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: When Growth Changes the Game
This Stoppage Time edition of the Pitch to Pro podcast features a focused look at the role of vision in entrepreneurship, regional development, and professional sports ownership, all through the lens of Northwest Arkansas’ rapid transformation. In this short segment from Episode 45, we revisit a conversation with Ross Cully that highlights how NWA’s explosive growth has forced local leaders to recalibrate their benchmarks, no longer comparing the region to peer markets it has now surpassed.
You’ll hear reflections on what it means to think beyond the present, both for cities and businesses. As NWA evolves, local leaders are wrestling with the need to plan infrastructure and policy around who the region wants to become in 20 years, not just who it is today. That forward-thinking mindset also parallels the entrepreneurial journey, where taking leaps before others see the potential is often what sets long-term success in motion.
Ross shares the early days of building The Harvest Group, a story filled with grit, risk, and the necessity of persuading others to believe in a vision that didn’t yet exist. These same principles carry over into the creation of Ozark United FC, where club founders are again being asked to forecast trends and commit to an idea ahead of the market.
This clip captures the tension and excitement of growth, the burden and privilege of leadership, and the deep need for clarity of vision, whether you're shaping a company, a sports club, or an entire region’s future. It’s a snapshot of the ideas driving NWA’s momentum and the people courageous enough to lead it.
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.
Speaker 2:I had a different guest, mervyn Gibourage of the University of Arkansas Economic Center for Research and Development, and they've actually had to change their countries of benchmark, you know, with the NWA Council and all of that, because we kind of had surpassed a lot of it and it made us look really good and we were kind of patting ourselves on the back and it was like, okay, our comparable markets now have shifted and changed and we need to set our sights higher. And I think that is a definite moment where it's a signifier of kind of the growth and development of NWA and kind of where it's at.
Speaker 3:For sure. Yeah, and I think you know we're talking to in essence is vision and something as an entrepreneur that I've had to learn a lot about and experience. And I think when we think about our area that's growing and changing, that's another important thing for us to have. Many of us who've lived here a long time have grumbled about the change. It's more traffic, it's this, it's that. The other way to look at that is to look forward with vision of the good things that are coming.
Speaker 3:I think this enterprise, ozark United, is really one that takes vision to see not what we have been as an area, not even maybe, where we are, but where are we going, and to see that and get ahead of that and, as an investor, having vision and spotting trends and hitting that timing. The point you just made are critical and you've spoken about this before on the podcast. But when you think about professional sports, a lot of people look up at the headline grabbing valuations of the Lakers or all the different transactions that happened Celtics, mavericks and say kind of duh, like I would have made that move if I had the opportunity. But if you rewind and you read the whole story, a lot of the people when they got in to those teams it was not a no-brainer, I mean, and there was a lot of laughing and naysaying and, you know, eyebrow raising when they got into professional sports. But when you spot trends, when you have vision and you hit the right timing, that's when sometimes magic can happen.
Speaker 2:And I think you're spot on and you know we'll talk about. We'll dive a little bit more into that, into soccer, specifically in NWA and in the league. You obviously had some vision and some grit to you know. Get to where you are now with Harvest Group. Talk a little bit about you know that journey and lessons learned and maybe some parallels that you might be able to to draw for any entrepreneurs out there listening or or you know folks thinking about vision and NWA and I mean there's, there's some intense.
Speaker 2:You know I had Nelson Peacock on the on the podcast early early days and some of the decision makers for the area. You start thinking about things that impact people's lives as an entrepreneur and a CEO, impacting the people's lives of your company based on decisions that you make. It's a heavy burden and not something to take lightly. Right, and having vision and foresight to do the best that you can with the information that you have. That was something that hit home for me in planning city infrastructure and who do we want to be in 20 years? You have to start planning for that now. Talk more about that from your lens as a builder and an entrepreneur.
Speaker 3:You know, my Harvest Group journey has been a 20-year journey, and so there's several chapters at this point, and I think that's helpful as we think about building the club here as well. But in the early days you're just scrapping and you're trying to survive. You're figuring it out as you go, you're hopefully surrounding yourselves with as much wisdom and counsel as you can. But it takes some people to see that vision and take a leap of faith, to take a chance to believe what they can't see, to have the same vision that you have. And so for us, that was early clients, early employees that decided to, you know, believe in us even though we had no office, you know, we had no income, you know, obviously, at the start. And so those early days, each stage has exciting parts to it and hard parts, and sometimes we can look back with nostalgia and it becomes mythology. But those early days can be really, really hard.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us for this stoppage time special of the Pitch to Pro podcast. If you've enjoyed the conversation, you can click watch the full episode here. Be sure to tune in next Thursday for a new episode of the Pitch to Pro podcast, the official podcast of Ozark United FC, Available on YouTube, Instagram and everywhere you get your podcasts.