Harrisburg, PA — The Rising Star and the Breakthrough Awards are for up-and-coming stars in harness racing, in the trainer/driver and non-trainer/driver-category respectively; the Good Guy Award is given to someone who thinks and speaks positively about the sport and has a good relationship with the media, while the Unsung Hero is someone performing important tasks for the sport out of the spotlight. 

Dawnelle Mock was named the 2019 Breakthrough Award winner by the U.S. Harness Writers Association. Chris Gooden Photo.

In grouping these four awards and their winners for description, the combinations of the foursome falling on male and female lines, as expressed in the title, is interesting.

Dawnelle Mock is the Director of Marketing for the Meadows Standardbred Owners Association. In her three years at the western Pennsylvania track, she has been the spearhead for the MSOA onto multiple digital platforms. She has shepherded several successful charity events; she has reached out to form a partnership with the Pittsburgh Penguins ice hockey team, a project with a large crossover potential; and she has been the MSOA liaison with the operators of The Meadows’ racetrack for a number of successful promotions, which contributed to a 6% year-over-year rise in handle at the track. Mock “works well with others,” but much of her success has been born of her own initiative and vision.

Wanda Polisseni of Purple Haze Stables was named the 2019 Unsung Hero. USTA Photo.

Wanda Polisseni has long campaigned harness horses under the name Purple Haze Stable with success, mostly in her home state of New York. She has founded a humanitarian organization to improve the standard of living – education, human services, civic improvement – in Upstate New York. Long an advocate for the after-track life of racehorses, on both the Standardbred and the Thoroughbred side of racing, Polisseni has now undertaken to buy a farm in New York that will serve as a home and a base for the Purple Haze Standardbred Adoption Program, for state-bred horses, that will also be the headquarters of the Harness Horse Breeders of New York State. If Wanda Polisseni can help, you can count her in; like Mock, she makes things happen.

Both Bob McClure, based in Ontario, and Jim King Jr., who races out of the state of Delaware but competes at all the major tracks, come from generations of horse people, and as such are not the type to seek the spotlight, though they cooperate with the media when the attention comes their way.

Hambletonian winning driver Bob McClure was named the 2019 Rising Star award winner. Chris Tully Photo.

Attention came to McClure in a big way during 2019, when he won the most prestigious harness race in North America, the Hambletonian, with Forbidden Trade. The victory was the culmination of a decade of continuous growth for the graduate of smaller raceways to the Grand River-Georgian Downs-Western Fair circuit and then right to the “A” class of his province’s racing at Woodbine at Mohawk Park, where he ranks among the colony’s top drivers. He earned over $5 million (Can.) for the first time in 2019, despite suffering a broken pelvis on April 25 – he was back racing in less than a month, using the cutting-edge technology of a hyperbaric chamber to aid his recovery.

Jim King Jr. has a reputation as a “ladies’ man,” but only in the best sense. In addition to having in his family two of the sport’s best spokespeople – wife Jo Ann Looney-King, a former winner of the Good Guy Award, and the self-proclaimed “harness racing firecracker,” award-winning communicator Heather Vitale – King seems to have a particular touch with the pacing ladies, as evidenced by his two 2019 stars:

the free-for-all Shartin N, who won over $2 million in 2018-19, and the precocious two-year-old Lyons Sentinel, North America’s biggest earner as a freshman while banking over $800,000. In keeping with his winning the Good Guy award, King will give honest, thoughtful answers to the media’s questions, never assuring success, but conscious of the power of the stable that his talents have built.

Mock, Polisseni, McClure, and King Jr. will be honored at USHWA’s annual Dan Patch Awards Banquet, celebrating the best and brightest of harness racing in the past year. The banquet honoring the champions of 2019 will be held on Sunday, February 23, 2020, at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando FL, the climax of a weekend that also finds USHWA holding its annual national meetings. The Trotter of the Year, Pacer of the Year, and Horse of the Year will be revealed for the first time at the Banquet.

Tickets for the Dan Patch Awards Banquet are $180, with a filet mignon dinner featured; “post times” on February 23 are cocktails at 5:30 p.m., with dinner to follow. Tickets, and other Banquet-related information, can be obtained through Dinner Planning Committee Chair Judy Davis-Wilson, at zoe8874@aol.com or 302 359 3630.

Hotel reservations for those attending can be made through USHWA’s website, www.ushwa.net; a link to the hotel’s computer is on the front page of the website. Those who would like to take out congratulatory ads for award-winners in the always-popular Dan Patch Awards Journal can do so by contacting Kim Rinker attrotrink@aol.com or 708.557.2790.