Photos by Nike // Words by Lindsay Woods

We walked into, what I’d like to call the “hang zone”, of Nike World HQ’s Tiger Woods building, a room constantly being re-furnished to match the current activation. This week it happened to be filled with video game consoles, couches and a pro-shop styled custom stick stringing station for the participants of Nike Lacrosse’s, The Ride. A week long intense training and mentorship showcase of top lacrosse high school players from across the United States.

We were there to get familiar with the experience these high school juniors were undergoing, however, up to this point we had no clue that there was an unveiling about to happen.

There it was, the yet unseen, Nike’s Huarache V lacrosse cleat. The players, media, and bloggers alike, wanted to get down to the details; what’s it made of, what colorways will it come in, how much will it cost? We decided to take a moment to find out the real story behind the shoe. More importantly, how did senior designer Jeff Rasmussen himself, influence the design of the shoe.

-Jeff Rasmussen, Senior Designer

When you were assigned to lead the design of the Huarache V did you feel that you brought a specific perspective to the drawing board?

Outside of being just a technology that helps a player play their best, the design of the cleat is very important as we always want the player to perform better than the previous athlete. That’s something that I’m very proud of when I look at this shoe, I think it helps a lacrosse player play better than he/she has ever before.

Coming into lacrosse, like I was thrown into a sport that I didn’t know a whole lot about. I didn’t know anything about this sport, so what could I possibly bring to it? But with 13 years of designing training shoes, football and baseball cleats, and even before that designing car interiors and an internship in consumer electronics under my belt, I wasn’t worried. I try to always take all this experience with me to the drawing board, knowing that I have a great amount of knowledge and really great technical skills.

In essence, become the athlete's scribe. Just tell me what you need, and I’ll do it for you. I know how athletes move, I’ve studied many hours of game tape in the Nike Research Lab and I have years of experience as an athlete myself. Although I don’t have the same perspective as a lacrosse player, I have this whole other wealth of knowledge and perspective coming from other sports and other projects.

Do you find that all this experience in different fields has helped you?

For sure, I mean the more variety of experiences you’ve had the more exposure you’ve had. When young athletes grow up and they’ve only played one sport, I think it hinders their growth because they don’t have the perspective of say moving like a basketball player or a football player or being on a team versus not being on a team, being in an individual sport. I think that having all these experiences makes you a better athlete, or a better designer for sure.

I think playing sports can translate into your professional life. This is not something I normally do, stand in front of a 150 people and give speeches. But because I’ve played sports, I’ve played team sports, competitive sports. I get that adrenaline rush, that like gametime mentality. I feel this surge everyday when I play a sport, whether it be pick up or an organized league, this is the same sort of fight or flight mentality. You just take your experiences, your different perspectives and you relate them to a new challenge.

-Rasmussen

You brought a chinese finger trap as a prop to explain your shoe inspiration. How does one draw inspiration from such a random toy?

It’s one of those things, that I’ve had laying around my house since I was a kid. It’s just something that I’ve always played with, that I’ve always been fascinated with, this is cool. One day it just hit me, why can’t we just take the same sort of novel idea, make it novel in footwear.

So basically, you’re saying stay open to new sources of inspiration?

Yes. It’s you have stuff around you constantly, that idea, turns into another idea, turns into another idea, it’s just a way ideas evolve. You have stuff around you you surround yourself with smart people, cool objects, and then eventually, those ideas mold into new ideas and that’s how things are invented. They’re not invented in a vacuum. The Wright brother’s didn’t invent flying in a vacuum. They were master mechanics who knew how to build kick ass bicycles so they just thought maybe we can sorta do the same thing but we can glide off a hill. They didn’t just wake up one day and were like, “I’m going to build an airplane”, no. They were amazing machinists and amazing inventors before that.

Is there anything that has inspired your recently outside of the world of sports?

You know this sounds corny, but the new Mad Max movie. I just loved the fact that they did real stunts, and it wasn’t a watered down, candy-coated action movie. It was like a real live throwback to an action movie. They created 23 new motorcycles, I’m really into motorcycles, and they’re all amazing and creative in their own way. Stuff like that inspires me, outside of my little footwear world.

And again, I love National Geographic, nature, and so you just take all these things. We were just in Redwoods, camping in Mount Hood, hikes, we do hikes all the time. The normal, Oregonian cliché types of activities. [/q]

Have you already starting to think of your next designs?

Yea, for sure. I think that anybody that’s in a design field, art field or any entrepreneurial field is like always sort of moving on, because that’s what keeps you excited.

The Huarache V will be available in store and online in October.