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Arkansas is a state that loves its sports. While football, basketball, and mountain biking come to mind as favorites, another sport is making inroads in Arkansas, particularly in youth sports. Lacrosse is often considered an East Coast sport, but when Dave McDaniel moved to the state in 2013, he quickly became involved in the growing lacrosse movement.
Dave started playing lacrosse as a freshman in high school in Shreveport, Louisiana. While he enjoyed it, he didn’t pursue it in college. Instead, McDaniel joined the army and was sent to Germany as his first duty station. Strangely enough, that’s where he picked up the sport again.
“It’s actually kind of a funny story,” McDaniel said. “When you get to a new unit, you report to the commander and introduce yourself. He was just asking me the same questions he asked everybody, “What sport did you play in high school?”
McDaniel’s new commander was a former goalie for the lacrosse team at Towson University, an NCAA Division I program out of Maryland. The commander had just one question for Dave McDaniel. “Do you have your gear with you?”
McDaniel brought his lacrosse equipment back to Germany when he returned from his leave for Christmas, and his commander took him to a lacrosse club in Frankfurt. McDaniel was able to play again, but he also had the opportunity to coach the game for the first time. He taught mostly German children the basics of the game while he was serving in the U.S. Army.
After eight years of service, McDaniel moved to Northwest Arkansas. He arrived in 2013 and enrolled at the University of Arkansas, which has a men’s club lacrosse team. While he considered playing, school, work and family life with his wife and two young children didn’t leave much time for such a commitment. He took a job with Walmart and reached out to a local club to see if there were any opportunities to play men’s lacrosse. They asked McDaniel to come to a meeting. When McDaniel arrived, he found out it was a coaches meeting, and he’d been assigned as an assistant coach to the high school age group.
“They were so desperate for people with lacrosse knowledge back then—any lacrosse knowledge—to basically help out,” McDaniel coached that year, and by 2016, he had taken on the head coaching job. “We took that team to the Oklahoma State Championship. It was pretty exciting, and we lost, but it just showed what we were capable of, like the athletes in Northwest Arkansas, and the lacrosse skill that we had helped develop in that previous year.”
Bentonville Parks and Recreation decided to run a lacrosse program for young children around the same time. McDaniel’s son enrolled, and the week before they started, the program reached out to ask if McDaniel could help staff coaches. He recruited some of the high school players, and they coached the young players. That was McDaniel’s first experience with a youth program. The players for his other teams, even in Germany, had all been high school-aged.
The program struggled to maintain players, though, even as the high school program grew. Now McDaniel had a new problem. “It creates a situation where you’ve got kids coming in their ninth and tenth grade years, and every year we have to rebuild, retool, and retrain, and so that kind of gets tough over time.” As other high schools in the area started lacrosse teams, McDaniel could see the need to develop younger players. He partnered with a youth lacrosse operator in Kansas City to figure out a pathway to success and how to structure a youth program, and launched Ozark Mountain Lacrosse in July 2018. After a successful summer entry, McDaniel expected 30 to 40 kids to sign up for the fall league. He got 150.
At first, the OzMo teams traveled to other areas for competition. When COVID-19 hit and shut down league play in 2020, McDaniel made the decision to keep teams in Northwest Arkansas, instead of adding the strain of traveling on weekends onto busy families and players just learning the game. To make it successful, he formed city clubs for Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, and Fayetteville. These clubs compete against each other in small-sided games. As players age up, the number of players on the field increases.
“What’s happened is almost like a Field of Dreams situation,” McDaniel said. “So we built it, and now everyone regionally wants to come play us, instead of us going places.”
McDaniel didn’t build the club on his own. His first co-owner, Nolan Frese, had to step away due to work and family obligations. Fortunately, another coach had already taken a strong lead over the program. Ty Chandler joined the OzMo coaching staff through one of McDaniel’s former high school players. Chandler grew up in Memphis and started playing lacrosse in fifth grade. While he decided not to play on the club team, he wanted to find a way back into the game. That opportunity came through OzMo.
After speaking with McDaniel, Chandler was assigned the seventh and eighth grade teams, and he helped manage the other coaches, a larger role than he expected to have at the time. Then McDaniel asked him to stay over the summer and coach the more advanced travel program instead of returning to Memphis. Chandler scrambled to find a temporary apartment. “I literally had a TV on the floor; it came with a couch, and I slept on a mattress on the floor…I had never stayed in Fayetteville over the summer…it was my favorite summer that we’ve ever had.”
At the end of that summer, McDaniel and Frese lightly pitched the idea of co-owning the club to Chandler. He had only been coaching since March, but Chandler jumped into training and learning about the business side of youth sports while still attending the University of Arkansas. When Frese stepped away, Chandler was ready to step in. He has been co-owner of OzMo since July 2023 and just graduated from the university in December 2025.
“Having someone like Ty, who’s got the energy to chase down a lot of stuff, was super important,” McDaniel said. “Ty has a real mind for the business side.” McDaniel and Chandler are deeply aware of the rising cost of participating in youth sports, and they do what they can to keep costs down and ensure that cost isn’t a barrier to trying out the sport. They have used equipment available for their clinics. They’ve chosen reversible jerseys for league play, and they’ve even designed their own lacrosse stick. They took the design directly to a manufacturer in China and ordered it in bulk. These sticks are offered at a deep discount to OzMo players, saving families nearly half the cost of a typical lacrosse stick.
One of the best ways for a new player to experience OzMo lacrosse is through a weekend lacrosse clinic. These are open to boys and girls in the area, and kids can try the sport with OzMo equipment, so no expensive investments are required. Chandler and some of the coaches use USA Lacrosse curriculum to introduce the history and equipment, and then they get lacrosse sticks in hands to show kids that what looks like a difficult sport on the outside is actually easy to learn, as well as a lot of fun.
Currently, OzMo runs league play for boys from kindergarten through 8th grade, with the spring season running from March to May. Find out more about upcoming clinics and league play at ozmolacrosse.com.
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