Walking through Warrior Sports facility in Sterling Heights, Mich., one might feel like a marionette. Suspended spools of yarn create the illusion of a web as you peer through the factory. For 24 hours a day, six days a week, these 20 knitting machines operate like spiders, spitting out wondrous patterns from the raw materials in their abdomens.

“The Warp isn’t a stick,” Warrior founder Dave Morrow says. “It’s a technology platform.”

Welcome to Warp City, where Warrior innovates around the clock. The 27,000-square-foot facility houses everything related to the conception and production of the Warp, a revolutionary line of sticks that has removed the complexity of stringing and made significant inroads in both the men’s and women’s games.

Each of the knitting machines weighs more than 3 tons and utilizes 1,400 needles. They read 3D files from a USB drive to turn more than a dozen cones of polypropylene and polyethylene into stick pockets with the precise specs of a new Warp Pro, Next, Junior or Mini.

High-end pockets used by pro athletes like Rob Pannell and Kylie Ohlmiller — with their specific sweet spots and release points — take just 20 minutes to complete. Some youth products can be done in 10. Knit pockets assure consistency, durability and accuracy, qualities that in a strung mesh pocket might be compromised by inclement weather or simply a knot come undone.

Pannell, one of the first pros to adopt the Warp as his stick of choice shortly after its introduction in 2016, marvels at how the facility has grown from just a few machines to what it is today. “It’s been amazing to see not only the development of the Warp itself, but Warp City,” he says. “Everything comes together right here.”

The factory also features five injection molding presses, which melt plastic and inject it into a mold, retaining its shape when it cools. Kevlar bonds keep the pocket in place.

From there, someone like Zach Currier, a Warrior pro athlete but also a product development engineer, can screw the head to an Evo shaft, trot over to “the cage” and wail away on a goal.

Currier, who graduated from Princeton (also Morrow’s alma mater) with a degree in structural engineering, noted the benefits of the Warp’s three-stitch knitted pattern versus the repetitive single-stitch design of mesh.

“We have three stitches for every strand,” Currier says. “We have three times as much creativity.”

That might be the coolest thing about Warp City, the interplay between industry experts. Currier, Pannell, Ohlmiller or any other athlete in the Warrior/Brine family can provide feedback on a product on any given morning, and have a new prototype in their hands that afternoon. The technicians can customize every stick down to a single stitch.

“It’s an intellectually powerful, dynamic environment,” Morrow says.