The start of the 2012 lacrosse season in College Park, MD is less than 1 month away. On February 18th, the Hartford Hawks will come to town and we’ll get our first taste of what this year’s Terps have in store for us. In addition to finding out who will step up and fill the giant holes left by guys like Grant Catalino, Ryan Young, and Brian Farrell, we’ll learn if Under Armour successfully filled the void left by STX. For the gear heads on the internet, that might be the more burning question right now.

Recall that last summer, Under Armour threw its hat into the lacrosse gear market. Their foray into lacrosse equipment all but guaranteed that Maryland (a UA sponsored school) would be outfitted with UA’s latest and greatest and STX would be expelled from campus. When classes began last fall, we got confirmation that Under Armour was indeed supplying the Terps with gloves, arm protection, and sticks. Shortly thereafter, word was filtering out of College Park that the initial reviews were less than glowing. That didn’t surprise me and I think most people considered last fall to be beta testing for the product line.

That was a couple of months ago and surely Under Armour has worked out the bugs and provided the Terps with a game-ready version 2.0 of their gear. Right? In the words of the great Lee Corso, “not so fast my friend!” Here we are, just a few short weeks away from game play and the gear situation in College Park is apparently still not settled to the satisfaction of some. We got an email from a verified source close to the Terps program that said not only are the gloves not satisfactory (to put it kindly), but that the sticks were not performing either. We wondered about the gloves, but the sticks were news to us. Our source says that “they have broken or warped within a week tops”.

After receiving this email, I went to the Maryland Men’s Lacrosse Facebook page and perused some pictures of the team’s first practice.

K18s in the mix at the start of spring practice. Courtesy of MD Lax Facebook

I’m certainly not a gear expert but I’m pretty sure that I see a fair number of players wearing STX K18s. Did a few boxes of gloves fall off of the truck on the way down I-95 or have some of the players opted out of the Under Armour gloves? The answer is that Under Armour met with the team and has kindly allowed the Terps to wear whatever gloves they want for the time being. For the veterans, that means the option of last year’s STX gloves. The newcomers to the program will likely still wear the UA gloves. New Under Armour gloves are expected to arrive in College Park on Friday. The same allowances are being made for the sticks, according to our source and new sticks aren’t due until sometime in the next 3 weeks. As you know, it’s nice to have a gamer dialed in without worrying about it breaking, so expect to see a few non-Under Armour heads in the mix.

We emailed Under Armour yesterday for comment and they have yet to respond. We’ll be sure to update the post if we hear back from UA. For now, it looks like the situation is under control even if it’s not completely settled. While we hated seeing STX go, we’re pulling for the other Baltimore based company to come through with a winner.