Ward joins Baffert's team as assistant trainer

Trainer Dan Ward is joining Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert’s Midwest team as an assistant in advance of the Churchill Downs meeting that begins Saturday.

Ward, who in the past has assisted two other Hall of Fame trainers in Bobby Frankel and Jerry Hollendorfer, has had a stable at Oaklawn Park this year that included Majestic Oops, winner of the Grade 2 Azeri Stakes in March.

Baffert is expected to have more than 30 horses at Churchill Downs this spring, including many of his leading runners. The stable is scheduled to travel from California to Kentucky this week.

Ward said in a recent interview that Baffert approached him about joining his team earlier this year.

“He asked me, ‘What is your level of interest?’ ” Ward recalled. “I said, ‘I’m very interested.’ I don’t think there was any way to turn it down if I wanted to work with good horses.”

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Majestic Oops, third in the Grade 1 Apple Blossom Handicap on April 11 at Oaklawn Park, will join Baffert’s stable, as well some of Ward’s employees.

“She’s the one I want to keep,” Ward said. “I’ll keep my help.”

Ward said that many of the other runners he trained will be sent to stables based at Lone Star Park or Monmouth Park in coming weeks.

Ward has won 79 races since 2019. Of those, 76 wins have occurred since the summer of 2023, when Hollendorfer relinquished control of his 29-horse Monmouth Park-based stable to Ward.

Ward had a career-best 30 wins in 2024 and 21 last year. He has won eight races this year. Finding new clients has been difficult, he said.

“I’ve been trying,” he said. “I stabled in New York last year. I met with a lot of people and didn’t get any new business.”

Ward, 67, worked for Frankel for 22 years and for 17 years with Hollendorfer.

“I feel like I’m 27 now that I have two new hips,” he said.

The Baffert stable in Kentucky will include runners for major stakes on Kentucky Derby weekend, May 1-2. Baffert said last month that he is sending a division of his 100-strong team to Kentucky not only for stakes, but for “more opportunities to run some of my horses that have [the] same conditions.”

Baffert’s Kentucky division is expected to have a presence in the state beyond the Churchill Downs meeting, which concludes on June 28. Baffert’s main stable is based at Santa Anita, with a division at nearby Los Alamitos consisting mostly of unraced horses and runners returning from layoffs.

Aside from Kentucky Derby weekend, Baffert has had a presence at the Churchill Downs spring-summer meeting as far back as the late 1990s. He won a career-best 13 races at the 1999 Churchill Downs spring-summer meeting and had eight wins there in 2003.

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