Nutshell

If you pop onto twitter or chatboards, or if you are at your simo-center in front of a bank of televisions, you'll often hear thoughts about race scheduling.

"Why is that [a grade 2 or 3 race] going off at the exact same time as that [another Graded stakes]. How hard is this to schedule races not on top of each other?! This business is frigged up!"

Like you, it makes me wonder. With 15 tracks, let's say, racing on a Saturday afternoon, this is close-to-impossible, but it seems to happen mid-week, or with stakes. It's like clockwork.

Who you gonna call?

I do a little work with Horseplayer Monthly (check it out here for a free copy) and for the next issue I said to myself "let's ask someone about scheduling, why this happens, and what can be done to fix it."

Then it dawned on me, who in the hell do I ask?

As @o_crunk puts it on twitter "who is "racing""? Is there a head of scheduling races at some head office? Maybe Stronach is in charge and he can schedule races better - no, he has only a couple of tracks.

When a sewer pipe is broken on your street you call the city and then someone comes to fix it. He or she is in charge of fixing sewers. Maybe the workers don't show up for hours, and your neighbor gripes about "lazy government workers", or maybe you get put on hold and that makes you mad, or maybe you get passed around.

But at the very least you talk to someone who fixes these things. The job gets done.

How can racing fix their broken sewer pipe when you don't even know who to call? How can racing fix issues when the person who could fix the issue does not exist? In a nutshell, I believe it is racing's number one problem. And their unwillingness to put someone in charge is why it has had the same broken sewers for more than a generation.