DiDomenico looks back on 2,000 wins

YONKERS, N.Y. – Scott DiDomenico isn’t one to obsess over the numbers, although with consecutive leading harness racing trainer titles at Yonkers Raceway in 2019 and 2020 and in a close battle with Ron Burke at the top of the 2021 standings, the numbers would be plenty to obsess over. With his eyes off the statistics and on the horses, the 38-year-old almost blew past his milestone 2,000th training win without realizing it. 

“I didn’t know anything about it. I was five or six away and Wendy Ross texted me one day and told me I was closing in on 2,000,” Di Domenico recalled. “I didn’t pay much attention to it. I felt some nerves of wanting to get there, but I’m glad we’re there and I want to win 2,000 more.”

Maroma Beach, a 7-year-old gelding who’s been a resident of the Di Domenico stable for about two years, delivered the 2,000th victory when he took a $12,000 overnight by a neck at Yonkers Raceway May 18. George Brennan, a close friend of Di Domenico’s in addition to being the conditioner’s first call at the Hilltop, drove.

“It’s a big accomplishment, I think,” Di Domenico said. “To win 2,000 races and a lot of them coming out here where competition is so tough, I thought it was pretty special. It’s hard to do. It’s not every day someone can say they did it. I still feel pretty young, granted I guess I’m kind of a veteran around here anymore, but I still enjoy the grind of racing every day.”

Di Domenico reflected on his unconventional journey to earning 2,000 wins with the SOA of NY’s Brandon Valvo….

BV (Brandon Valvo): When did you start training and what was it like when you started out?

SD (Scott Di Domenico): Horses are the only thing I ever wanted in my life from when I was a young kid. My mom and dad enrolled me in horseback riding classes just to be around horses because ultimately, that was all that I ever really dreamt about or wanted to be around. I played sports, but it was never my top priority. Horses are what I always thought about. My dad (Richard Di Domenico) always liked the races and my cousin was a horse racing guy. We used to go to the off-track places on the weekends and watch the races until finally, one day, my dad said we’re going to take a flier and buy a racehorse. It was a family day kind of thing. We’d go to the farm on Saturdays and spend time and be around the horses and watch and learn how the trainer did things. It was always very enjoyable to do.

BV: Do you remember the name of that first horse?

SD: The first horse we had was named Arbrator. My dad claimed him for $4,000 at Balmoral and a guy named Ernie Adam, who I’m still friendly with, was our trainer at the time. Arbrator was great. He was a wonderful, wonderful horse. When we got him, he was up there in age. He probably won six or eight races for us before somebody else claimed him. For somebody breaking into the business, and for my dad – I don’t think he was trying to get rich by any means – but for a horse that could pay his way and give us a lot of thrills, he was the most ideal horse you could put in that situation. I was 12 years old at that time. It was my first taste of being around horse racing and the competitiveness of it.

BV: When did you decide to go the training route? That’s a big step up from owning them.

SD: We did this for a while and my dad decided he was going to try to get a trainer’s license and we were going to have a couple horses on the side. That’s what we did. We were very new to it. We got our assess kicked often. Between me and him, we didn’t really know much about training; he worked at the railroad his whole life and I was in school. I was young and naïve and didn’t know much about horses. Neither one of us ever worked with an experienced horseman. We saw some right and wrong ways to train and care for them. We watched Ernie when we had horses with him and when we got stalls at Maywood Park, we watched some of the people there and how they did it. We tried to copy what they did, only because we didn’t know any other way. At the time, we were buying cheaper horses and trying to make it work. For a while, it was really difficult. You learn a lot more from a bad horse than from a good horse. A bad horse wracks your brain and takes a lot more of your time than a good horse.

BV: What are some of the key lessons you picked up in those early days from watching those other guys or from making mistakes?

SD: The first thing for me was seeing some of the backstretch people and how they lived their lives. I thought, “this isn’t the way to be and this doesn’t make sense.” That was probably as big a lesson in life as I’ve ever had was watching people give their life away to gambling or alcoholism or drugs. As far as the horses, let a horse be a horse. As naïve as that sounds, you watch a lot of guys overthink what to do with a horse instead of just letting a horse do what it wants to do and following it along.

BV: Did you ever think, “what are we doing here? This is crazy.”

SD: All the time. All the time. Nobody likes getting their heads kicked in and at the time, we were. We didn’t know anything. We were on the fly out there, a dad and son. Some people go out to the baseball diamond and throw the ball around, batting practice and stuff like that. We were on a low budget and no money and we were trying the race horse game. I think my dad did that for me just because he saw my admiration for the horses and how much I enjoy being around it. At that time, Hawthorne was having double headers and I wanted to be there every day win, lose, or draw. Every night when Maywood raced, I wanted to be at the races. I wanted to watch those guys do it. You got to see a guy like Dave McGee or Tony Morgan, those kind of guys that you took for granted how great they were then. Those are Hall of Fame guys and you watched them. Man, the first time I got to talk to them, you remember that kind of stuff. And how grateful and thankful you were that they took the time to talk to you. I think that’s a part of the game that we’re missing a lot of now. The average guy that might watch a horse race never gets to hear the driver or the trainer; why a trainer added a piece of equipment or why a driver stayed to the inside.

