Thanks to you all that have signed up and re-upped to join us in 2016. There are still a few “checks in the mail” so while we work through that (should be completed by the end of this week) here is where we go from here.
It looks like we are going to have approximately 160 or so members. This is slightly higher than where we were last year but still far from the record 202 we had two years back. That means we will have about $40,000 to spend so we will try and get a pair of horses that we can run through the season.
I am submitted our applications to Arkansas for licensing. Like the state of Minnesota, Arkansas only licenses owners that have more than 5% interest in the group so I will be the license holder for the group. Arkansas requires that we register as a stable name as well as a partnership and those licenses are $30 each.
Clay Brinson, our trainer, is at Oaklawn and will be looking to claim us a horse or two. Claiming activity there is hot and heavy so it may take a while to get our first horse. I will outline the claiming process and what we are looking for in a post later this week/weekend.
We should be ready as soon as possibly this weekend to start shopping. In the past we have been fortunate and been able to get a horse right away and we have also struggled a bit and not been able to get a horse until we returned to Shakopee, so it’s hard to say how soon we will have a horse in the barn. However, we start looking now!
Welcome aboard and thanks for joining us!
Canterbury Racing Club 
Great, thanks for the update. Just wondering, any thoughts about focusing on just one horse this time? Would we have a better and quicker result if we had more money to spend on a horse, or am I barking up the wrong paddock?
While that is a possibility, the primary goal of the Club isn’t necessarily to make money. In fact, by charter we are forbidden from making a profit. The reason we shoot for a pair of mid- to lower-level horses rather than a single good one is to be able to provide a more consistent learning opportunity as well as the ability for members to race more and be able to experience the paddock a few times (for those of you new to the Club, we divide the Club into groups for paddock access because we are simply to large to all charge the paddock for each race). We may get 12 starts from a pair rather than 5 or 6 from one.
Thanks. Welcome to new clubbers and hello again to others. It will be interesting to see what kind of horse we will get from Oaklawn.