Dan MacRae Is Ready to Lead the Black Bears Pack
Published on November 5, 2025 under National Lacrosse League (NLL)
Ottawa Black Bears News Release
The day is Saturday, August 12th, 2023. Dan MacRae, just weeks removed from his 35th birthday and the completion of a 13-year NLL career, has guided the Burlington Blaze over the Orangeville Northmen for the franchise's first ever Ontario Jr. A championship, ending a 15-year period dominated by Six Nations, Orangeville, and Whitby.
A former Burlington player himself, MacRae had embarked nearly a decade earlier on a mission to lead his hometown program to the top. Still an active NLL player during the fall and winters, he spent his summers pouring into the Blaze's development system as head coach, helping shape the next generation of lacrosse in the region.
The Blaze eventually went on to win the Minto Cup as well, defeating Coquitlam in Edmonton behind Burlington native Alex Marinier's three goals and three assists. Coincidentally, while playing for the New York Riptide during the NLL season, MacRae was captaining the young forward's older brother, Matt, a defenceman.
Lacrosse, after all, is a small world.
It's fitting, then, that MacRae was appointed head coach and general manager of the Black Bears on August 14. It is the same franchise he served as inaugural captain for, while they were known as the New York Riptide - just as he once came full circle to coach his hometown Burlington Blaze.
That same championship summer, MacRae retired from playing in the NLL after a tough season battling a lingering injury. Just a day after the retirement was made official, he was snapped up by the Colorado Mammoth to be their defensive coordinator.
Two summers later, he finds himself back with the same franchise who selected him in the NLL expansion draft back in 2019, just with a relocation to Ottawa and a name change.
And despite the name change, the familiarity runs deep with Ottawa's roster for "Danny Mac."
MacRae played with Black Bears like Marinier, Jeff Teat, Connor Kearnan, Reilly O'Connor, Larson Sundown, and Kevin Brownell as recently as 2023.
"I already have open lines of communication with the guys," said MacRae. "I think that there's already a level of trust there with them as well."
MacRae was able to use that trust to get honesty from the team about what systems and personnel were working. On defence, that meant coach Brian Beisel would be sticking around, based upon great feedback from the players.
On offence, the Black Bears had to replace Brett Hickey, who left to become the offensive coordinator of the Las Vegas Desert Dogs. Still, MacRae used insight from the players about what worked with Hickey's approach and took it into account during the search for a new coordinator.
MacRae eventually used his familiarity to tap former Brampton Excelsiors teammate Dylan Evans, with whom which MacRae won a Mann Cup in 2011, as his offensive coordinator.
"I've usually been classified, I guess, as a bit of a players' coach," MacRae said. "I think that in any sport, if you're a younger coach, maybe you get classified that way. But yeah, I want to have open lines of communication. I think that's extremely important for any coach with their athletes in today's day and age."
With all that being said, drawing upon his background as both a championship-winning coach and player - he captained the Calgary Roughnecks to the 2019 NLL championship immediately before being selected in the expansion draft - he also knows what it takes to climb to the top of a mountain.
"We're going to be demanding when we're on the floor and from our physical testing point of view, and just making sure that we're holding everybody accountable," said MacRae. "I think it's just an area that we see an opportunity for consistently, to try to breed more consistent production on the floor."
Pulling dual duty
A head coach's relationship with his general manager might be the most important relationship in a sports organization.
The general manager builds the team with a focus not only placed on making it the most competitive as possible for the upcoming season but also in a way to find sustainable success.
The head coach, meanwhile, takes that roster and develops players, establishes a culture, and usually has a more short-term view of success.
In the NLL especially, where there are only 18 games a season, the coach's role is all about looking forward to next weekend's game and motivating and adjusting your roster to win it.
With those roles in mind, General Manager MacRae didn't waste any time in setting Head Coach MacRae up for success.
Less than a month after he was appointed, MacRae landed Sam Firth, Tanner Thompson, and Nicholas Volkov from the recently relocated Oshawa FireWolves in exchange for Taggart Clark and a third-round draft pick.
Firth, drafted in 2020, has averaged a goal-per-game pace through his young NLL career. Notably, he also grew up in Ottawa, and played his minor and junior lacrosse in Nepean.
A massive, athletic defender that exemplifies what MacRae has shaped the back-end into this offseason, Volkov went end-to-end to score the insurance goal that locked up the Burlington Blaze's 2023 Minto Cup - while he was coached by, you guessed it, MacRae.
Just before the NLL CBA was finalized in late October, MacRae pulled the strings on the biggest move of the Black Bears' offseason, when he acquired former NLL MVP finalist Rob Hellyer.
MacRae is four years Hellyer's elder, but the two actually broke into the league together in 2011, as MacRae helped the Calgary Roughnecks to the Western Conference finals and Hellyer helped the Toronto Rock to the NLL championship.
