The Stanwicks are considered one of the first families of lacrosse. All eight of Wells Sr. and Dori Stanwick’s children, including Shack, the Johns Hopkins freshman attackman who was the No. 1 recruit in the country, have played or are playing in Division I. Yet throughout their careers, the Stanwicks have been in the minority, woven together by a common thread: a leather-strung stick.
While leather pockets — which are also known as traditional because Native Americans used deerskin or raw cowhide to string sticks — were the norm 20 years ago, they have become an outlier. Now most players prefer synthetic mesh.
However, there is still a niche that has an affinity for leather. That includes the ESPN lacrosse analyst Paul Carcaterra.
“When I’m doing a game and I spot a kid with leather, I almost want to have a conversation with him,” Carcaterra said. “I want to know his story. Something is different about that kid. There’s a story to a kid that uses leather. There’s a story to a stick.”
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Wells Stanwick in a game against Duke last May. “Mine never really gets affected by the rain when I’m playing with it, so I think that’s a benefit,” he said of his leather pocket. Credit Johns Hopkins Athletic Communications
For the Stanwicks, who are from Baltimore, the tradition of using leather started with Wells Sr., whose father, Tad, played for St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., and wrote a book on the 10-man game.
Wells Sr. began stringing sticks when his oldest daughters started playing lacrosse. Traditional is still the common form of stringing in women’s lacrosse, but after buying factory-made sticks, Wells Sr. did not like how they were strung. So he bought unstrung heads and leather stringing kits and taught himself.
“He would do that for the girls, and when the boys came along, that’s all he knew,” said one of the sons, Steele Stanwick, who plays professional lacrosse and is an assistant for the Johns Hopkins women’s team.
The sisters Sheehan, 35, Wick, 33, and Coco, 30, each earned all-American honors at Georgetown, and Covie, 22, is a senior attacker at Boston College (14-3, 5-3 Atlantic Coast Conference) who recently became the Eagles’ top career goal-scorer and now has 188.
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The oldest son, Tad, 28, was a co-captain at Rutgers. Steele, 25, won lacrosse’s highest honor, the Tewaaraton Award, while leading Virginia to a national championship in 2011. Wells Jr., 23, is a senior attacker and captain on Johns Hopkins (6-6, 3-1 Big Ten) who is leading the team in assists with 28. Shack, 20, is third on Hopkins in points this season, behind his brother, with 31.
Although Wells Sr. did not play lacrosse, Steele said his father was a student of the game.
“I think he’s kind of instilled that in all of us,” he said.
“We’re always talking about lacrosse whether we’re in season or not,” Steele said. “Whether it was at the dinner table or out in the backyard, whether it was just with my brothers or just with my sisters or with my dad, we were always talking about it, learning from each other. We always went to each other’s games. We would try and learn if someone did something wrong or did something right.”
The Stanwicks have also reaped the benefits that come with using a traditional pocket. Leather gives them a better feel for the ball. Loosening or tightening the strings to their liking manipulates the pocket, and enables them to throw the ball harder and more accurately.
“I like the way you can feel the ball all the time,” Steele said. “It moves around, and I like that. I like to be able to feel the ball in my pocket, and I just feel like I have total control with it. I think it’s really good on ground balls, and I think for me as an attacker and as a passer, I like to know exactly where the ball is in my stick at all times.”
While rain and mud tighten up the leather pocket after it dries, it can be useful during wet weather.
“When it rains and stuff, a lot of people say the mesh gets a little messed up, and mine never really gets affected by the rain when I’m playing with it, so I think that’s a benefit,” Wells Jr. said. “I think that the ball can go wherever, which I like a lot. Some guys only like it to go in one spot, but I like how the ball can go throughout the entire stick. If I want it at the top of the pocket, it can go there. If I want it at the bottom, it can go there, and with mesh, that’s not always the case.”
Despite such advantages, leather has its drawbacks. It is much harder and more time-consuming to string and break in a pocket. It requires constant adjustments, with tweaks needed after every game and practice. With mesh, making a pocket is easy, and there are fewer adverse effects after it dries. It does not require the maintenance that leather does, eliminating a nuisance for parents and children.
“It goes hand and hand with our faster society,” the ESPN analyst Quint Kessenich said. “Drive to a fast-food restaurant, and you pick up dinner. It’s the same with a stick. When you’re driving a van to practice, the last thing you want to do as a parent is sit there having to fix the strings for 20 minutes before practice, so it simplifies what was a pretty unique part of lacrosse.”
However, it took a couple of decades after the advent of mesh before it truly caught on. And it took a college superstar in Casey Powell, who is part of another notable lacrosse family, to start the movement. As a freshman at Syracuse in 1995, Powell began using a mesh stick strung by the assistant coach Kevin Donahue. Instead of all the shooting strings strung across the top, one was woven into a V, which, combined with the way the sidewalls were strung, channeled the ball down the middle of the pocket.
Powell went on to become one of the best college players of all time. He was a four-time all-American, helping lead Syracuse to the 1995 national championship. (His brothers Ryan and Michael also starred at Syracuse.)
As Casey Powell’s legend grew, so did his style of stringing, which became known as the Powell pocket.
Mesh had been around since the 1970s, but it was unpopular. There were two options — hard mesh and soft mesh. Hard mesh was too tight to make a good pocket, and soft mesh wore out quickly. So leather dominated the market until Powell’s rise.
“I was playing well, and I was successful,” Powell said. “It’s almost like if you see a guy on the PGA Tour with a putter that wins the Masters. You might feel like that’s a factor in helping you become a better player.”
As youth and college players tried to emulate Powell, sales increased significantly. Companies reacted by creating dura mesh — nylon between hard and soft mesh.
Matt Slater, who works in customer service and strings sticks for the Cockeysville, Md.-based chain Lax World, said only about 1 percent of the heads the company sells are strung in leather, a dramatic shift from when he started his job in 2003.
“It was never 50-50 since I’ve been at Lax World,” Slater said. “It was never half traditional, half mesh, but there were more sticks strung with traditional in the early 2000s than there are now, for sure.”
Despite growing up in the mesh era, the Stanwicks never made the switch. Now their sticks draw attention wherever they go.
“Someone always brings it up, whether I’m at a camp or I’m working somewhere — someone’s always asking about it,” Wells Jr. said. “ ‘Who strings it?’ ”
That was especially true during Steele’s career at Virginia. Because of his success, some admirers switched to leather, although the effect did not seem as pronounced as with the Powell pocket, Slater said.
But starting a trend was never the goal for the Stanwicks. Leather sticks have strengthened a connection between a father and his children, and helped foster a discernible link from the modern game to the one played by Native Americans.
Wells Sr. still strings all of his children’s sticks, and he taught them how to make adjustments. When Steele was in college, he would text his father pictures of his stick, and his father would walk him through any fine-tuning. Once, before Virginia’s first-round game in the N.C.A.A. tournament in 2012, the strings on Steele’s stick broke, so Wells Sr. drove to Charlottesville and used his sailing background to repair the head, using fishing wire to fuse the leather together.
“It’s something that we have with each other, like, ‘How’s your stick playing?’ — or whatever it is,” Steele said. “I think he enjoys it. He’ll be happy when we don’t need any more, but I think he enjoys it. As much time it takes in the day or nights, it’s something we can share, which is rare.”
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