kings, Neighbours immediately impressed coach Brad Lauer, who played nine seasons and was an assistant coach in the NHL.
“As a 16-year-old coming into our league, he had an aura,” Lauer says. “He always had his head up, his chest out, and he was very confident. But he was grounded, asked the right questions and respected the older guys.
“Guys gravitated to him. He could give 19-, 20-year-olds a rough time on the bus and everyone got a laugh out of it because he did it respectfully. You could see he was raised the right way and understood being a good person.”
Neighbours left his family in Calgary and moved in with a billet family, Terry and Rhonda Gibson. They saw it right away, too.
“You could tell he had leadership qualities,” Rhonda Gibson says. “He was like, ‘OK, guys, we’re all coming back to my house,’ and they’d all come, like our house was the hangout. I thought maybe it was because of my cooking, but it was just Jake’s personality.”
Neighbours became the Gibson’s “adopted son.” He helped their young niece learn how to skate and went on Easter egg hunts with her. They were close enough that Neighbours was comfortable chirping Rhonda, especially about her love for curling.
“He’d say, ‘C’mon, Rhonda, please pick a real sport!'” she recalls.
One afternoon, Rhonda received a text message saying that all of the pregame dinner had been eaten. She ran out of the salon with half-dyed hair, thinking she’d have to go home and make more, only to find out he was fibbing.
“That was a two-way street, but she probably didn’t mention that,” Neighbours says, laughing. “One night, I went to a team party and came back. I rolled into bed, and there was a full box of Rice Krispies in my bed. It’s 1 o’clock in the morning, and I had to get the f—ing vacuum out.”
Neighbours lived with Terry and Rhonda Gibson for five years while playing for the Oil Kings. They hosted birthday parties with his teammates.
Neighbours spent five seasons with the Oil Kings — all of them with the Gibsons — and followed the trajectory that many saw for him, being named captain in 2021.
He was a mentor to a lot of players, including 16-year-old forward Caleb Reimer.
“Caleb was a rookie, and Jake did what he always does — he helped him get settled in,” Tanya recalls. “I remember Jake assisted on his very first goal.”
“Jake was somebody who everybody looked up to, and he had that relationship with the young man, Caleb,” Lauer says.
Neighbours was devastated when he got the phone call in August 2021 that Reimer, 16, had died in a car accident. Then just 18 himself, Neighbours was in St. Louis at the time, training with the Blues.
“Very tragic,” Neighbours says. “Reimzy had a bright future ahead of him.”
“I talked to Jake quite a bit, and he kept saying, ‘I just wish I was home so that I could be there for the family,'” Ed remembers.
Neighbours stayed in St. Louis, but after being reassigned to the Oil Kings, he made a heartfelt gesture that not even his parents knew about. Ed, Malia, Shaun and Tanya were leaving a playoff game when they were approached by Reimer’s parents.
“They said, ‘You just don’t know how amazing of a child you have,'” Ed remembers. “He was calling them once a month to see how they were doing. All four of us, we just broke into tears.”
Tanya adds: “Not having to tell him to do that, just knowing that that’s a part of who he is, makes me incredibly proud.”
Neighbours downplayed his role, saying, “That we tried to be there for the family was the most important thing.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only tragic incident Neighbours would face. In September of 2025, close friend and fellow hockey player Orca Wiesblatt also died in a car accident at 25.
“He was a brother,” Neighbours says. “Just a big part of my life, someone I talked to on a daily basis. Someone I leaned on a lot emotionally for anything. It’s still hard to talk about, hard to deal with.”
Seeley marvels when hearing about the compassion his former player has for others.
“Jake learned growing up that family is important and family isn’t always blood,” Seeley says. “That kid is just full of empathy, full of love. It serves him well, and it will always serve him well.”
Lauer adds, “It’s the maturity of him. He’s just got core values and oozes leadership — a player that you want to build around. But he has a personality that — never mind the hockey player — he’s a person you want to be around.”
The Neighbours family wearing their Oil Kings gear. From left, mother Tanya, Jake, sister Dayna, stepdad Shaun and sister Courtney.
They’re traits many say were instilled by Neighbours’ parents.
“We always said to him, ‘Treat people like you would like to be treated,'” Dad says. “When you leave this world, you don’t want to be remembered for what you have. You want to be remembered for who you were.”
“We just tried to raise a respectful, kind, generous boy,” Mom says. “The dynamics of our family — having older siblings and a blended family — I think that contributed to the young man he is today in a good way.”
Neighbours reflects on that.
“Yeah, hanging out with my brothers as a young kid, that taught me a lot,” he says. “Going through a divorce at a young age, that matures you. Moving away from home at 14, I had to figure out how to do that. I think a combination of those things has bred me into being a wiser, beyond-my-years type of guy.”
“Every once in a while, I’ll tell him that he’s way more mature than I am,” Geoff says. “He’s always been very set in what he’s wanted to accomplish in his life. It’s a lot of fun to see the man he’s become.”
The entire family is grateful for how everything has turned out.
“He’s building a life that is inconceivable to many — one that he couldn’t even imagine himself,” Mom says. “I hope he never loses that gratitude of, ‘Holy s—, I’m in the NHL.’ Sometimes, he’s like: “Unreal, eh, Mom?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s unreal, kid.'”
Neighbours is just thankful for those who’ve been with him along the way.
“It doesn’t matter what you have in life,” he says. “It’s who you’ve got by your side, and the moments that you cherish. That’s more important to me than the money and playing in the NHL. It’s something I worked really hard for, but having those principles of how to treat people and communicate has helped me along in this journey.”
A journey in which Neighbours became “BP.”
“Yeah,” Seeley says, “he’s absolutely bulletproof now!”