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white, boxy helmet hangs on the wall of a small second-floor conference room. It’s the old bucket style from 1986, with a flat front and ties in the back, branded “Sport Helmets” across the chin pad.
One row down dangles a newer, sleeker red-and-black design popular on lacrosse fields today. The helmet is elongated and streamlined. It tilts down from the back and has a ratcheting system to tighten in the back.
Those helmets making up a two-row, 18-piece display serve as a visual timeline and proof of the evolution of Cascade Lacrosse.
“We took a white water rafting helmet and put a lacrosse mask onto it,” said Steve Moore, director of manufacturing. “Look at the rest of the line and how that’s kind of evolved.”
Cascade, headquartered in Liverpool, N.Y., is the industry leader in lacrosse headgear. The company was the first to use the expanded polypropylene foam in helmets and launched a revolutionary women’s headgear product, the LX, in November. Its equipment has touched nearly every lacrosse field in America.
The helmets are born on the second floor, which features the new research and development wing. It’s covered with drills, drawings and model-making materials, looking like a cross between a scientist’s lab and a child’s playroom. The crown jewels are two 3-D printers.
A team of designers have tablets and computer-assisted drawing programs, but pencil and paper is the quickest sketching method, said Jesse Newman, senior developer for headgear. They consult with scientists and doctors, including ophthalmologists on what facemask colors dilate players’ eyes.
A large glass window on the first floor reveals Cascade’s in-house testing facility, which tests the compliance with safety standards. Two impact-testing rigs look like medieval guillotines, but head forms suspended in the air, waiting to be dropped onto a padded anvil below, stand in for the blades.
Each head is filled with a triaxial accelerometer and microchips to measure the force of impact. The helmets, sometimes heated or chilled beforehand, are dropped from heights of two, four and six feet in six different head positions. There’s even a modified, spring-loaded pitching machine that tests the impact of slashes.
Cascade’s ball cannon that tests how the helmet and headgear withstand shots used to look like a potato gun. Now, it more closely resembles a high-powered rifle, firing into a cage with another mounted head. A high-speed camera records the impact of the ball with the helmet. Each head form’s face is even painted white to see if the inside of the helmet touches the face.
The large drops test the effectiveness of Cascade’s Seven Technology liner system, which is a series of small cylindrical tubes that compress and bulge out laterally on impact to absorb high-energy hits. It took about four or five years from inception to production and went through more than 100 variations of the design that’s now inside its top model of helmets.
The two-foot drops test the Poron XRD, which is a soft material that makes direct contact with the head, providing comfort and absorbing low-energy impacts. Each men’s helmet has to withstand a 70-mph shot and a 60-inch drop.
“We could make an incredibly stiff helmet and it will score great in the lab, but it would be like wearing a brick on your head,” Moore said.
The equipment then undergoes field testing. The LX was tested by more than 700 girls and women ages 6 to 23 over the course of three years. Newman spent more than four years working on the safety standards for the new equipment.
In the back half of the Cascade building, dozens of rows of large boxes tower over the production lines below. Drills dangle from the ceiling and mounted containers dispense sections of the Seven Technology like candy. Everything is stored in precise locations based on importance. White visors are kept closer than navy because they rank first and third, respectively, in popularity.
The lines end with a dedicated quality checker. If the worker sees something amiss, he or she can pull the cord for a red light bulb above to illuminate, alerting a supervisor. The number of people in a line differs, but they hand each product off one-by-one with the goal of 45 seconds per person. Every worker checks the job of the one before, because they’re all cross-trained at every position.
Above the end of each line hangs a red LED counter, totaling the number of finished products. Dry erase boards show the goal for each hour.
“Just keeping score just like a team,” Moore said. “We want to be efficient and these guys get it. They’re competitive from this line to that line. There’s a lot of trash talking going on and that’s the environment that we want.”
Cascade won’t say how many helmets it produces in a day, week, month or year. But every night, UPS drops off an empty trailer on the loading dock in the back of the production room while the old — hopefully full — one is hauled away.
Each order is received, produced and shipped out within 48 hours.
Since its founding in 1986, Cascade has revolutionized the helmet industry while grabbing a strong hold as the leader in headgear. Thirteen of the 18 teams in the NCAA tournament last season wore Cascade helmets, as well as 40 of the last 48 Division I champions.
“If all of a sudden you took Cascade off the map, we don’t even know whether lacrosse would keep on being played next year,” said Ryan Demorest, brand manager. “We have that much of a responsibility to this sport.”