Why are womens sticks so expensive?

It's not supply or demand

Have you ever accidentally clicked on the “Sort Price Highest to Lowest” on a website only to be delivered to a horrifying page of wildly priced products?

Go try it on a lacrosse website.

I’ll wait.

What came up first? If you searched the men’s section, it was either a combo rebounder/guaranteed-to-make-your-kid-better-set-up or a helmet.

Now. This isn’t about lacrosse helmets being over 300 dollars. (It should be, but it's not…not yet). Try not to think about the fact that a high-end bike helmet is more than 100 dollars less than the latest lacrosse helmet to hit mass production.

If you searched the women’s section, you likely found the highest of high-end women’s sticks…which now retail for over 300 dollars.

I was shocked when I saw it with my own eyes this morning. There is no reason for a women’s complete stick to cost over 300 dollars.

Full Stop.

But I do understand it.

To be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy it. I know how strapped the lacrosse industry is - I used to work on the gear side right up until every company decided to pull their ad funding in favor of sending free samples to Instagram stringers and unpaid shills.

I used to have long conversations with brand reps about what their new heads were before everything became a sequel to itself. It was a magical time. However, most of those conversations were about men’s heads. I asked a certain rep why there were never any meetings about women’s heads. They said, “Kyle, women’s lacrosse is like less than ten percent of our business.”

Why is that?

Well, women are sensible. They don’t have ten different sticks for ten different occasions. They don’t need the sick new drop because they find something they like and they stick with it pretty early on. (This is also why companies are addicted to sequelizing their product lines, but I digress.)

The stick is a tool to play the game. More importantly, it’s the ONE tool that women need aside from goggles (or half-shell helmet depending on your location relative to America’s most infamous peninsula). That makes it a cornerstone of every brand’s presence in the women’s market.

The cost of a top-tier women’s stick used to be just over 100 dollars ten years ago. Then it jumped to under 200 dollars less than five years later and now we are over 300 dollars. On the men’s side, unstrung heads were all but forbidden to go over the 100 dollar mark 10 years ago, and have steadily crept up to around 130 in the same time frame.

It’s not inflation, at least, not in the sense that the materials cost significantly more. It’s how inflation has affected the bottom line for the lacrosse companies.

Because the market share is so much lower than the men’s side, the pressure is on these companies to make it up at retail. And that’s exactly what they are doing. They will say that you’re paying for research and development, but why do all the sticks look the same? Why is the greatest innovation in women’s lacrosse in the last five years a stick designed to control draws?

Women’s sticks have two things working against them - they’re typically sold strung and on a shaft. The pockets were never great, but they became much better than factory-strung men’s pockets because they needed to be. Now, the design of the women’s head has a massive effect on how it works and what position it is best suited to. It is also way harder to find someone who can competently string a women’s stick than it is to find the same on the men’s side. You can throw a rock onto a lacrosse field in/on Long Island and hit a men’s stringer; but you would need to roll a boulder through a hundred strip malls in Maryland to hit a confident women’s stringer.

That’s not a knock - stringing a women’s stick is hard. It’s arduous. It’s special knots and tension points that change head to head. Legalizing the use of mesh was supposed to fix that. It didn’t. It made things more confusing. I know because I lived it as a stringer - the mesh is harder to string than the runners. I stopped doing it and became part of the problem. You couldn't pay me 50 bucks to string a women’s stick right now and I actually know how to do it.

What about head design? Well, if you thought men’s heads all looked the same, take a gander at the top-line stick for each brand. You’ll notice a similar high-angle tick upward near the scoop. That’s a proven design that works. So everyone uses their own variation of it.

Which means we have reached peak design for that category.

The next step is to change up the materials, which is what lacrosse companies did on the men’s side a few years ago.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because you need to see where this is going. You need to know that there is a choice. If you want to throw down 300 plus dollars for one stick, that’s going to continue to push the price upward. If you pay the price, the companies will keep making it and you’ll have to drop another 300 dollars in 18 months.

Or, you can just go roll your own boulder into a lacrosse store, get a restring, and buy a rebounder for the same cost.