Rich Fisher

Trenton, NJ — No one will ever say the COVID-19 pandemic was a good thing, but it did inadvertently provide Josh Clouse with a second chance at his first love.

The 37-year-old Ohio native began training and driving Standardbreds after leaving college in the mid-2000s. But with he and wife Kelly preparing to start a family, financial issues dictated that Clouse get more stable employment, so he began working factory jobs.

Several years later, he was in a body cast for three months after a frightening fall from a deer stand. Josh eventually got into exterminating but when COVID struck he was unable to make calls on steady clients due to shutdowns.

Forced to look elsewhere for work, Clouse began performing magnetic wave therapy on horses. That led him to trainer Henry Graber Jr., which kick-started his harness racing career once again.

Josh Clouse returned to the daily routine of the barn three years ago. Facebook photo.

Clouse is now training horses at Graber’s Monroe, Ind., stable, and also drives a few when necessary. Since the season opened at Converse Fairgrounds, Josh has posted six driving wins (five at Converse), including the first of his career on opening day. It was his first time sitting behind the filly pacer Mystical Glance and the race could not have gone smoother.

“She went straight to the top and never looked back from there,” Clouse said.

That trip was just the opposite of Josh’s stop-and-go career, but he is enjoying where it has led him.

“It’s been a total second chance at everything,” a grateful Clouse said. “It’s pretty great when every day you go out and it’s not really work for you. It’s more fun than it is a job. I absolutely hated factory work. I had to get back outside.”

A native of Van Wert, Ohio, Josh spent ample time in his relatives’ barns at the nearby fairgrounds. His grandmother, Nancy Dixon, great aunt, Betty Myers, and aunt and uncle Amy and Tony Dixon had horses that he helped train.

“I was out at the fairgrounds in Van Wert ever since I could walk,” Clouse said. “I was always brushing horses, goofing off, cleaning stalls. Whatever I could do to be at the fairgrounds, I did.”

And he had his parents’ blessing.

“Mom and dad were never really into the horses much,” he said. “I showed horses too, and always kept everything at grandma’s. It’s always stuck with me ever since I was little. (My parents) enjoy going to races, they just never really got into the horse part of doing anything like that.”

Along with horses, Clouse was a “decent” baseball player according to him. He was good enough to earn a scholarship to play for Indiana Tech in Fort Wayne. That only lasted one year, however, due to an arm injury. Asked if he was a pitcher, the catcher/middle infielder chuckled and said “No, but they thought I was.”

After that failed experiment Clouse went to a branch of Ohio State in Lima, but in 2005 he began working for trainer Jeff Miller.

“At the start I wanted to be a catch driver and just drive all the time and shoe horses on the side,” he recalled. “After I got started, I was training here and there. Working for Jeff I really learned a lot and picked up more on the training aspect of it. I never really understood it being younger, and I kind of fell in love with it originally working for Jeff.”

Along with training, Josh drove a few horses and did some qualifiers. He collected 17 training wins and over $32,000 in earnings from 2006-08, but that wasn’t enough to keep him in the game.

“The economy kind of switched,” Clouse recalled. “I had just gotten married and we were just getting ready to start a family and trying to get insurance. We figured we’d try something with some better hours.”

He started at an RV factory, moved to another factory in Van Wert and was shoeing on the side. But while his work was inside, Josh still enjoyed his outside activities. Unfortunately, he was struck by disaster during a 2015 deer hunting trip.

“I was actually in one of the climbing stands and the connector cable broke on it, and they estimated I fell 23 to 25 feet,” he recalled. “I broke quite a bit of things on that one. That happened the first weekend of October. I was in one of those hard body casts from my bellybutton up to my neck until around Christmas. My kids called it a turtle suit.”

The turtle finally emerged from his shell and eventually got into commercial exterminating. But when COVID struck, the shutdowns were killers for Clouse.

“I couldn’t get into a lot of my accounts, like nursing homes, hospitals, restaurants, things like that,” he said. “I had to look for something else and started doing magnawave with horses and just going around the area and hitting places here and there. I did one of the buggy horses for a guy that worked for the Grabers, I started going over and talking to those guys. They needed another guy to work in the barn and that’s how it all started.”

The stable is located just 20 minutes from Josh’s Convoy home. One of the stable’s top horses was M-M’s Dream, a two-time Indiana Sire Stakes champion now winning on the Grand Circuit with trainer Ron Burke.

Clouse is happy staying in the barn to train but said that if a horse needs to be driven or qualified, he is happy to do so. In one of his most recent races on Aug. 29, he drove Brookview Bullet to victory at Van Wert in the Signature Series and missed the track record by one-fifth of a second. Whether he gets a strong horse or one who needs work, Clouse jumps at the chance to get in the bike.

“I like taking some of the problem horses and seeing if I can figure some things out on them,” Josh said. “If the driver comes off and they’re having issues, or say you watch him for two or three starts and you sit behind him enough when you’re training him, you might think ‘if I switch this or that, maybe I can get him qualified.’ I guess maybe that’s my ego. If he does do good, you have that benefit of saying ‘Hey I guess I got him where he needs to be.’”

Clouse is once again where he needs to be in his professional career and family life. He and Kelly have two children — 12-year-old Griffin and 9-year-old Grace. Griffin is not a horseman, as he focuses on football, baseball and showing pigs.

“He never got into the horses, but I could see Grace doing it down the road,” Clouse said. “She loves the horses; she’s been on the jog cart. She has show horses. My wife used to show. We always had horses, but it wasn’t the same as being in the barn every day.”

Fortunately for Josh, he returned to the daily routine of the barn three years ago and is loving his rebirth in the business he enjoys the most.