How to match your hockey equipment colors

Pick one piece to carry the color and keep the rest quiet. Your gloves and your stick share the same frame on every shift, so those two decide whether a kit looks deliberate or accidental. Tape is the cheapest color you own. And if your team has a rule about gear, that rule beats anything we say here.

One piece leads, the rest gets out of the way

Stick, gloves, helmet, jersey, pants, tape, laces. Seven chances to add a color, and you need one. A kit built on one color with a lot of black or white around it reads as a choice. A kit with four colors in it reads as whatever was on sale that year.

Let the stick lead. It is the largest colored surface you carry, it moves more than anything else you own, and it is the piece people pick out from the stands.

If your gloves are already the loudest thing in your bag, you have two options and both are fine. Build around the gloves and let the stick be the second voice, or accept that you are running two colors and keep them the same two all season.

Gloves sit closest to the stick

Your hands are where the eye lands. Gloves and the lower shaft take up the same corner of every photo anyone takes of you, so glove color does more work than jersey color.

Three combinations that hold up:

• Black gloves with any stick. The safe one. Dark hands make a colored shaft look intended rather than loud.
• White gloves with a colored stick. Cleaner, and harder to keep that way.
• Gloves in the same family as the stick. Not the same shade, the same family. Navy gloves with a blue stick, red gloves with a red one.

The one to avoid is two colors that are close but not the same. Red gloves next to a pink shaft look like a mistake. Black gloves next to that same pink shaft look like a decision. A near miss reads worse than a clean contrast.

Leave the helmet out of it

Helmets come in a short list of colors and most of that list is white, black and navy. Treat yours as fixed and build around it. Hunting for a helmet that matches a stick is the tail wagging the dog.

Do not paint it. Whether a coating affects a helmet’s certification is a question for the company that made it, not for us, and we’re not going to guess on the one piece of gear that protects your head.

Tape is the cheapest color decision in the bag

A few dollars of tape changes how a blade and the top of a shaft read. It is also the only color on this list you can change between periods.

Black tape on a colored blade draws a hard line where the blade ends. White tape lets the blade stay one bright shape. Colored tape is the cheap way to find out whether you can live with a color before you buy a stick in it.

Players argue about whether blade tape gives a goalie something to read. We have not measured that and we will not pretend otherwise. Pick the tape you like looking at.

When the team kit fights your stick

Team colors are not your decision, so start there and work backwards. If the sweater is green and you play Senior, we build a green one and your afternoon is easy. If the sweater is purple, nothing we make will match it, and that is worth knowing before you order rather than after.

Then the honest part. A stick that does not match the jersey is not a problem. Nobody on the ice is grading your palette, and the whole point of a colored stick is that it is not the same as the four leaning next to it.

One rule outranks everything above: if your league, club or coach says gear has to match, it has to match. Ask before you spend the money.

Matching and clashing both work. Drifting does not.

Two kits do the job. One color plus neutrals, which looks tidy. Or one color set deliberately against everything else, which looks like you meant it. A pink stick with black gloves and white tape is the second kind, and it is the easiest look here to pull off.

What does not work is drift, where you add a color at a time over three seasons and end up with five. Decide on the one color first, then hold the line when something cheap and yellow turns up in a clearance bin.

What we will not tell you

We do not publish a hex code or a Pantone number for our colors, because we have not measured one. Anybody reading a color code off a product photo is reading their own screen, not the stick. Our pink is our pink, and you will know it when it is in your hands.

We also won’t tell you a matched kit helps you play. It doesn’t. This page is about how your gear looks, which matters as much as you want it to and not one bit more.

What we build, and what that leaves you

Eight colors across three sizes, and black is not one of them.

• Senior: pink, blue, green, orange. 77 flex, 385 g, about 65 inches (165 cm).
• Intermediate: pink, red, yellow, blue. 50 flex, 320 g, about 62 inches (157 cm).
• Junior: light blue, light pink. 20 flex, 260 g, about 58 inches (147 cm).

A Maila is one color from the butt end to the blade, with the wordmark printed in white, so a neutral is already in the mix. Size decides the flex and the weight. Color decides nothing about how it plays, and every color in a size costs the same. Which of them read best against white ice is a different question, and hockey stick colors on the ice answers that one. If you are still choosing between the two adult sizes, the hockey stick size chart settles it faster than a color will.

Common questions

Does my stick have to match my gloves? No. Matching gloves and stick is one good look, and black gloves under a colored stick is another. The combination to avoid is two colors that nearly match, like red gloves against a pink shaft.

What color tape goes with a colored stick? Black if you want the blade to read as its own shape, white if you want the blade to stay bright. Both work on all eight of our colors, and tape is cheap enough to try both before you commit.

Can I get a stick in my team’s colors? Sometimes. We build pink, blue, green and orange in Senior, then pink, red, yellow and blue in Intermediate, and light blue and light pink in Junior. If your team plays in purple, nothing we stock will match. If your team plays in black, we are not going to build that, which is more or less the reason this company exists.

Get the fit right, then pick the color

Color is the fun decision and the one you can make last. Fit is the one worth getting right, so read how to choose a hockey stick for length, flex and handedness, or run your height and weight through the size finder and have it settled in about ten seconds. Then go pick a color from the sticks. The longer argument for owning one that isn’t black is in colored hockey sticks.