by Bob Carson

Editor’s Note: The USTA website is pleased to present freelance writer Bob Carson and his popular “Outside the Box” features. This monthly series is a menu of outlandish proposals presented with a wink — but the purpose behind them is serious. The views contained in this column are that of the author alone, and do not necessarily represent the opinions or views of the United States Trotting Association.

“If you are going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance.” — Anonymous

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” — Maria Robinson

Bob Carson

With few other places to vent, the United States Trotting Association is the recipient of pleas from fans of harness racing to change our unsettling forecast and solve our problems. If only it were that simple. Just take an idea, hand it off, fund it, staff it, implement it, and blue skies will emerge across harness racetracks far and wide.

Movement in the real world is a tad more difficult. Movement in harness racing is infinitely more daunting. Asking our national organization to straighten out harness racing is like asking Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band to straighten out Afghanistan; great band, but not much juice with poverty stricken, warring clans in the Hindu Kush Mountains.

My core beliefs are as follows, or as Groucho Marx once said, “These are my principles, if you don’t like them I have others.”

• Harness racing is terrific.
• We have a future, maybe not as a mainstream sport but a solid niche.
• Our future will be intrinsically linked to the Internet.
• The website you are reading will be critically important.
• To stand out, a website needs regular visitors.
• Repeat visitors need a compelling reason to visit every day.
• Successful websites (there are surprisingly few) are built on a foundation of regular traffic with plenty of on-ramps for new visitors.
• Harness racing needs promotion to improve our niche.

Based on these tenets, the following plan (scheme, harebrained idea, or proposal) costs virtually nothing. It is designed to bring revenue, possibly a lot of revenue, for promotion of harness racing. The solution could dance on this website, just one dance per day.

Autumn Ryan graphic

I have no doubt that variations of this concept have been considered in the past (among my least favorite e-mails are those that say, “We tried that once in 1973 and it flopped.”) Maybe so, but this is a new day and recent technological innovations now make this type of proposal much easier to implement.

The idea is fairly straightforward.

Every morning at 7 a.m., the program page for a single race will be posted on this website. Let’s call the project “The Race of the Day.” The race will take place that evening. The logistics would call for some creativity, but the objective is simple — create a daily national race that is a good bet. Once we set up this race, the idea is to siphon off a little of the wagered money for promotional projects and return the rest to the players. This will give our sport money to reinvest and make the payoffs on this particular race higher than usual.

This daily race featured on the USTA website must be free from local fiefdoms and regulations. We need to find a way to exempt a single race, one race each day, from the morass of state taxation and red tape. Hopefully, existing pari-mutuel racetracks could donate this race. Maybe some state legislatures with horse racing would grant a waiver for this daily promotional race.

If presenting this daily race at one of our existing tracks becomes snarled in red tape (shocking), we could investigate running this single race in a state without pari-mutuel racing, hold it in another country, hold it at a training track or in a parking lot. If the search for a site to podcast our daily race gets dicey and we resort to outsourcing to the Bahamas, or Fiji, toss my Panama hat into the ring as race secretary.

The USTA will be the “Master” of this domain. The operation, infrastructure and design could be handled through a contract with a company like Expressbet. The risk would be miniscule because the cost of implementation would be small. If the project looks problematic for our association, remember this axiom, “The more daunting a task looks, the more promising delegation and outsourcing appears.”

Four objectives are at the foundation of the Race of the Day plan:

• Finance our national organization.
• Lure new customers through our terrific website.
• Bring back gamblers who have been driven away by overly-high takeouts.
• Create a buzz, a fad, a new paradigm that can be accessed via PDA.

Consider the possibilities that a Race of the Day project presents:

Takeout. The Race of the Day will be an extremely attractive wager for serious handicappers because the takeout will be minimal (less than 10 percent, maybe less than 5 percent). We just need to keep enough to cover operational expenses and designate a percentage as revenue for USTA coffers, revenue that will be returned to projects and politics that push our sport forward.

Hopefully, a race like this with a significantly lower takeout will attract serious wagers and serious money. Having a race, a single race, with a significantly reduced takeout could energize our core gamblers. If the daily race becomes popular, the pools would be huge.

Focus. Many eyes will be on the same race. This is crucial in our diffuse world. A single race that everyone can focus upon allows chatter. People (both experienced and inexperienced) will opine on what will happen tonight in the Race of the Day. People that visit the site and play will all be on the same page, literally on the same page. After the race they can talk about what went right or what went wrong. It will bring everyone playing into the same tent. This is a lesson that successful sports and entertainment have learned — put lots of eyes on the same ball, talk endlessly about the ball before and after the game. If you draw the eyes, you can sell your product and peripheral products.

Wagering. The only wagering on the Race of the Day will be to win. This is for the new visitors, for simplicity. New visitors and their friends will have one simple task — pick one horse from the posted program and cheer for that horse to finish first. When the horse wins you collect money and win bragging rights around the water cooler. A simple format often rattles many of our regular gamblers but a simple system is absolutely essential for new visitors to our alien world.

For those of you who grumble about a basic wagering platform, here is something to keep in mind: Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO’s) could very well be the type of platform that will save harness racing (and will be the subject of a future column). These games seem complex but the opposite is true. The companies and their design teams work tirelessly to ensure that their products are easy to use and accessible. There is no intimidation to play. At every step, players are educated and trained without knowing it. Simply stated, studies show that for customers in today’s entertainment market, simplicity pays.

Learning. A professional handicapper should offer ideas when the Race of the Day is posted and then offer an analysis after the race has been run. This is critical for new visitors to harness racing. They would discover the reasons why races are won and lost. Cultivating fans is one of the goals of this proposal. Following the Race of the Day on the internet would be a great way to learn the basics of wagering on our game and would hopefully hook new players.

Preview and Countdown. A pre-race show should be shown on the site prior to the race. This show would help build suspense and (once again) add focus. This show could educate new players and entertain new visitors. Shows could also offer advertising and promotional opportunities. These pre-race shows could even spin into personalities and back stories that would make a visit to the harness world even more exotic.

Repetition. Win or lose the Race of the Day, you would have a reason to visit tomorrow for another try. The race can become a habit and a topic of conversation, for both experienced and inexperienced players. The benefit of repetitive behavior cannot be overstated.

Spin-off. Of course, this site can be accessed via cell phone or PC tablet or whatever is coming down the pipe. The Race of the Day holds the potential for social interaction. Social interaction and networking seem to be the next wave of consumerism; it would be terrific if tweets and Facebook on the race read, “have #3 for $2 off in 5 min.” or, “OMG #7 just won!”

Money. Lack of money is the root of much of the evil that we face in harness racing. If our national organization had a solid cash flow, many of the initiatives that many are clamoring for suddenly become more realistic. If this daily race program brings strong revenue to the organization, many programs become possible.

All the elements of the Race of the Day concept are already in play. Every day we have plenty of races available. There are betting platforms taking wagers. We have a phenomenal website. Potential new players are tweeting and facebooking away. A prototype could be enacted by a few computer geeks in conjunction with the USTA and a betting outlet in a very short time.

This single, simple, daily race could be a new horn to toot, a daily dose of fun, a reason for people far and wide to click onto this site every day. Horse racing has wagering. Gambling gives us a unique chance to stand out from the crowd of cyberspace diversions. This daily race might just get folks, old and new, dancing. Wouldn’t you love to click on each day and play the Race of the Day?

The hope is that the rest of the planet would find us and join the fun.

Let’s give them a reason to dance each day.