Both of the moves embody a core tenet of MacRae's roster-building philosophy: the weaponization of his first-hand knowledge of players, gathered from a life spent in lacrosse.
"I remember, he was one of the hardest checks when he was coming out of his corner," said MacRae, who played 178 regular season games and 25 playoff games across his career with the Roughnecks and later the Riptide.
"He's just a consistent point producer, right?" added MacRae. "When you were in a one-on-one against him, you're just like, 'Oh God, let's make sure that there's some help around here.' He can beat you with his feet, he can beat you with his shot... he can see the floor, which is really important for us."
Coming off a 29-goal, 64-assist season with the San Diego Seals, Hellyer instantly becomes the right-shot compliment to the other-worldly Jeff Teat on the left.
"He's a local, Ontario guy, he's a veteran in the league - we've got some young guys up front there - so I think he's just a perfect fit for us," said MacRae.
"Coming into this year, finding out that he's available, he was at the top of our shopping list, so to speak, and we couldn't be more excited to get him on our side."
What Ottawa stands to gain
The Nepean Knights have established themselves as a premier team in the province and country over the past decade.
The Knights won the city's first-ever Founders Cup as national Jr. B champions in 2022 and have lost just eight regular season games since. They finished first in the OLA East for the fourth straight season in 2025.
Some of those players helping that resurgence to put Ottawa on the lacrosse map include Stittsville's Thomas Kiazyk (Saskatchewan's backup goalie), Osgoode's Connor Nock (drafted 10th overall by the Colorado Mammoth this past spring), and Owen Tasse (drafted 73rd overall by Halifax in the spring).
All three were called up by MacRae on the road to the Minto Cup, as the Blaze was affiliated with the Knights and used many of their players over the long season.
Ottawa natives like Willem Firth - Sam's brother, and believed to be the first Ottawa player to be part of an NCAA Division I men's lacrosse championship team - and Liam Aston, the Black Bears' highest draft pick this season, exemplify the pipeline that the region has become.
The only thing left to truly "cement" Ottawa as a premier junior program is for the Knights to move to Jr. A, a heavily debated movement that MacRae has supported and voted in favour of dating back to his time at the helm of the Blaze.
"I see it as an up-and-coming hotbed," describes MacRae. "I'm hopeful that with the Black Bears, we're able to help grow that from the grassroots level, get kids excited about lacrosse."
This is important not just because of the need for MacRae to have familiarity with local prospects, but also because the long-term viability of a professional lacrosse team in the region depends on cultivating a strong, local market of knowledgeable fans of the sport.
"We're looking at building programs and going into schools, getting kids who haven't played lacrosse involved," said MacRae. "That just helps to just fill the pipeline through the minor teams, the junior organization, and then more and more Ottawa local players going into the pros."
One win away
The Black Bears started 2024-25 with a record of 5-2, giving fans and those within the organization hope that the move to Ottawa might spell the franchise's first-ever NLL playoff berth.
However, they lost six of their next seven games, and despite a late-season resurgence were unable to earn the final playoff spot, falling a single win short.
MacRae knows the ask is simple: lead the team into the playoffs for the first-time ever. It's the same goal that MacRae has been striving towards since 2022, when he was named the inaugural captain of the franchise.
It's a similar mission that MacRae set himself upon with Burlington, who had never won as much as an Ontario championship in the program's 47 years of competition before 2023. "You can pull some similarities," said MacRae.
"That was the message since I took over [Burlington], that our entire staff was communicating about, like, 'we're going to be the team that gets it done and makes history,'" says MacRae. "Not just the 2023 group - we were building towards it, in 2019 we lost in the Ontario finals."
The biggest hurdle with the group, he says, was getting the team to believe that it could be theirs.
"You do that by just putting in the hard work," he adds. "I'm a firm believer that practice and repetition builds confidence, so that was sort of the first thing, and that's what we're going to be doing in Ottawa. I don't think anybody doesn't believe that."
With "the absolute best player in the world," Teat, and "an absolute all-star goaltender," Zach Higgins, MacRae says it's undeniable the foundation has been laid.
"We're surrounding [Teat] now with some more balanced offensive ability. We've got a young, big, physical defence that can push the ball as well. We saw some flashes last year that we can beat anybody, but we've just got to get a little more consistent to get in the playoffs, then anything can happen."
MacRae says that he'll be putting a couple of practices from that 2023 Burlington team into play in Ottawa to try and find similar success.
"We'll be looking to break some barriers, for sure."
This year, the Black Bears will play four Friday home games and five Saturday home games from November to April.
National Lacrosse League Stories from November 5, 2025
- National Lacrosse League Expands Grassroots Reach to 48 Communities Across North America - NLL
- Dan MacRae Is Ready to Lead the Black Bears Pack - Ottawa Black Bears
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