How to String a Goalie Lacrosse Head

The key to getting a good channel and decent pocket on a goalie head is to have a tight top string. If you lay your lacrosse mesh out by your head, you will notice that there are almost too many diamonds for the width of your lacrosse head.

To compensate for this, you can pull two diamond rows over, instead of one, when attaching your lacrosse mesh to your goalie head. This is demonstrated in the next photo and illustrated above by the red circles.

If you are new to stringing lacrosse heads and are unfamiliar with the lacrosse top string knot, you can visit our Lacrosse Top String Styles for a more in depth explanation.

While there are many ways to string a lacrosse goalie head, I tend to stick to two main tactics when stringing goalie pockets: Create a natural runway, also referred to as a channel, in your goalie pocket; which works best for beginners and is the one I most frequently use. For more advanced lacrosse goalies, or for stringers looking to try a new style, there is the Quad-Sidewall Theory.

This tutorial assumes you are familiar with lacrosse sidewall knots and top strings.

The first step in stringing a lacrosse goalie stick is to pull the second diamond in your lacrosse mesh down as far as you can. This was the third sidewall hole on this warrior head shown in the picture.

As I said above, a tight top string is one of the keys to a great lacrosse goalie pocket. So, when your pulling down the third row in your lacrosse mesh, you will probably have to skip two holes. After that, only skip one hole per diamond until you reach the midpoint of your lacrosse head.

Once at the midpoint in your lacrosse head we will transition from a single KSI to a skip with another KSI. Like a Double Knotted SI, we will take our sidewall string and loop it through your lacrosse mesh twice. Unlike Double Knotted SI, we will only lock in one of the two diamonds. Just like above, skip one hole and proceed to lock the mesh in place.

This is the transition mentioned above where you will skip one hole, row. If you’re a stringer and have a name for this, please feel free to comment below.

Continue using the new pattern down the sidewall of your goalie head.

Once at the bottom of your lacrosse head, we will want to finish the goalie pocket off with less depth. After two times of skipping one hole, proceed to skip two holes and lock your pocket off.

Your bottom string will vary depending on which lacrosse head you use.

On goalie lacrosse sticks, I usually skip a diamond on each side and we’ve the bottom string up and down, twice on each side

While it might be tempting to string a deeper or tighter channel, beware that this might affect a goalies accuracy when clearing the lacrosse ball.

When stringing lacrosse shooting strings on a goalie lacrosse pocket, you want to make sure the ball rolls off the shooters and not hook. In some instances if your shooters are too low or tight this can occur.