A foam company, a lacrosse player and a plastic head.

STX grew out of a Baltimore company that made something quite different. Wm. T. Burnett & Co. is a manufacturer of polyurethane foam and synthetic fibres, and the Los Angeles Times, in a 2012 report by Lorraine Mirabella of The Baltimore Sun, described STX as a division of that company, based like its parent in the Pigtown neighbourhood of Baltimore. The same report named the founder as Richard B.C. Tucker, a lacrosse player who graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1951 and then joined Burnett, his family’s business.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Tucker began experimenting with synthetic lacrosse heads during the 1960s, received a patent for the synthetic lacrosse stick in 1970 and founded STX that year. English Wikipedia gives the patent as U.S. Patent 3,507,495 and the original company name as STX Inc., and says the name is a contraction of the word “sticks”, although it is commonly spoken letter by letter as “S-T-X”.

The work was a group effort inside Burnett. A 1995 article in The Baltimore Sun quoted Tucker, then chairman of the Burnett board, naming the team that developed the synthetic head: Joseph Sollers Jr., who later became Burnett’s president, Bill Crawford and Roland Fracalossi, with Tucker himself. English Wikipedia describes Fracalossi as a chemist at Burnett and Crawford as a former University of Virginia goalkeeper, and says a patent application was filed in 1967 and a synthetic head was put into play in a 1968 game between the US Naval Academy and West Point.

The idea behind the product was practical. The Baltimore Sun explained in 1995 that lacrosse sticks had been carved from a single piece of wood, curved at the top to form the head, with a pocket of rawhide, so a broken stick was thrown away whole. The STX design was a pre-strung head with a pocket of synthetic fibres that slipped onto a straight handle; if the handle broke, the head could be moved to a new one. The newspaper reported that STX Inc. began making the new heads and sticks at a plant in Timonium, Maryland, in 1971, and that the plant had since moved to Essex.

Lacrosse, putters, field hockey and ice hockey.

The new heads reached the top of the college game quickly. The Los Angeles Times reported that STX heads were in use at the 1971 NCAA lacrosse championship, and English Wikipedia records that Cornell beat Maryland in that final. The company kept working on the rest of the stick: the Los Angeles Times dated an STX aluminium handle to 1973 and a mesh pocket to 1974.

STX also took its materials work beyond lacrosse. English Wikipedia says the company began developing golf putters in the mid-1970s, helped by ties with the chemical company DuPont, while the Los Angeles Times dated the debut of its putter to 1980. Wikipedia adds that, as of 2021, STX no longer sold golf clubs. The Los Angeles Times dated the company’s field hockey stick to 1993, and listed among its patents an interchangeable putter face insert and a “vibration dampening” field hockey stick.

Ice hockey became a further line. English Wikipedia lists STX ice hockey equipment including shoulder pads, elbow pads, gloves, shin guards and sticks, sold in three lines named Stallion, Surgeon and Halo. Lacrosse remained at the centre: the encyclopedia describes men’s and women’s lacrosse sticks and protective gear, including gloves, pads and women’s eyewear, as the main business.

In 2012 the Los Angeles Times described the company’s Baltimore base as a converted warehouse where designers and engineers developed and tested equipment, while the gear itself was made in factories around the world. The same report said STX had a cooperative agreement with Nike to design and produce lacrosse equipment under the Nike brand, and named Brine and Warrior among its competitors. Jason M. Goger, then STX general manager, told the paper that the company combined field testing with lab testing. Tucker, the report added, still worked in the STX office as chairman of Wm. T. Burnett.

League partnerships carry the name in public. On 23 February 2026 the National Lacrosse League announced an agreement naming STX, LLC its Official Equipment Provider, with a term running through 30 June 2026, covering equipment support for the league and its teams along with digital, broadcast and in-arena features.

Design and documentation.

Protective and playing equipment gives a logo very little room and a great deal to compete with. A helmet is curved in two directions, carries vents, clips and face guards, and may also have to hold a team’s own crest, numbers and stripes. A stick or shaft is long and narrow, so a name usually runs along its length and is read sideways, often from across a field or a rink. A skate boot offers a heel, a tongue and a quarter panel, each seen from a different angle, while a ball is round, scuffed and spinning, and its print is broken up by panels and seams.

Brands working on these surfaces tend to lean on a short word or a simple symbol that survives being stretched, shrunk, repeated or partly hidden. Colour matters too: a mark has to read against team colours it does not control, under floodlights and on television.

Each guide that follows sets out who started the brand, who has owned it since, and how its name and mark have appeared on equipment, separating what independent sources record from what a company says about itself.

Three letters, a head and a handle.

The STX name is a piece of compression in its own right. English Wikipedia says the three letters are a contraction of “sticks”, the product the company was set up to make, yet the name is usually spoken as three separate letters. That gives the brand a short, all-capital mark that can be printed along a narrow handle, moulded or printed on a plastic head, or repeated on gloves and pads without needing much room.

The product itself shaped how the name travels. Because the 1970 design separated the head from the handle, as The Baltimore Sun described in 1995, the head became an object in its own right — something a player could keep, move to a new handle and recognise by its maker. The handle, from the aluminium shafts the Los Angeles Times dated to 1973 onwards, became a separate surface for the brand as well.

The company name has also changed shape over the years, from STX Inc., the name The Baltimore Sun used for the 1971 manufacturer, to STX, LLC in the National Lacrosse League’s 2026 announcement, while the three letters have stayed the same. Its links to Wm. T. Burnett run through that whole history: the synthetic head came from a team inside the foam company, and the Los Angeles Times still described STX as a Burnett division in 2012.

Across lacrosse, field hockey and ice hockey, and a golf line that Wikipedia says had ended by 2021, the one constant is the word on the equipment. The sports and products have changed, but the three letters on them have not, and the Los Angeles Times still found the company in Baltimore, where it began in 1970, in 2012.

For a design guide, STX shows how a name shortened from the product it describes can work as a mark on long, narrow and curved equipment, and how a single patented part can become the thing a brand is known by. Compare it with Warrior, which the Los Angeles Times named as a lacrosse competitor in 2012, and Nike, for which STX designed and produced lacrosse equipment under a cooperative agreement. For this guide we use field navy, signal red and mesh white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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