So you want to be a Thoroughbred racehorse trainer? The classic path begins at the end of a shank tethered to a horse, turning left around racetrack shedrows, mucking stalls, grooming horses, and then maybe, just maybe, learning how to condition them from a head trainer as a foreman and then assistant.
After all that, you may have the acumen and owners to go out on your own.
There is, however, an alternative, which also begins on the end of a shank, mucking stalls, etc, but with major differences.
Bluegrass Community and Technical College (BCTC) Equine in Lexington, Kentucky, is a program for future trainers. In rarity, practicality, and brevity (two years as opposed to four for a degree) BCTC Equine arguably surpasses any other educational path to a training career.
Alumnus Aaron West’s experience (class of 2016) may tell the story of BCTC Equine best: “The first day I walked into BCTC was the first time I’d touched a horse. In six months, I had a job working at a small farm in Georgetown [Kentucky], taking care of the horses, and running the barns on the weekends.”
West is today Racing Operations Manager for Bradley Thoroughbreds in Lexington, a company offering co-ownership opportunities and bloodstock services to clients.
Chelsea Heery (class of 2014), unlike West, did have a background with horses, galloping them at a farm in New Jersey, including a granddaughter of Secretariat. Her story is a testament to BCTC Equine’s highly successful internship program. Her first and only practicum was with trainer Mike Maker.
Seven years later, she is still with Maker, having worked her way up from hot walker to exercise rider to assistant trainer responsible, at one time, for a 40-horse string at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington.
She sums up succinctly what BCTC Equine did for her and what it can do for other students: “You’re not going to jump to the top of the ladder, but you’ll climb it a lot faster.”
BCTC Equine was originally the North American Racing Academy, launched in 2006 by retired Hall of Fame jockey Chris McCarron at the college. The riding program continues but is under the ‘BCTC Equine’ banner, recently coined to draw emphasis to a broad program producing not just jockeys and exercise riders, but trainers and industry executives as well. The ‘horseman’s curriculum’, as it is referred to in the college, began in 2010.
The greatest contrast of BCTC Equine to competing 4-year college programs is provided, inadvertently, in a website description for a university equine program ‘housed’ in the school’s college of business. BCTC Equine is housed, for all practical purposes, in a barn on the backside of the Thoroughbred Center outside Lexington.
For Aaron West, that is the advantage of BCTC Equine: Looking at 4-year programs he saw immediately, “You’re not at a working racetrack or training center every morning. I don’t know if there’s a program that puts you as directly in hands-on roles right out of the gate as BCTC Equine.”
Online and in-person classes do, however, complement barn-time. But the heart and soul of the program is ‘EQS 104 Equine Care Lab’. The lab is the barn, with a dozen off-track, retired Thoroughbreds and an occasional active runner under the care of 12 to 15 students admitted to the program each semester.
“What our program helps to do is find the people that are truly passionate about the industry and give them a foundation that first day on the job to be an asset,” said Program Coordinator Dixie Kendall. “Instead of someone that can just barely make a few turns left with a horse on the end of the shank, now you have someone who has experience bandaging horses, looking for vital signs as far as colic, and all those types of things.”
Identical to a racetrack job
Day 1 in the Care Lab is (what else?) mucking stalls. Grooming horses will follow, along with applying standing and medicated bandages, learning conformation and basic horse anatomy, said Kendall.
The lab is the fish-or-cut-bait time for many students, mirroring racetrack work that can begin as early as 5 am. The lab, however, begins at 7 am and ends at 10:30 to accommodate the students’ schedules and is from Monday through Thursday. Students generally take paying jobs hotwalking and grooming horses Friday through Sunday. It is, in every sense, identical to a racetrack job, but with tightly prescribed requirements, like any academic course.
“I can’t remember how many basically hands-on practicals I had to pass,” said West, referring to individual tasks students must learn in the Care Lab. “If I had to try to remember and guess, I would say there were 20 to 25 individual things before the end of the semester to complete that course - mucking out a stall under a certain time frame, properly grooming a horse, putting on raceday tack, putting on different types of bandages, or hoof packs or whatever.”
