Perseverance

"If we are facing the right direction, all we have to do is keep on rolling."

~Buddhist Dung Beelte

Well after momentary success with Woodbury University it is back to the usual with the Ambassador Program at Santa Anita. Usually I wouldn't comment on our success or failure, however, I am afraid I have beaten the "image" and "marketing" aspects of racing's drum a little too long and have annoyed some people in the process. When industry leaders stop returning your e-mails, you tend to get the drift (NTRA CEO Alex Waldrop still replies, thankfully). Therefore I digress. I am going to step away from those issues and find something else to comment upon. However since there isn't a lot of major industry issues hitting the Bloodhorse.com site to spin my opinion on at the moment, I'll resort to updates on the Ambassador Program for the interim.

Well the Ambassador Program was cancelled for today. There was only one signed up so I cancelled it to save me the two and a half hours of driving. A professor from a statistics class had called me earlier in the week and said they would be interested in coming out. I told them to register the group on Meetup.com but they never followed through. Perhaps this weekend was bad for them but they seemed really interested, especially with how I told them it was free, so maybe I'll be writing about their day at the track later in March.

In an attempt to generate more interest, Donny in the marketing department at Santa Anita put together an ad to run in the daily official track program. He said it ran both days this weekend so perhaps that will generate some interest. Hopefully the past is not a precursor as we tried this at Del Mar to little (ok, actually no) success. People at the track already tend to know much about racing, so a "newbie" program isn't too thrilling to them. Still the ad is free so it is worth a shot. Getting the word out about the program remains the number one factor in its success and since I have no marketing budget, the name of the game is perseverance. Eventually we will get recognized. In the mean time just keep rolling like the beetles.

Other Points of Perseverance:

As far as I can tell "Roses In April" won't be happening. The proposal was denied a while back. I did a rewrite because from the denial letter it appeared that no one understood what I was attempting to get across. However nothing has come back from said letter so I'm going to let that one go. Perhaps it will happen another time.

Whoops, I got bumped again! The second article attempted for The Horseplayers Magazine in their "State of the Game" column could not fit within their March/April issue, so now it’s going to be in May/June issue? No guarantees I was told. I keep holding my breath on this because when it eventually runs I'm finally qualified to win a turf writer's award... not really. The winner for the 2008 Eclipse writing award went to a reporter who worked the beat for ten years straight without serious recognition. Everyone has to put their time in and this first published article will be the first step in the journey all authors undertake.

And the winner is... Ken Kinakin! Who? He won the TOC "Rookie of the Year" Award. Why mention this? Well I actually filled the paperwork out and mailed it back -- all three pages of it. I figured with the bad economy there wouldn't be many new owners and I'd be running against a small field. However my claimer at Los Alamitos could not fend off his pair of horses that won $186,988 in 2008. I guess my Grade-2 win in the Hirsch Handicap at Del Mar just did not impress the voters enough. (Mind you this was the HorseRacingPark.com Hirsch Handicap. Purse: $300 vs. the real Hirsch's $300,000.) Oh well, can't fault me for trying.

I know that someone, somewhere got a smile out of my application.

Perseverance!