90 Days: Sunday, December 1 (Day No. 56)

Photo Credit: Dylan VonderHaar

Photo Credit: Dylan VonderHaar

Photo Credit: Dylan VonderHaar

(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, 6:52a

Rosevelt SC admin, 11:15a-11:30a

Posted a schedule update for our RSC Boys Academy's college showcase game, and updated a results tracker with Saturday's results. 

We compile all of our teams' results over the course of a season on a few different spreadsheets, so that we can track the data for our "Positive Developmental Experiences" index we use for team-specific and club-wide purposes. 

Attended Sixby Hanover's race, 11:45a-4:45p

After an unexpected offer for a private sale of our partnership's 6-year-old pacer Sixby Hanover fell through in August, our partners decided to retire Sixby by the end of the winter meet at First Tracks Cumberland in December.

At the time, we were looking at a third capital call from each partner since our initial capital call to purchase Sixby in April 2022, and over the previous 30 or so months we learned that capital calls would likely be ongoing given our monthly training bills, Maine's purses, and Sixby's struggles above a certain class of races.

Since we returned Sixby to training in September to prep for the winter meet, I've been keeping a close eye on our ledger to ensure that a potential capital call never exceeded the $279/partner projection I shared with partners when we were going through the decision-making process in September. A couple weeks ago, I informed our partners that we'd be retiring Sixby the weekend of November 30-December 1 to avoid another month of training bills amid the uncertainty of the track's pop-up series of races and to give partners enough lead time to plan a trip to the track for Sixby's last career race.

Yesterday was Sixby's last career race, and we went out in dramatic fashion by *just* losing by a nose in a photo finish. We hired Dylan VonderHaar, Rosevelt SC's club photographer, to document race day with photos and a video that we plan to share with our partners and the public, and we organized a brief social at Norton Farm after the race to give everyone one more opportunity to enjoy a post-race Guinness with our Guinness-gulping race horse.

Now the focus is to finalize a post-career option for Sixby to ensure he enjoys a safe and healthy retirement from the race track here in Maine.

Asleep, 9:57p