The History of Lacrosse Gear and the Stick

Almost every piece of equipment in your kid’s bag is younger than you are. The stick is the exception, and its story is the best one in the sport.

What to buy is answered in the beginner’s gear guide and the girls’ gear guide. This page answers why the gear looks like this at all, because every item in that bag exists for a reason.

One tree, one year, one pair of hands

A traditional lacrosse stick is a single length of hickory — shagbark or bitternut, chosen for tight grain — split, seasoned, steamed, bent into a hook, drilled, sanded, lacquered and laced by hand. The process takes about a year, most of it spent waiting for the wood to dry. Wood that has not cured splits when it is bent, and every piece of hickory behaves differently, which is why the work never automated.

The factory that made almost every stick on earth

For most of the twentieth century the world’s lacrosse sticks came from one place: Cornwall Island, in the Mohawk community of Akwesasne.

Frank “Tewesatene” Roundpoint (1899–1968) and his brother Alex learned the trade in the 1920s at the Lally Lacrosse Stick Manufacturing company in Cornwall, Ontario, then opened their own factory on Cornwall Island in the early 1930s with a Scottish partner, Colin Chisholm. Source: Think Lacrosse.

The numbers are worth reading twice. By 1961 the operation ran 17 workers in the factory and 10 women lacing stick heads at home, producing roughly 36,000 sticks a year from hickory cut within 100 miles. It ran only in winter, because summer humidity made the hickory break when it was bent. By 1968 it supplied about 97 percent of the lacrosse sticks used in the world and employed around 80 people from the community. Source: Watertown Daily Times archives and Canada’s History.

The factory burned to the ground on June 8, 1968, taking all the manufacturing equipment with it, and Frank Roundpoint died a month later. Production restarted under new ownership within a couple of months and reached half its previous level. It never got the chance to reach the rest.

The gut wall, and how a stick was strung before mesh

Inside the hook of a wooden stick runs the gut wall — leather or rawhide strands laced across the frame and cross-woven with runners to form the pocket. There is no manufactured net in a traditional stick. The pocket is the lacing.

Anyone who played in the 1970s remembers what that meant. A gut-strung pocket changes with the weather — it soaks up rain, sags, then dries tight and different, and no two were ever the same.

April 1970: the plastic head

US Patent 3,507,495 was filed June 1, 1967 and granted April 21, 1970, to a team at Wm. T. Burnett & Co. in Baltimore that included Richard Tucker and Bill Fracalossi. Tucker went on to found STX. Source: US Patent 3,507,495. USA Lacrosse dates the first plastic head to August 1970. Source: USA Lacrosse Magazine.

A molded head is symmetrical, so one stick works for a left-handed and a right-handed player. It does not change in the rain. It is made in minutes rather than months, costs a fraction as much, and separates the head from the shaft so a broken piece can be replaced instead of the whole stick. College lacrosse adopted it immediately: at the 1971 NCAA final, every goal was scored with a plastic head.

The effect on the stickmakers is documented in their own numbers. Alf Jacques and his father Lou, at Onondaga, made roughly 12,000 wooden sticks in 1973. In 1974 they made about 1,200. Source: Onondaga Nation.

A trade that had supported families at Akwesasne and Onondaga for generations lost most of its market within a few years. Alf Jacques kept carving by hand for another five decades and taught younger makers, which is why the craft still exists. That story belongs to him, and it is told properly in The Creator’s Game.

The shaft: aluminum, titanium, scandium, carbon

Once the head was separate, the handle became its own product, and it went through four materials in forty years.

Hollow aluminum arrived in the early 1980s, borrowed from hockey. Titanium came from a college defenseman: Princeton’s Dave Morrow was breaking aluminum shafts constantly, noticed a customer of his father’s metal-tubing business using titanium in snowshoes, and built himself a titanium handle for the 1992 season. He used it in the NCAA tournament that spring and founded Warrior Lacrosse in February 1993. Source: USA Lacrosse Magazine. After that came alloys blended with scandium for stiffness at low weight, and then carbon fiber composites.

Modern shafts are sold by exact weight, which is the clearest way to see what changed. StringKing’s Metal 3 Pro attack shaft, an aluminum alloy blended with scandium, titanium and zinc, is offered in 135, 155, 175 and 195 grams — roughly 4.8 to 6.9 ounces for the entire handle. Source: StringKing.

Sources: USA Lacrosse Magazine and StringKing.

Mesh, and what a pocket actually does

Synthetic mesh began replacing leather and gut through the 1980s. It is lighter, it does not rot, and it holds its shape in the rain, which is the whole reason it won. Mesh is sold by stiffness, and the three grades do genuinely different jobs.

The head, and the rules that keep reshaping it

Brine patented the offset head in 1995 — the head drops below the line of the shaft rather than sitting on top of it, which lowers the ball’s center of gravity and makes it harder to check out. Source: USA Lacrosse Magazine. Essentially every men’s head sold today is offset.

Then heads got pinched. Manufacturers narrowed the throat and scoop so the ball sat in a tighter channel, until a clean stick check stopped dislodging it reliably. Rule makers responded by regulating head width at measured points in 2010, and stick checks became part of pregame inspection.

