Growing, Expanding, and Planning

As I mentioned in the last blog, we’ve got a good group of owners, including the guys who set me up (e.g. My Meadowview and Winter Park Partners) and I do my utmost to have their horses because they are the ones that got me started.  And we are gradually building momentum with bigger owners too (e.g. West Point and Zilla Racing have ten horses with us) and they are sending better stock to us as well.

With the benefit of more owners and more horses, we will be expanding our operations this year beyond New York.  In the wintertime the plan is for both Pearl and Sarah to go to Florida together and I will run the New York division, which will probably be the smaller of the two divisions. I will predominately be in New York, but at least every two weeks I will take a plane down to Florida to spend three or four days down there. I’ll see the horses at least once every two weeks for a few days.  Animal husbandry is still very important to me and I’m a very hands-on trainer.  If I have the opportunity to run my hands over a horse, then I will … which is probably dementing to my staff, because they have already checked them as well.

When Saratoga is over I’m going down to Florida and have a look at Payson Park.  Payson seems to be a winter home for some of the top operations and horses seem to do extremely well when they come out of there. I’d like to train my horses in as relaxed an atmosphere as possible and that’s a reputation that Payson Park has.  So I’ll go down and if I’m happy with the surface, I know that some of my owners would prefer to go there, so that’s an important factor.  I’m also going to look into Palm Meadows situation too.  It would be between one of those two places we would go in the winter.

And then we’ll race at either Tampa or Gulfstream.  I’m a little bit concerned about the state of the grass course at Gulfstream. I don’t believe the championship meet run in the winter should be raced on a turf course that is run on all year round. That is a very wide turf track but, honestly I’ve been looking at the races run down there, and it looks a little bit like green dirt. I think they need to start managing that turf course a little more carefully. I heard a lot of stories about people who weren’t happy with it this past winter. And now it will have another whole year of racing on it and I think that’s an awful lot for that turf track to take. So I won’t be afraid to take horses to Tampa at all.  And it’s not difficult to get to New Orleans and run at the Fairgrounds.

The main thing is to give my grass horses a place to go in the winter, since there is no turf racing in New York that time of year.  This will help our business, when owners realize that Tom Morley Stable is going to have horses down south this winter and their grass horses will have an opportunity to race year round with me.

With all of these changes, and the separation of the stable into multiple locations, we have to make sure that everyone is on the ball with every horse, even though they might not have seen them for six months, or maybe not at all. We are hoping a new system called iStable is going to help us manage the barn more efficiently. You enter everything the horse has into the system; shoes, medication, feed, what equipment the horse uses to train, etc. So when a horse ships from one division to the other it’s very easy for the assistant to pull up the information on the horse and see exactly where the horse is at. It’s a communication system more than anything for the entire team.  In addition to that, there will be special access for owners to monitor the status of their own horses.

So not only is Tom Morley Stable growing, we will soon be expanding into new racing venues, and at the same time we’re planning how to manage these changes in a way that benefits us and our owners.

-Tom Morley