Warrior Sports bringing sticks to NHL, 4 Nations all the way from Tijuana, Mexico

Brad Marchand, Brayden Point, Jake Guentzel, Noah Hanifin, Rasmus Dahlin, and Erik Karlsson will represent their respective countries next month at The 4 Nations Face-Off.

They’re among 12 players in the tournament using sticks manufactured in a place rarely connected to hockey: Tijuana, Mexico.

The corporate offices of Warrior Sports are in Shelby Township, Michigan, a short drive from the Detroit Red Wings’ home at Little Caesars Arena. But the company’s manufacturing facility is more than 2,000 miles away, in a border city where the most popular sports are soccer and baseball.

This week, plant manager David Avila and pro production leader Santiago Cuellar spoke with NHL.com from the Warrior Hockey production center in Tijuana. Avila enthusiastically detailed the production process, pointing out that every stick has a different length, weight, and curvature, based in part on the player’s position.

“We’re very proud to make the best hockey stick in the market,” Avila said in Spanish.

Cuellar, who has worked at Warrior for more than 18 years, shared the story of the first NHL game he attended, in a manner that would sound familiar to hockey fans in any language: He remembers the matchup (Dallas Stars at Los Angeles Kings), the fluidity of the skating, the sound of the puck, and the reaction of fans to a big hit.

“Me encanto,” he said.

“I loved it.”

To help the approximately 250 employees develop a deeper relationship with the sport, Warrior has installed multiple TV sets on the factory floor. They’re always tuned to hockey games. There’s an image of Auston Matthews inside the 52,000 square production center, alongside Mexican and American flags, to celebrate that the mother of the Maple Leafs captain was born in Mexico.

Though the Ducks and Kings are the closest NHL franchises, Cuellar has noticed his coworkers tend not to align themselves with specific teams. Rather, they keep track of the names on the sticks they make -- and feel a special connection when they recognize their handiwork in games unfolding multiple time zones away.

“When there’s a game playing on the television, if I see a player for whom we’re making sticks, we’re so proud that we made that stick on this floor,” Cuellar said in Spanish.

Once the sticks are made in Tijuana, they’re transported to Warrior’s design and development center near San Diego. The Chula Vista, California, site serves as a distribution center for North American-based professional players. Cuellar remembers meeting Martin St. Louis, the Hockey Hall of Famer and current Montreal Canadiens coach, during his visit to the California facility years ago.

A relatively small number of NHL team personnel have traveled to the factory in Tijuana. Jason McMaster, head equipment manager of the Winnipeg Jets, brought his staff there to better understand the equipment used by star center Mark Scheifele, among others.

“Our presence in Mexico, and the people there, are super vital to what Warrior is and to the edge we have in the NHL,” Isaac Garcia, the company’s director of research and development for hockey sticks, said in a recent interview. “Warrior has a huge presence in the NHL, and we compete in the NHL because of this factory in Mexico . . . [The team there is] very in tune with what they’re making, and where it’s going, and how important it is.”

Jared Quartuccio, Warrior’s pro services manager, said visitors often are surprised to learn that the majority of production steps are done by hand, not automated. He estimated that 45 to 50 people touch every pro-level stick with their hands, partially because curve preferences vary from one player to the next.

“People thought there was a machine where you type in specs, push a button and hockey stick comes out,” Quartuccio said. “It is a very, very intense process.”

Quartuccio said sticks are comprised of “aerospace-grade” carbon fiber, bonded by resin, because they must bear substantial force without being bulky. A typical NHL player may begin a season with 24 sticks, then order bundles of 12 as the stock dwindles, Quartuccio said.

It’s common that a player will go through 100 sticks during a single season. (NHL clubs pick up the bill.) Quartuccio estimated that Stars center Matt Duchene required around 145 or 150 last season. That’s a big number, but nowhere close to the single-season Warrior record. That distinction belongs to Ilya Kovalchuk.

He once needed 240.

240!

About 20 actually broke, Quartuccio said. The others were swapped out at a dizzying pace, with new sticks requested for every morning skate and game.

Kovalchuk is an extreme example of a popular trend among NHL players.

“They feel like if the stick isn’t 100 percent to what they need it to be, that can twist their confidence a little bit, which lowers their level of play,” Quartuccio said. “We want to make sure the sticks are consistent and to the level they require all the time, so it’s not something they have to worry about on the ice.”

Warrior’s hockey division began as a separate company called Innovative Hockey, before Warrior Sports founder David Morrow created a single company to manufacture lacrosse and hockey sticks. Composite shafts were Innovative Hockey’s initial foray into equipment during the 1990s, when wooden sticks were still popular; Innovative later produced custom curves for stick blades using molded foam.

Innovative Hockey opened its Tijuana location in 1999, due to space needs and labor costs to meet increasing demand for composite shafts. By the time New Balance -- Warrior Sports’ parent company -- acquired Innovative Hockey in 2005, the Tijuana factory was home to production for one-piece composite sticks and fused sticks.

“In these 25 years I’ve been here, we’ve grown as a company,” said Quartuccio, a San Diego native and longtime roller hockey player. “We do everything in-house, instead of having to source custom molds [from] outside the factory.

“The level of quality, and the environment at our factory, is pretty impressive. The knowledge of the people on how to make the product -- also on the impact the product has on the world of hockey -- is a big deal.”