How do we get the younger generations, and young students interested in horse racing and the equine industry? Presenting job opportunities with the awareness of specific skills that are needed to get a job in our industry is a great idea. My belief is we have to start younger. Get children interested when they’re wide eyed and bushy tailed and feel the awe and are wowed by the sheer magnificence of the animal. The key would be to get young kids in front of a horse. You don’t have to talk a child into loving a horse. It’s a magnetic attraction. It’s a natural attraction.
From my experience with doing field trips up to my farm years ago, it’s stuck with kids for the rest of their lives. Teachers couldn’t believe how I had 70 kindergarteners in the palm of my hand. The only reason was because I was standing infront of a big, beautiful horse and they couldn’t get enough of it.
NYRA already has a great program with their backstretch tours that they do at Saratoga. They have the volunteers that are very experienced and knowledgeable about horses and the history of Saratoga. They have the tram which is key to transporting people around without getting in the way of traffic and horses during training hours. If they could take that same program and institute, it at the new beautiful Belmont Park, it would be a step in the right direction. They could expand it by inviting schools to have field trips to the backstretch and when necessary, transport a horse to a school.
Over the years I’ve experienced over and over again, where a bunch of us sit around the table, and each, and every one of us in the horse business was exposed to horses as children. That sticks with you and keeps you coming back for more. It becomes part of the fabric of your development and steers you back to horses later in life.
Baseball does it with Little League, football does it with Pop Warner, and now Pee-wee football. Soccer does it with Pee-wee soccer. On a corporate level, McDonald’s did it with Ronald McDonald and happy meals, Walt Disney did it with Bambi. The list goes on and on. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to copy success. By introducing young children to our business, those will be our future fans, handicappers, and industry participants.
Nowadays the way most of the younger generation is exposed to the industry, if they did not grow up around it, is through social media. Sharing the horses, the people and stories behind them, and the day to day operations and behind the scenes can create the first impression. It just takes one to create the first thought. It takes about a minimum of seven to have an action taken. That could be as simple as watching a race on the TV or even having their family take them to the track.