BV: When did you decide to make a career out of it?

SD: I was studying psychology and criminal justice at Triton College, right outside Maywood Park. It wasn’t for me. I remember telling my mom and dad, “listen, I don’t want to go to school anymore. I want to train horses.” They weren’t really fond of that decision at the time. I was three years in, but it just didn’t feel right. I was in school thinking about the horses or something that happened the night before at the races. My mind was with the horses, it wasn’t in my schoolwork. School was expensive and I wasn’t getting anything out of it. I was just costing my mom and dad money. I was getting by, but I wasn’t going anywhere with it.

BV: So where did you start? Did you start working with any other trainers?

SD: I never did. As a kid, we were fortunate to be stabled next to Julie and Andy Miller at Maywood Park, before they were the Julie and Andy Miller, they were just Julie and Andy. Watching them, everything we did, we just picked up on the fly. Some things we did right and some things we didn’t do right. 

BV: Those first few years, not a lot of starts, not a lot of wins. When did things start to pick up?

SD: Three or four years in, in Chicago I started to understand the horses better, understanding the equipment better. We got away from buying the low-level horses and got into claiming horses that were simpler. You claim a horse, you get an equipment card, they’re already shod. The thought process is far easier as opposed to buying a horse for no money off a guy and working through whatever the issues are. 

I got to be very close with Tim Tetrick, who nobody knew then. My friendship with him helped me a lot, too. At the time, he was far more seasoned because he was raised on a farm and he had been around horses all the time. We started playing basketball together, of all things, and when we were done with that, we would talk about horses. It’s been a long friendship with me and him and we still do the same thing.

BV: In 2007, you had your first $100,000 season. In 2008, your horses earned nearly $600,000 and it seemed to snowball from there. When that started to happen, did you feel like you had made it?

SD: No, not at all. I was lost. I didn’t have enough confidence in myself to do it and it took me a long time to feel confident in decisions. It was good, but I was still learning. I was over the hump of being comparable with a lot of other stables. I’m not the guy who’s going to tell you how good I am or put the statistics on social media every day, that’s just not me. I was taught to let your success talk for you. At the end of the day, numbers don’t lie.

BV: When did you get that confidence and feel secure with what you were doing?

SD: When I got here, things started to click. The first few years, I came out here for the Meadowlands, I lived at the track, didn’t have any money. When they closed in the summer, I’d go back to Chicago the first two years. Out here, John Brennan, he was one of the three or four really influential people in my life. He taught me the New York way. You’re not a kid anymore, you’re not a deer-in-headlights anymore. This is the way things are done out here. You’ve got to handle yourself in a professional manner and do things this way and you’re going to give yourself a shot. Sometimes, you have to put your head down and walk away from situations that aren’t what you want them to be. I can’t say enough good about John Brennan. He was a wonderful human being, very helpful and very influential to me and showing me the way. For that, I’ll always be forever grateful for my friendship with him.

2019 was just a great year. It was probably the most gratifying year I ever had training (in 2019, Di Domenico harnessed 305 winners and his stable earned $4.7 million, both career bests in a single season to date). I won the trainer’s title (at Yonkers). I remember when I was going to get my trophy and John was unfortunately sick with COVID and nobody realized at that time how devastating that virus was going to be. I just remember him calling me and crying on the phone that he wasn’t going to be able to be there and take a picture with me when I got my first trophy. That will always be something that will be in the back of my mind.

My dad, I wish he was still alive to see me win my 2,000th race. It would have given him even a greater sense of pride than me. I couldn’t have done it without my dad, his support, and certainly all the money he lost trying to get me the horses and the knowledge. He was everything to me. Not having him here anymore is tough.

BV: When you look back, what horses and what wins stand out to you as the most memorable?

SD: Handsoffmycookie is at the top of my list. She was the first horse ever to give me the opportunity of seeing what it was to have a stakes horse and race at a major league level. Missile J when I raced him, that was a lot of fun competing at a high level with him. He really did well for the first year or so after we bought him, winning a leg of the Levy. Swansea, he’s not a horse you read about in Hoofbeats, but watching him progress and get better and go through some of the suspensory injuries he’s sustained and still do it at a high level. I can’t have any more respect for a horse. I raced Jimmy Freight for a short time and he won a Grand Circuit race in Dayton. There’s so many. I’m not giving a lot of the horses I’ve won with enough credit. There’s been a lot of them. Scandalicious, we bought her as a yearling and she’s made three-quarters of a million dollars. She’s been racing at Yonkers for seven years now, which is hard to do. 

Horses are like people; they all have different personalities and they all have different routines. What works for one doesn’t work for another. I like being aggressive classifying, I like to try a lot of different horses because of the old philosophy that you want to see what’s under the hood on some of them. You never know when you get that one that really clicks in your system. To see progression and see horses get better, that’s the gratification that you work hard to do because ultimately that’s what makes you the most money. To see the horses get better and improve, that’s what we’re out here to do.

by Brandon Valvo, for the Standardbred Owners Association of New York