Lax Pet Peeves

Being around lacrosse for some time now I have picked up on a lot of different terms or phrases that apply to the game and it’s equipment. Even though I know almost every one in the book, people still find a way to surprise me with different names for different things. Working tournaments in the summer you run into a lot of inexperienced players and parents. Now there is nothing wrong with being new to lacrosse, everyone has to start somewhere, but I still can’t tune out some of the weird things people say. One of the worst ones that I can remember was at a two-day youth tournament this past summer. Universal Lacrosse was set up doing our thing, dominating the summer scene, and a customer came up asking about the heads we were selling. You could tell that this family was new to the sport and that’s great! We love seeing new players show interest in lacrosse and we try to help in anyway we can. What made this great was when they started asking about our custom stringing service. The thing is they didn’t say, “custom stringing.” No. The amazing question that followed was, “Do you guys do the BASKET WEAVING?” Seriously though? Basket weaving? Hearing this blew my mind and it took a little self-control to hide it. So I decided to play it off and politely correct them by saying something along the lines of, “Yes we can RESTRING (notice the emphasis on restring) any head you want.” I thought that would have been the end of it, but no. Next question the ask was, “Okay, so how much does it cost do weave the whole basket?” At that point I cut my losses and just happily answered and gave up on correcting their terms. Live to fight another day kind of thing. Things like that happen to us all the time. Whether is weaving baskets, stringing the racquet, or even netting the plastic (I’ve heard them all, SERIOUSLY) sometimes people just don’t understand the lacrosse world’s basic terminology. I really don’t want to sound like I hate talking to our customers because in reality I actually love it! Our whole mission at Universal Lacrosse revolves around the pursuit of a happy customer. It’s our goal in our stores, online, and especially at tournaments. The point of this post is to simply point out that certain things have names for a reason so why not try to learn them to make everything faster. We aren’t trained to be professional basket weavers. No, here at Universal Lacrosse we are proud to say that we are all Masters Stringing, and we take that title very seriously. IT'S ALL U