Princeton enjoys best gear — for free

Two helmets. Six pairs of shoes. Ten sticks. Two pairs of gloves. Three different kinds of uniforms. Plus sweats.

That's what each and every lacrosse player on Princeton's men's varsity team gets when he joins the team his freshman year — and the team gets pretty much all of it absolutely free.

Fortunately, Princeton avoids what can be the fantastically expensive cost of fielding a lacrosse team through a unique relationship it has with Warrior Lacrosse, currently the largest lacrosse equipment manufacturer in the world. If you're a business-oriented type, you might say the Tigers got in on the ground floor with Warrior.

It all started in 1992, when David Morrow '93 was still a junior on Princeton's team. At the time, lacrosse shafts were typically made of aluminum, which broke often with a good, hard check. Morrow's father happened to own an automobile tubing company, and at the end of the first Gulf War, he got his hands on a large quantity of titanium.

It's not hard to see what happened from there. Morrow and his father crafted a set of titanium lacrosse shafts, and Princeton went to its first NCAA Final Four in 1992 better equipped than any of its competitors. That year's team took the championship, the Tigers' first of six to date.

"A lot of people would say that's why we won the championship — because no one else had them — but we like to think not," head coach Bill Tierney joked.

Morrow was the NCAA Division I player of the year the following season, and after his graduation he went on to found Warrior Lacrosse under the slogan, "The means to dominate." It's literally grown "from a dad-and-son operation to the biggest lacrosse manufacturer in the world," Tierney said.

Warrior is currently the exclusive supplier of lacrosse gear to Princeton's team, and many Princeton players, including the legendary Jesse Hubbard '98 and Coach Tierney's own son, Trevor Tierney '01, help to design Warrior equipment.

This is the first year that Princeton is wearing Warrior jerseys, though; Reebok had previously supplied Princeton with a complete uniform package that included shoes, which Warrior previously did not make.

Tierney noted that it was "kind of hard to turn down" Reebok when all they asked for as payment for the gear they designed and gave to Princeton was that the Tigers wear it. In front of 45,000 fans at the Final Four, though, it was obviously worth it when Reebok's logo would sneak its way into virtually every picture of Princeton's players in action.

"In 1997, Reebok sent us a whole batch of new shoes just before the Final Four and they. . . were really out there," Tierney said, chuckling at odd design of the shoes. "But the interesting thing was, they were really comfortable."

They must have been, because that's another year that Princeton won the NCAA championship.

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Uniforms are only the beginning of Princeton's gear, though. Lacrosse equipment has come a long way since Morrow's titanium shafts in 1992, and Tierney has seen many different iterations of equipment.

The greatest change since 1992, though, in addition to the titanium shaft, has been the offset head, Tierney said. Offset heads are dropped down below the horizontal plane of the shaft, which effectively makes the pocket of the stick about two inches deeper.

Protective equipment, too, has changed a lot in the past decade or so, and Princeton has all the latest gear.

"The equipment now is becoming almost space-age," Tierney said. "It's got air in it, it's the lightest foam you could possible get. . . there's a lot of scientific principle to it."

Indeed, thanks to their tremendous success under the leadership of Coach Tierney that spans more than a decade now, the Tigers are awash in gear.

"We're blessed. . . we have a lot of stuff. We've got a beautiful new locker room donated by an alum this year, all this new clothing, all these new shoes — everything's kind of handed to us," Tierney said.

The new locker room this year features wooden lockers and a plasma TV for watching film. Tierney, though, was quick to note that his players show a great deal of appreciation for everything they've been given in the way they keep the locker room scrupulously neat and always keep track of their gear, consistently returning all of it at the end of each season.

On the same theme of appreciation, Coach Tierney has also had each of his players do research on past Tigers who've worn the same number.

"Every once in a while, I'll call one of the kids out to give a quick report about somebody in the history of our program who's worn their number," he said. "It says that this is more than just this year's team and that this is about history and sacrifice. That's why we hope this season is just a blip on the radar screen — we hope we get it back next year."

Whether or not the Tigers can reclaim their past glory, one thing is sure: Princeton certainly has "the means to dominate."