That is worth knowing before you shop, because an expensive elite head is narrower and tighter than an entry-level one, which makes it harder for a beginner to catch with. Entry-level complete sticks have wider, more forgiving pockets on purpose.

Helmets: from nothing, to leather, to a certification sticker

The traditional game had no helmet, no pads and often no shoes. Head protection entered the men’s game for one reason, and it is a simple one: a hard rubber ball travels very fast. The fastest verified lacrosse shot on record is 119.9 mph. Source: Guinness World Records.

Early helmets were leather, closer to a football helmet of the same era than to anything modern. Hard shells with cages followed, and Cascade’s line — the CLH2, the CPro, the CPX, the CPX-R, then the R, S and XRS — is the one most American families recognize, because a version of it has been the standard-issue youth helmet for two decades. The CPX-R is still a common entry-level, one-size adjustable helmet. Source: Lacrosse All Stars.

The change that actually matters happened in 1986, when NOCSAE published ND041, the first performance standard for lacrosse helmets. From that point a helmet was not a product claim. It was a test a helmet either passed or failed.

There is a specific reason to check rather than assume. A certification can be voided after the fact — the Warrior Regulator and the Cascade Model R both had theirs voided for every date they were ever manufactured, and helmets like that circulate on the used market for years afterward. That is the argument for buying this one piece new.

Pads, gloves, and the standard written after a heart stopped

Gloves, arm pads and shoulder pads all evolved the ordinary way: heavier and stiffer at first, then progressively lighter as materials improved and players traded bulk for mobility. Shoulder pads in particular got small.

Then they got a standard. Commotio cordis is cardiac arrest caused by a blow to the chest at a precise moment in the heartbeat — a window of 10 to 30 milliseconds, roughly 1 to 3 percent of a single beat. A lacrosse ball to the sternum is one of the ways it happens. NOCSAE spent more than two million dollars developing a test for it, and USA Lacrosse became the first governing body in any sport to require the resulting standard, NOCSAE ND200. Source: NOCSAE.

Sources: USA Lacrosse chest protector FAQ, USA Lacrosse headgear FAQ, NOCSAE.

Practical consequence: shoulder pads made before 2022 almost certainly do not meet ND200, which is why hand-me-down pads are the one piece of used gear worth turning down.

Cleats

Footwear is the one required item with no lacrosse-specific safety standard behind it. Lacrosse cleats became their own category in the 2000s, cut higher through the ankle than a soccer cleat because the sport asks for more lateral cutting. Soccer and football cleats work fine, and plenty of high school players wear them all season.

The girls’ game: goggles, headgear and a shallower pocket

The women’s game developed separately from 1890 onward and never adopted body contact, so its equipment solved a different problem. The required list is three items: a stick, a mouthguard, and eye protection.

Protective eyewear became mandatory in 2005 at the youth, high school and college levels, following a rule change adopted in 2003. Source: MedStar Health. The goggle is not a scaled-down helmet. It is a cage protecting the eye socket from a stick, which is the contact the women’s rules permit.

Headgear — the padded soft shell some girls wear — is a separate item, and it remains optional at every level under USA Lacrosse rules. Any headgear worn must meet ASTM F3137, published in 2015, and must cover the whole head, which rules out headband-style products. Source: USA Lacrosse.

Why the women’s pocket is shallower, and what it does to the game

The rule is explicit and it differs from the men’s game. In a legal women’s stick, part of the ball must stay visible above the sidewall when it sits in the pocket, and no gap in the stringing may exceed an inch and a half. Source: USA Lacrosse Magazine. A men’s pocket may be deep enough that the ball disappears below the sidewall entirely.

A shallow pocket holds the ball less securely, and that one specification shapes the whole sport. It is why a stick check dislodges the ball so often in the girls’ game, why cradling technique matters more, and why possession turns over as much as it does — the pocket, not the athletes.

The goalie kit

The head of a goalie stick is 10 to 12 inches wide — two to four times a field player’s minimum — and that width is written into the rules as a deliberate equalizer against a 100-mph shot, not a manufacturer’s design choice.

Everything else is protective: a field player’s helmet, a separate throat protector hanging from the facemask, a chest protector meeting ND200, gloves, a cup and cleats. Roughly double a field player’s kit, and the one position where nothing on the list is negotiable.

The timeline

Sources as cited throughout, plus World Lacrosse.

What this means for what you buy today

All of that history collapses into a short shopping rule, and it is friendlier than most parents expect. Two items carry a mandatory certification, with both marks printed on the product itself: the helmet and the shoulder pads for boys, the chest protector for a goalie of either gender. Check those two, buy them new, and the safety question is closed.

Everything else is a fit and preference decision. The stick, the gloves, the arm pads, the cleats, the bag — none of it carries a standard, and the inexpensive version of each does the job for a first season. A wider entry-level head is genuinely easier for a beginner to catch with, so the cheap stick is not a compromise at that age. Specific brands, prices, sizes and local stores are in the beginner’s gear guide and the girls’ gear guide.

One last thing worth doing. Show your kid a picture of a wooden stick and tell them what it took to build one. That handle in the garage weighs about five ounces and came off a shelf. Its ancestor took a year, a tree and a pair of hands, and the people who made them are still making them. The rest of the story is here.