Practicals are only part of the hurdles for students. “We have strict attendance policies that, if they miss a certain number of days, they’re out; it’s an automatic fail for the course,” said Kendall. “As far as punctuality, if students are late, again, for a certain number of days, they are going to be penalized for that and not eligible to move forward.
“We absolutely have attrition rates and they vary semester to semester,” added Kendall. “I’ve had 20 students coming in for a semester for our labs, and five complete it. I have had 15 and all 15 go forward.
“That’s one of the things we can offer the industry - to filter through those who aren’t going to really pursue a career.”
Replicating a racetrack environment at a working Thoroughbred training center lets students know exactly what they are getting into. The Care Lab even shares the barn at the Thoroughbred Center with an active race trainer, giving students even more of an inside look at what a racetrack barn and its operation are like.
A major revamp of the curriculum recently was internships immediately following the 4-month first semester and the Care Lab. “A big goal of ours with updating the program in the last couple of years is one solid semester providing 4 months of foundational training, and then attaching them with quality employers like Lane’s End Farm, trainer Todd Pletcher and others,” said Kendall.
“Internships give them an opportunity to apply their skills rather than staying with us semester after semester.”
Placement in internships is 100 percent and there are more opportunities than students to fill positions.
Returning after an internship, future trainers would take EQS 223 Training Principles & Practices.
“They learn about yearling sales prep and what goes into it — how to sales groom, how to walk horses for sale, how to set them up,” said Kendall.
Extra understanding
Yearling prep is one of three modules for the class. Breaking and race preparation is the second module and covers things like how to lunge and long-line a horse. The third module focuses on race conditioning and aspects of training as specific as types of tack.
“Each of those modules focuses on giving an overview and a foundation of what to expect if you were to go into those different fields,” said Kendall.
Students return to classwork after internships, but online learning enables many of them to continue in positions in the industry while completing coursework for an Associate in Applied Science degree.
Heery attests to the value of the training class. “There are some things I use to this day that I still remember from the classes, like things about the horse’s health. When the vets talk, I understand a lot more than what most people would because I learned about a tendon or the way a horse is put together. Even with conformation, I can understand the sales a lot better than a lot of people because they go into such depth about it.”
For West, the Training Principles class and that perspective on the industry led him to Lane’s End Farm after graduation. “I worked in every division of the farm and rotated around every season. I did three seasons of yearling prep. I spent one winter to early spring on the broodmare side, foaling and working with mares and foals, and then the following year I went over to the stallion division.”
The experience helped him decide to pursue what BCTC Equine calls ‘Equine Administration and Support Services’ and his position with Bradley Thoroughbreds.
‘Jumping right into it’
BCTC Equine engages students in far more than barn-time and online or in-person classes. Located in the self-proclaimed Thoroughbred Capital of the World, students take field trips routinely to nearby Keeneland, where they meet and interview trainers. Other trips taken each semester are to Lane’s End and Godolphin farms and the equine hospitals in the area. If a student has a specific interest, Kendall will also arrange a visit with a farm or other facility for them.
Trips are not sight-seeing adventures, however. “We go to all the major sales here in Lexington — Keeneland and Fasig-Tipton — and the students have to do projects where they’re doing appraisals,” said Kendall. “They’ll be assigned a certain number of hip numbers. They have to go and assess the horse and try to come up with an appraisal price based on the information they have.”
The uniqueness of that kind of experience, as well as hands-on, curry-comb-in-hand work is what West and Heery gravitate to in discussing BCTC.
Said Heery, “I got my foot in the door to learn the right way to do things - that I wasn’t trying to put on a bandage without knowing how to do it properly - things where you can injure a horse or have a problem. I wasn’t going to get that chance unless I went to the track and went asking for a job. Yes, you never know who you might be working for and they might not be the best teacher. At the school, it’s people who’ve been around the track. And they know good people. They’re not going to set you up with people who have bad habits.”
West added, “As far as the hands-on experience of learning how to do things, you’re jumping right into it. It’s a technical school. You’re learning a trade and that trade is working with Thoroughbred racehorses. You’ll be fully prepared to go to a racetrack or go to a farm.”
Kendall almost forgets something else that is a factor in future horsemen and horsewomen choosing BCTC Equine: “We have the lowest tuition in the state.”