Hockey Stick Furniture Gets Functional

Often at MIT, a student is walking around campus with something they’ve created—a circuit board, a robot, a prototype. Other students see this creation and get ideas.

A scene just like that pushed electrical engineer Glenn Tournier '04, SM '06, toward a hobby that’s kept him building for the past 12 years.

What Tournier saw was a coffee table made out of hockey sticks. Tournier, then a member of MIT’s ice hockey team, liked what he saw.

“I’ve always been hands-on and I played on the team so I thought, ‘Wait, I have source of a lot of hockey sticks. This idea seems cool, but how can I make that better?’” he remembers.

Tournier began collecting broken hockey sticks to put his idea into action.

“People would throw sticks away after practice, so I just started collecting them. I would ask guys when they broke their stick if I could have it,” he explains.

After just one season, Tournier collected enough broken sticks to build his first piece of furniture: a coffee table. The Course 16 alumnus created it in the AeroAstro machine shop during spring break of his junior year. The table was made entirely of used MIT hockey sticks.

With guidance from the machine stop staff, Tournier was able to master the finer points of building furniture with old hockey sticks.

“I could ask the machine shop for help. The furniture making tricks of the trade came from my time at MIT,” he says.

Tournier kept building after he left MIT and has created everything from clocks to headboards from old hockey sticks at his shop in Somerville, not far from MIT. He recently began selling some of his designs through online craft retailer Etsy.

Where does Tournier get his broken sticks these days? MIT alumni of course. He’s a member of the MIT alumni hockey squad.

“All the alumni know this is something that I do. There’s still an MIT connection. Alumni are still supplying sticks, 12 years later,” he says.