United Kingdom - £
Having been involved in lacrosse for over 30 decades during which I have played and coached all over the UK and mainland Europe, I can safely say I've made countless friends through this sport. Over the course of the season I get to catch up face to face with a great number of these friends and there are many which I'd almost regard as brothers having known them for so long.
During Covid lockdowns I made an effort to connect with our customers regularly through our various social media platforms and joined a few online lacrosse groups myself in order to keep the fire for our game burning during a time that we could not play. During this strange period I actually made a friend who nearly 3 years later I'm yet to meet face to face.
Curtis Davies and I stuck up a friendship through our love of wooden lacrosse sticks. We first emailed back and forth about a couple of badly broken Williams sticks that I'd spotted on eBay but they were in such a bad way that they really needed a skilled craftsman to bring them back to life. I'd been aware of Curtis through his work on the White Hand Lacrosse page on Facebook where I'd seen some incredible restoration work he had undertaken on sticks that frankly looked like they'd never see a ball again. I reached out to Curtis and showed him some photos on the two Williams sticks I'd found and asked if he thought they could be saved? Although the sticks looked in very rough shape he seemed very confident that he'd be able to bring them back to life, even the one that was in pieces! Curtis explained that he did have a number of sticks he was was working on at the time and I told him there was certainly no rush as I was not short of sticks and went on to explain that I'd collected a pretty impressive selection of sticks over the past few years.
Over the past decade I've tried to attend as many of the Laxcon events run by US Lacrosse as possible and 2022 had planned to attend and was going to meet up with Curtis but as it happened the borders up in Canada where still not open properly thanks to Covid. With many of the main lacrosse brands pulling out of the event it meant that I cancelled the trip and thus Curtis and I were yet to meet up for the beers we had talked about on many occasions. Strangely I remember seeing Curtis at the 2020 Laxcon, he's a dude you'd notice thanks to the mohawk and the fact he towers over many people, had we have met during that weekend of Laxcon I'm sure we'd got on like a house on fire.
Curtis and I had become pretty good buddies during Covid, exchanging a ton of emails, phone calls and many random leads on some great wooden sticks which have worked their way in to our collections. Hope that one day we can meet up and throw a ball around together my friend.