How to Be a Friend to your Racing Steward

By Daralyn Wallace

#1 - Send in your entries as email attachments, with Arial Narrow or Times Roman 9 pt font, and .5 inch margins all the way around. When entries are sent inside an email, the steward may have to copy them to a document of some kind. Often the formatting of your email is not exactly compatible with Word documents so the steward has to mess with the margins, take out unnecessary line or paragraph breaks, etc. in order to get the entries organized so they do not take up 15 pages when they might only need to take up 6. Help preserve trees!

#2 - DO NOT USE FANCY FORMATTING when making your race cards. Plain text is best. You can use ALL CAPS to indicate Stakes winners, but don’t try to make your cards extremely fancy with a lot of special formatting or different fonts, etc.

#3 - Do not write a novel about the accomplishments of the sire or dam. List the sire’s or dam’s racing accomplishments first, then list the accomplishments of his/her foals. You don’t have to list ALL a stallion’s get. List 3 or 4 of the best ones and use the word “etc.” if there are more. The same thing applies to the dam. If you mention the grandparents at all, state only their highest racing achievement and state if they produced SWs/MSWs, etc. Keep it all as short as possible. Listing ancestors further back than grandparents really isn’t necessary.

#4 - USE CLIFF NOTES. Most stewards prefer that you put them at the TOP of your list of entries where it can be easily found, or inside your email. Some stewards like them just above each horse’s race card.

Here is a sample of how to write CLIFF NOTES: Gone South (ABC) 05chC/FTS (Gone West –r X Wanderer-m, Danzig-r) Bred by Famous Stud, KY

What this means: Horse’s Name (Your Initials) Year born, color, Sex / Highest race status (Sire X Dam, Dam’s Sire) Farm that bred him, state (or country) bred in

#5 - Make sure that you have a SUMMARY of the lifetime achievements of your runner just before you list your race details.
For example: Lifetime: 15 (3-4-2-3) MSW/rSW si102 $35,500

#6 - Keep your race details NEAT and BE CONSISTENT in how you write them so the Steward can figure out what is what.
For example:
7/10/07 FRR (fast) Flying Falcon Stakes 3/u 1M ~ pp4, 126#, 2nd of 10 by nk, “stalked leaders, came up fast in stretch” $8400
[Date, Track initials, track conditions, name of race, ages, distance, ~ post position, weight, placing and margins, description of horse’s finish, money won] You don’t need your horse’s name, color, or other info with the race results because it is not pertinent to the race details. Besides, it will be listed at the top of the race card.

#7 Training Notes - You don’t need to write a novel here, either, but you do need to write something more inventive than just “training well at this distance.” Give the steward a clue or two about why you are trying a particular distance and what you have done to get the horse ready for the race. For example: “Tried hard at shorter distances, but has been ‘gearing up late at the wire’ so we have been training him at 550-660 yd. Has also had more trail work and swimming exercise to build up stamina/endurance. Instructions to jockey: Stalk the leaders early, then push hard in the stretch.”

#8 - Don’t give 5 years worth of race details! Most stewards do not give points for every race that a horse has entered unless it is just a few races. Usually, stewards give points only for the last 3 or 5 races. You definitely won’t need details for more than 10 races, so consider cleaning up your race details if your horse has a huge number of races under his/her saddle. Write race summaries for each year and have only the number of details that you need (generally you only need the current year & maybe the year before that.) If the steward only gives points for the last 3 races, they won’t mind seeing a few more than that, but they usually have to print out your race cards for each meet. Have pity on their printers and on trees, and please put only the info that you need. You can keep the full results for all the horse’s races in his/her file/record. But the poor race steward only needs a few details to score.

#9 ~ KEEP YOUR RACE RESULTS CURRENT. Be sure to add the latest results to your horse’s race card before you send it to the next meet.
If the meet results have NOT been announced, then you do this instead:

7/10/05 FRR (fast) Flying Falcon Stakes 3/u 1M ~ PENDING

This way the steward will have all the info on your horse and its race results.
NOTE: If your horse was entered in a maiden race (for horses that have not won a race yet) and you have race results still pending from a meet, then you CANNOT enter that horse in a maiden race at the next meet. We have this rule just in case your horse ends up winning at the meet that still has pending results. So if this is the case, you horse should be entered in a different type of race instead of another maiden race.