(This is the time of year when the horse racing season for the Ivory Pine Syndicate is winding down, but the soccer season for the Rosevelt Soccer Club is gearing up. Here's a 90-day glimpse of the day in the life of a horse racing managing partner and soccer club administrator.)
Awoke, 4:58a
Worked at Westbrook High School, 7:30a-2:30p
Ivory Pine Syndicate admin, 2:45p-3:15p
When a proposed private sale for Sixby Hanover fell through in September, our partners decided to retire Sixby by the end of this year. He's always been healthy, sound, and low maintenance. But since he arrived in Maine April 2022, we've always been grinding out results and purse checks and he's struggled to compete if his Trackmaster floats up just a point or two to bring him up into a class one or two rungs higher than his optimal level of competition.
So I quoted our partners a $279 cash call ceiling in September, with the understanding that we'd keep Sixby in training only as long as our outstanding bills didn't exceed that number.
Fortunately, we've been able to manage Sixby's races over the last couple months by either putting a claiming tag on him, and the last three weeks we've benefited from a beneficial class that has included pacers who haven't won more than one race in 2024. So we've been able to enjoy almost ten more races with Sixby since he returned to training in September.
But I've been keeping an eye on the ledger to make sure we don't exceed that quoted cash call, and last week I informed our trainer and partners that Sixby's final career race with our partnership would be over Thanksgiving weekend.
For many of our twenty partners (myself included), Sixby is the first race horse we've owned more that doesn't involve microshares, and we've naturally grown attached to him over the last thirty months. So I wanted to give everyone a 10-day notice for a holiday weekend to ensure everyone had enough lead time to organize their calendar to attend his final race with our partnership.
But as the managing partner, I also need to be a step or two ahead. So yesterday I renewed a conversation with Futures for Standardbreds that we started in September, and filled out an application for donation to an aftercare program that specializes in retraining Standardbreds for a second career.
Sixby has already taught us so much about Maine harness racing, and we've been pretty good about sharing our experience with the general public. And we're looking forward to the next leg of that process, after he retires from the track.
Rosevelt SC, 3:15p-5:15p
Our club is relatively affordable because we minimize our overhead and staffing costs. We're usually really good at focusing on one or two aspects of running a club at certain times of year (rostering players in June and July, booking outdoor field space and finalizing rosters in February, etc.). But this is a challenging time of year because we're doing a little bit of everything: Onboarding new players, setting up our online apparel store for orders, finalizing our teams' winter schedules, preparing our two oldest boys' and girls' teams for their upcoming college showcases in Massachusetts, and all the other small logistical issues that are required to go from relatively dormant to really active.
Met with local club staffer, 5:30p-7:15p
On top of building our own club, we also have remain active working with other Maine soccer stakeholders to ensure our state's soccer ecosystem is as healthy as it can be. In my keynote at our club kick-off event a couple weeks ago, I used the analogy of not only needing to building a plane as we're flying it, but also needing to put in the work that ensures all the other logistics and infrastructure required for successful flights (i.e., airports, runways, etc.) are in place.
We've been working with other Maine-based clubs over the last decade to improve Maine's soccer ecosystem, but there's still a long way to go to build a more connected, more strategic, and more aspirational soccer system in Maine that prioritizes all of our stakeholders *within* Maine.
Last night's meeting with a friend who works with a local club was another good step in the right direction, on and off the field.
Asleep, 9:09p
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