Three-day week will shorten Retama’s season

Retama Park near San Antonio will open its 20th anniversary season Friday night with a new general manager and racing schedule but a familiar slate of stakes. The 26-date meet will run through Oct. 17.

Kevin Whalen is overseeing his first Thoroughbred meet at Retama, which is starting its season about two weeks earlier and adding Sundays. The stakes schedule will again be highlighted by the El Joven and La Senorita, while the annual group of four stakes complementing inductions into the Texas Horse Racing Hall of Fame is set for Sept. 12.

Retama will race three days a week at this meet over a nine-week span after previously running two nights a week over a 13-week span, said Whalen. The schedule shift is being made to work around winter weather, he said. Whalen, who is also vice president of Retama, joined the track last November.

“We wanted a better weather period for people to come out to the track and enjoy the races,” he said. “We found our struggles were in November. It just wasn’t a pleasant time to come out to the track. There were a lot of weather challenges and, at the same time, a lot of Friday night football, which is big in this area. We wanted to be able to avoid that as much as we could.”

Retama will race at night on Fridays and Saturdays, while there will be a 3 p.m. Central post on Sundays and for its lone holiday Monday card Sept. 7. In another change, Whalen said there will be daily ontrack promotions . The protocol stems from his background as former general manager of the Jupiter Hammerheads, the Class A baseball team for the Montreal Expos. Whalen, a 45-year-old native of Providence, R.I., later joined Retama’s majority owner, Pinnacle Entertainment, and has spent the past four years overseeing its casino operation at L’Auberge in Baton Rouge, La.

“I always wanted to be involved in a career in sports,” said Whalen, who has a master’s degree in sports administration from the University of Florida and an MBA from Duke.

Whalen has brought on Eric Williamson as the new marketing manager for Retama.

James Leatherman continues to serve as racing manager at Retama, which is projected to average $94,000 a day in purses. The six-race stakes schedule reaches a high point Oct. 3 with the running of the El Joven and La Senorita, a pair of $75,000, one-mile turf races for 2-year-olds that produced runners for the Breeders’ Cup.

Texas Hall of Fame Night will feature four restricted stakes and a gala during which Lukin Gilliland Sr., Stanley Beard, Sammy Jackson, Ken Armbrister, Dan and Jolene Urschel, and No Le Hace are inducted into the Texas Horse Racing Hall of Fame at Retama.

Retama’s opening feature is an optional $25,000 claiming race for fillies and mares at a mile on turf. Expect Royalty returns to the overnight ranks for the race after taking the $50,000 Lane’s End Stallion Scholarship Stakes at Lone Star Park in her last out June 20. She won last year’s Fiesta Mile at Retama.