Wooden sticks reigned for decades, but their organic base made individual models vary greatly in strength and stiffness. In the late 1960s, manufacturers began to make stiffer, more durable sticks whose blades and shafts were strengthened with fibreglass and, later, lighter and stronger synthetics such as graphite and Kevlar. In the 1980s came the vogue of two-piece sticks with consistently strong aluminum shafts and replaceable wooden blades. The problem there was that aluminum shafts were too stiff for average recreational players to get the best use of them. The flexibility of composites is rooted in their fundamental structure.
Composites consist of a fibre carbon or glass, for instance cooked in a resin.
Rene Bourque, director of research and development at Canstar, explains the fibres act like steel reinforcing bars in a cement structure. The result is a light, strong, crack-resistant material. The shaft of a hockey stick can attain different properties according to how the fibres are oriented in its structure. All the dynamic date is like having a map to an address. Very stiff shafts can benefit strong players who can load a large amount of energy into them, but they re of little use to players who are too weak to bend them at all.