Pitch to Pro
Pitch to Pro is the official podcast of Ozark United FC. This will be our platform to tell our story about the club and the special place that we call home, Northwest Arkansas. This is a journey. We want to bring you along for the ride. We'll share what's going on behind the curtain, help educate the community at large about soccer, Our league, and give updates on the progress of the club along the way.
Together, we'll explore and unpack our journey to professional soccer, the magic that is NWA, our community, and talk all things soccer from on the pitch to behind the scenes, telling the story of our club.
Pitch to Pro
Stoppage Time Special: Growth Beyond the Giants
Welcome to this week’s Stoppage Time edition of the Pitch to Pro podcast, where we feature a powerful five-minute excerpt from one of our previous full-length conversations. In this episode, we take you deep into the economic transformation of Northwest Arkansas — a region whose growth story is often reduced to headlines about big-name companies. But there’s more to the evolution than just corporate giants, and this clip brings out the layered dynamics behind how real, sustainable regional development takes shape.
Our guest, Mervin Jebaraj, breaks down the phases of growth, starting in the 1990s when expansion was driven directly by the region's “big three” corporations and the university. That first wave was about attracting talent to those anchor institutions. The early 2000s saw a second wave: businesses that existed primarily to serve or collaborate with those core companies began thriving. Then came a third generation — companies that supported the support companies — creating a complex, interdependent economic engine that fueled unprecedented job growth.
But the conversation takes a turn when we explore the present and emerging future. Growth in Northwest Arkansas today is increasingly defined by lifestyle and infrastructure: healthcare, education, hospitality, and other services required to support the ballooning population. The pandemic highlighted this shift even more. Remote workers flocked to the area, bringing jobs from outside and proving that quality of life can be just as magnetic as corporate opportunity. Still, the region isn’t quite at the point where people move without a plan — like they might to New York, Austin, or LA — but it’s inching closer.
This episode also addresses what it means to be a “self-sustaining” region — one that can attract people and businesses simply because of what it is, not just who’s hiring. Mervin paints a picture of what it would take for Northwest Arkansas to become one of those places where people show up, figure it out, and still thrive even if Plan A doesn’t work. That kind of organic, resilient growth is aspirational — and, according to this conversation, within reach.
To close, we look at how the region measures itself. Initially benchmarked against metros of similar size, Northwest Arkansas consistently led in key indicators. So, the comparison group shifted to larger aspirational peers like Kansas City and Omaha — and the region still holds its own. This clip offers a compelling window into how smart, long-term growth is being mapped, managed, and measured. If you’ve ever wondered how a mid-sized community becomes a nationally respected economic player, this Stoppage Time episode is a masterclass in just that.
Welcome to the Stoppage Time edition of the Pitch to Pro podcast. This is a highlight reel of some of the best moments from the show so far, and every other week we will be bringing you a special five to seven minute segment featuring the best stories, tales and moments of the podcast. Everybody knows that it's happening now, especially with the national and international attention that we've gotten, but kind of bring people into your world a little bit. What are some of those things that have been the key drivers and how we look at that from your lens?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you think of the original growth boom here in the 90s, that was largely because the three major companies here and the university were growing, particularly the three companies, and so a lot of that growth was those companies doing so well and attracting people to work for them. And then the early 2000s decade, if you will, right up until that recession, was growth that people who wanted to work with those companies were generating. So it wasn't directly, it was somewhat in those companies, but more so in the companies that wanted to work with the three big companies here. And then, in this most recent decade that just passed, is the companies that work with the companies that work with the big companies. So you support yes, all the support companies here, and so, by and large, north of sharpens, those growth has, um, been driven by job growth. So it was either job growth through big companies or the companies that worked for them, other companies that worked for the companies that worked for them. Yeah, um, but I think we're, you know, not quite there completely yet, but we're starting to get to the self-sustaining growth that isn't dependent on one of these companies adding jobs.
Speaker 2:At this point it's the kind of business growth that you're seeing and the job growth that you're seeing leisure and hospitality industry, healthcare and education that's mostly just to sustain the growth in the population here, so it's not directly related to those companies in that sense. Except, there's all these people here, and all these people need their hair cut, need places to go eat, need places to get their teeth cleaned, need hospitals, all of that, everything of that nature. So that's the kind of growth that you're seeing. So it's still sort of in relationship with the with jobs, uh, but you know, during the pandemic we saw some evidence of this with the remote workers. So now it's not, uh, we're not quite there yet. We're not one of those cities where people just move without a job, yeah, and then find something when they get there. So we're not. You got new york, right, austin, or something like that. People just like I'm just gonna move here, yeah, like one of, and then find something when they get there. So we're not Think of New York, right, austin, or something like that.
Speaker 2:People are just like, I'm just going to move to New York, yeah, like one of those things. Right, I'll figure it out, figure it out. Yeah, and I think there are people that do that here. It's not a very big thing, not at all. Well, certainly, over the pandemic with remote working people, pandemic with remote working people were just like I'm just going to move there and figure it out. And you saw a lot of population during the pandemic here, yeah, north of shork, and saw now most of these people had jobs somewhere else, so they aren't quite doing the. You know I'm going to move there, just find a job. But that that will be the sort of next phase of our growth is just become self-sustaining. Where you become that region you go. Well, I'm going to go try my luck and know what to show up and sell.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's it. That's that next step change. But yeah, I'm going to move to LA and become an actor, but really a waiter or whatever. Or whatever the dream is People go to New York to be XYZ.
Speaker 2:In Austin, be XYZ. I think those are large self-sustaining yeah relation centers down that they just move there because they know that's where there's a lot of opportunity. Yeah, they fail at the first three things they tried. They'll still have a fourth thing to try.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So if we're not in New York, we're not in LA, we're not in Austin, what are some comp markets that we compare ourselves to or that you guys I know you guys, the NWA Council, I know you guys work together on some different projects and things like that what are some comp markets that kind of we look at and and why do we look at other comp markets and across what metrics?
Speaker 2:yeah, so I mean that's, as always, the why we look at uh comp markets is because you know if you want to be able to benchmark yourself against some standard right I think originally, when we started looking at comp markets, uh, we were thinking of places that were like us in terms of size.
Speaker 2:So we're a region of 560, 575, 575, 000 people, which isn't terribly large, um, although I'm sure if you grew up here this sounds like it's gotten so much larger. But you know there are places a million people or more, a lot of those places around the country. So sure, uh, we're not that um. So we used to compare ourselves to places that more or less with the same size as us and we found that over the years you know, we two to three years on a variety of different metrics like job growth, the business group, educational attainment and things of that nature we were routinely, you know, ranking ourselves number one compared to places that were just like us. So then we try to be a little more aspirational and pick some larger metro areas that are in our region so you think of Kansas City or Omaha and places like that and then we would consistently be beating those metro areas too.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us for this Stoppage Time special of the Pitch to Pro podcast at Metro areas too.