Playing in the Warren School Indoor Soccer League, Doug Mitchell notched a number of accomplishments: led Division Two scoring with nineteen goals in 1980; scored eighteen goals as a member of the Celtics team that captured the Division Three Co-Championship; and set the Division Three scoring record with twenty-four goals in 1982.  (He later coached in the league for two years.)

Doug also competed as a member of the East Bay Soccer Club of Barrington.  In under-fourteen competition his team captured the Pele Association State Championship of 1981, a year in which he was named to the Association’s State Summer All Star squad; the following year they won South County Cup, Regional, and Challenge titles.  His East Bay under-sixteen squad notched the 1983 Connecticut Invitational Championship.

As a Warren High School junior he was named first team All Division Two South by the Providence Journal and first team All Scholastics Small Schools by the Fall River Herald News.  The following year, with coach Manuel de Melo noting that “everybody knows Mitchell is a scorer, but he plays good defense too,” the Redskins were Division Two South Co-Champions. 

They then won the Division Two State Tournament.  Co-Captain Doug scored two goals and an assist in the tourney quarter-finals, a goal and an assist in the semi-finals, and two more goals and an assist in the final win over Narragansett.  He was named Tourney Most Valuable Player.

In recognition of his achievements, he was named first team All Division Two South.  But Doug and teammate Neil Swift were not named to the All State squad, a fact that Narragansett High School Coach Tom Ashley objected to vehemently in a letter to the Providence Journal: “Why not just call it a Division One All State team?  The fact that they were left off the team is an injustice and a slap in the face to every coach and player in Division Two.”

Doug later played for the Warren Men’s Soccer Club, where he won the Junior Division scoring title with twenty goals.  He has volunteered as a soccer coach in the Bristol Youth Soccer League for the past ten years.

(To prove that he wasn’t just a soccer player, Doug was twice named to the Boys Baseball League All Stars, the second time after his Yankees team won the league’s 1980 title.  The following year he was named to the Babe Ruth League’s thirteen-year-old All Stars.)

Pictures from Hall of Fame archives