by David Mattia, USTA Web Newsroom Senior Correspondent

New Brunswick, NJ — Beachy Girl, a bay daughter of Real Desire, from the Jenna’s Beach Boy mare Color Me Beachy, will leave from post two in this Saturday night’s She’s A Great Lady final at Mohawk Racetrack. The purse for this prestigious race is a rewarding C$782,200, and a victory will give Beachy Girl her seventh straight pari-mutuel win. Brian Sears will again be handling this talented lady for co-owner/trainer Joe Seekman.

New Image Media photo

Beachy Girl was a 1:54.1 winner for Mark MacDonald in Mohawk Racetrack’s $51,490 Whenuwishuponastar final on August 2.

The She’s A Great Lady is one of Mohawk’s premier events, and its graduates are a rather exclusive bunch. In 2004 it was won by the gifted Cabrini Hanover, and in 2003 it was the Dan Patch Award winning filly Kikikatie, another Seekman trainee, who found her way to the Mohawk winner’s circle. A victory in Saturday night’s edition will put Beachy Girl in the record books with these and some other immensely talented freshman fillies.

“She’s a good sized filly and size is definitely to her advantage,” says trainer Seekman. “She’s not huge or anything like that, but she can be tough and you wouldn’t want to turn your back on her because she might take a chunk out of you. She can be really moody like that, but once you have a hold of her she’s pretty much okay to work with.”

Beachy Girl is, for all intents and purposes, a genuinely undefeated 2-year-old since all of her efforts (qualifiers included) have been winning ones, and when a filly of this caliber runs off a string of victories as impressively as she has, those first-place finishes start to look like really impressive lines on paper — even if a few of them have the letter Q in front of them.

Trainer Seekman, on the other hand, has been further along with undefeated fillies before. He’s not about to let a six in a row streak make him lose his concentration.

“Kikikatie had, I think, 14 straight,” said Seekman with a chuckle. “Beachy Girl isn’t even halfway there yet.”

In fact, Kikikatie did win her first 14 starts as a juvenile. That streaked ended in her final effort in 2003 when she wound up second in the $470,000 Breeders Crown final at The Meadowlands, just a neck behind Pans Culottes.

An early bloomer, Beachy Girl started her career on May 30, 2007 with a winning qualifier (2:01.2) at Balmoral for driver Ryan Anderson. She followed that qualifier exactly one week later with another win with Anderson in 2:00.2, with a very nice :28 final panel.

“I wouldn’t say that she was ready especially early,” recounts Seekman. “We planned on going to Chicago where we start a lot of young horses, and that was part of the schedule we planned all along to get her to the Hanover Stakes at Balmoral.”

She won that Hanover Filly Stake on June 16 in 1:54.4 with a :26.4 last quarter. Seems like that schedule of hers was right on schedule. It’s hard to find too many fillies that can run off a :26.4 last quarter so early in their career, and this exhibition of late speed was indeed a harbinger of things to come.

“Training down she didn’t get much of a chance to show that she was as good as she’s turned out thus far because all the babies train together and finish together,” said Seekman. “But as they started to drop we could tell that she was the best of them all.”

Attention to breeding because of a previous success story is what led Beachy Girl’s connections to her stall at the Lexington Selected Yearling Sale last year where she sold as hip #449 for an easygoing $21,000.

Nigel Soult photo

Beachy Girl lowered her mark to 1:53 in a Kentucky Sires Stakes race on August 12 at The Red Mile for driver Ricky Macomber.

“We had a filly by Real Desire named Cabana Fever the year before,” recalled Seekman. “She was out of a Jenna’s Beach Boy mare too, so we looked for that cross again. We found it with Beachy Girl. Cabana Fever was a really good filly and she made almost $400,000 for us, so we went after Beachy Girl because the cross was the same.”

Involved in harness racing with Joe Seekman for only four years, co-owner Hal Hewitt of Versailles, Ky., had a somewhat different way of deciding that Beachy Girl was the horse for him.

“I liked her especially because she was a bay horse with a blond tail,” recalls Hewitt. “That blond tail took my eye and that’s what I liked about her. Now that’s from the point of view of a novice and I knew that there were other factors involved that didn’t have anything to do with that flashy tail of hers.”

Hewitt, a retired engineer, travels all over North America with his sister-in-law June to watch each of his horses race, and so far in four years he’s only missed one race. He likes talking about his travels — especially following Beachy Girl.

“I travel wherever she goes as I have done with all my horses. We’ve even driven to see her qualifiers in Chicago. We go wherever the horse goes, and when we win a race we fill up that winner’s circle with a lot of people. Everybody knows us and I think sometimes all those people in the winner’s circle gets Joe (Seekman) a little rattled.

“I’m pretty new to harness horses but I played them through the windows for 40 years. June was involved at a high level with harness ponies in Michigan and through that connection I gradually met a lot of Standardbred people. My first harness horse was a filly named A Perfect Jenna, and I’ve been hooked on the horses and the travel that goes along with them ever since.

“In my four years with Joe, he never tells me if a horse is training down bad or good. He’ll just say everything is okay. The only way I know how good one of my horses might be is when I get the staking bill. The bigger the stakes payment bill I get, the better the horse — at least that’s the way it’s been.”

Hewitt plans on hitting the road in a few days for the ride to Mohawk.

“For me it’s all about the travel and I’ll drive the eight hours to Mohawk to watch Beachy Girl race. Like I said, we buy horses for the Grand Circuit events and we go wherever the horse’s schedule sends us. Sometimes it’s nearby at The Red Mile, and sometimes it’s quite a distance, but it’s always fun.”

As far as the She’s A Great Lady final, and the rest of Beachy Girl’s career is concerned, Seekman is taking things one day at a time.

“Right now we have to see our way past the She’s A Great Lady final so we’re not planning too far ahead except that she’s eligible to everything but the Matron. We’ll see how things move along.”

The rest of the fillies in the She’s A Great Lady would be well advised not to turn their backs on this fabulous filly. Though she might often be looking to take a bite out of her human companions, it’s rather easy to imagine her taking a big, 50 percent bite out of that C$782,200 purse when the field crosses the wire.