By Dick Jerardi
The annual Turning For Home golf outing tees off late Thursday morning at Bensalem Country Club. It will be a day for golf and cameraderie and fun . More than anything, however, it is a showcase/fundraiser for PTHA’s Turning For Home program, long acknowledged as the best race track aftercare program in the country.
It is such a successful program for many reasons, none more important than Danielle Montgomery, the incredibly dedicated program administrator who oversees it all.
“We’re trying to invite some people that might want to come golf with some of our Parx regulars, our owners, our trainers, our jockeys that might want to be interested in owning a horse,” Montomerty said. “It’s a great place to learn about it.”
The outing, in fact, is a great place to network and absolutely a perfect place to ask questions of all those who make the magic happen every morning and three afternoons a week at Parx.
“We have a lot of repeat people and we have some new people,” Montgomery said. “It’s a nice way to put some eyes on Turning For Home. We’re approaching 5,000 (retired from Parx and rehomed) horses and have a nice day to talk about (TFH) and racing and horses and bring everybody together and do something fun.
The golf tournament raises funds for TFH in a variety of ways.
“People can donate,” Montgomery said. “We have silent auctions. People can go online at our website Turningforhome.org and they can donate through Pledge. It’s those funds that can help us reach those extra things like we have horses coming back and some of our outreach. We are sponsoring horse shows this year. We have the new East Coast Thoroughbred League which is an all thoroughbred league that is run by one of our partner farms, J.R. McCaulley (Once Upon A Farm in Chalfont, Pa.). We’re really trying to push that this year so that more people will want our horses…I think the whole industry has been doing that. Getting them into good homes is important. So we are trying to make thoroughbreds more visible, dispelling the myths so that people know these are great horses, can go on for the next 25 years of their lives.”
The League is putting on horse shows all over the east coast – Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Nine shows happened during April, May and early June. Eighteen more shows are scheduled in the coming months.
“Some of the extra money we get from these golf outings and these different things that we do is going to support prizes for the Thoroughbred League,” Montgomery said. “Supporting prizes means more people want to show in them, which means more people need thoroughbreds. That’s the whole point.”
So the golf outing is another means to an end, this ending being finding forever homes for the Parx horses when their careers are over. And since it began in 2008, TFH has become the model program for race tracks to emulate.
The annual Turning For Home Day this year will be September 19, Pennsylvania Derby Day.
“We are going to have a special featured race on Pa. Derby Day,” Montgomery said. “We figure that’s when the most eyes are on Parx Racing and we can really just simply show people what we have done so far as the leader in thoroughbred aftercare since 2008.”
