Making Lacrosse Sticks for Dummies

Where's that 45° angle, Owen?

Some of our staffers have driven a Buick Lacrosse, and one or two have even been to LaCrosse, Wisconsin – but the ugly truth is that no one in the building has ever played lacrosse. Several have seen lacrosse played and even found the occasional lacrosse ball rolling around in the street by a park, but played it? Nope. Based on the article "How to Make a Wooden Lacrosse Shaft"¹ he wrote for Healthfully.com, we're pretty certain that Owen E. Richason IV has never tossed a ball around, either...

Richason, required by DMS² to introduce his subject, dashed off this throwaway bull:

"Lacrosse is a sport enjoyed by many people. But like any other sport, having the appropriate accouterments is necessary to play. This includes proper protective wear as well as a netted head and shaft. You can buy the heads and shafts as one piece or separately. If you want to save a little money, you can even make the shaft yourself. All you need is some wood and to follow the standardized dimensions."

At which point Owen proceeded to tell us how to do this supposedly simple procedure. According to him, you must,

"Measure a long piece of hickory with a tape measure and mark a pencil line to cut it between 30 and 32 inches long. Put on goggles and cut the hickory to 30 or 32 inches long with a jig saw."

Well, thanks for the safety tip, Owen; but why specifically a jig saw? Hint: it's because he doesn't know the difference between a hawk and a jigsaw... And then there's this bullshit:

"Put the hickory lacrosse shaft on a planer and plane it down to .0625-by-1 inch in diameter -- the regulation thickness of the lacrosse stick."

We looked it up: standard shape for a lacrosse stick is an octagon whose circumference cannot exceed 3½ inches. that being said, we're almost certain that you can't machine an octagon with a planer... not knowing what a planer does, Richason probably wouldn't know that. The remainder of the post is equally rife with dumbassery, including this direction:

"Use a miter saw to cut a 45-degree angle into the top end of the lacrosse shaft to fit the head over"

First, why did you cut the stick to length in step 2 and then again in this step, and second, how does the head "fit... over" the angled end of the shaft? People with brains want to know! No, Owen found a YouTube video about how to make a traditional Iroquois crosse – including the head – out of wood, but apparently just winged it from there. Could there be a better candidate for Dumbass of the Day?

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_12082964_make-wooden-lacrosse-shaft.html
² DMS was the parent company of eHow, Demand Media Studios; now renamed Leaf Group. That's a shame, because while you can certainly say, "You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS'"; '"You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'LG'" doesn't work that well.

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