Stakes season is fun, right? You all know - that sprawl from like early May until the middle of November where it's just a big race here and a big race there...so many big races coming at us so often and so quickly that my head inevitably spins keeping up with it all. But I love it, you love it. I hope you love it, that is - I don't want to put words in your mouth. Though, as a member of the press pool, I think - for one - I should be allowed to swim in the deep end (I am six feet tall, foot to skull). For two, I will admit that when the stakes fire glimmers to a crisp, the reprieve is nice. To me, this time from December through to about April feels almost like everyone is just gearing up to do the whole song and dance again in May. At the same time, this down period also makes following racing - even for me - feel a bit less exciting. Maybe we as a sport could make it more enticing in some capacity? And thanks to that rhetorical question, I can segue to my proposal. But unfortunately, being the little scattered dog in the brain that I am, I must prelude with my source of inspiration, as well as a subject matter I am inevitably going to reference over the course of this column so long as my lovely editor still likes me or as long as I stay alive, whichever persists longest. You see, over the course of the pandemic, I have rekindled my love for horse racing. From a decade-plus of grinding in "the biz" alongside the super inconvenient conflict of being a 20-year-old and wondering on the "what's my life all about" malarkey, I'll admit I faced the crossroads of keeping with the sport or saying goodbye and, I don't know, becoming a bank teller. The unexpected spark that reignited my passion came from across the pond with British flat and National Hunt racing. Man, it was the summer of love for me. Most of my days, you could find me mapping the perfect trifecta over the July course at Newmarket or perfectly nailing a race at Pontefract. To this day, it is a major thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, and there are many elements that contribute to making British racing such a great product for me (minus the unfortunately high rake for us international players). So, as I said earlier, British racing may come up a lot, even though I am writing for a harness newsletter, but I am not sorry. It's a big world out there, and I want to see it all. Now, at the time of writing this piece, we are in the middle of National Hunt season in Britain and Ireland. But across both disciplines, many tracks host various series races. On the Jumps side, there are many series across the nation's tracks for their lower-rated horses, and they all run in qualifiers spaced from weeks to months - and sometimes across tracks - to determine whether they race for a big pot come time for the finals. Series like this have also developed for this time of year on the flat in a set of races called the "All-Weather Championships," which were formed in part to help keep horses in Britain instead of shipping to Dubai or Bahrain to race for bigger purses. Basically, I just described series racing. I do remember a time back to yesteryear - 2010 - when there was this sort of spark, and it particularly focused on the types of horses that may not be the types for the Grand Circuit. I'm thinking back to the days of the Complex Series, the Exit 16W, the Clyde Hirt, etc. Reimplementing races of this type to the calendar is a portion of the opportunity racing has with its current calendar, but I'm thinking bigger. With the English example, these series feel more akin to something like a playoffs season, where the stakes (no pun intended) are just higher because they build towards something. I feel we as a sport could implement a series like this for our weekend warrior horses and shape them where they can be interesting betting contests, because the current state of classifying late closers monetarily and/or by victories is somewhat clunky and can often lead to there being one or two standout horses that ultimately makes betting the race feel uncompetitive. But more on that in a future column. ► Sign up for our FREE DRF Harness Digest Newsletter Here's my basic proposal: a playoff-type series of races targeted at more of the overnight company horses, ideally contested in cooperation with other racetracks. Perhaps that last part is a lofty ask, but considering our nation's race secretaries meet annually, it possibly may not be that far out of the realm of possibility. Now, the real catch of a series like this - to oversimplify classification - is to let the race secretary have the responsibility of matching horses with other horses close to their ability. In this way, it is an open series. But it wouldn't be an open series. You see, the series would be divided into bands - for example, the Band A horses would be the top of the top entered and the Band E horses would be the bottom level. All calibers of horse can have an opportunity in the series. Horses' finishes in each prelim would earn them points, which would also be weighted in the event of horses moving up a band or down a band (since a win at Band D, for example, would be easier than a win at Band C). The series would then go into "playoff" prelims, where the top x-number of horses compete in eliminations for berths into their respective finals, which would have tiered purses wherein Band A competes for the highest and Band E competes for the lowest, but still sizeable, purse. The logistics of what number of prelims go to what tracks and which track hosts the finals are beyond the bounds of this hypothetical, though the series would ideally have prelims at several tracks of varying dimensions just to create an added spice to it all. But my design of the idea focused on two parameters. First, I focused on restructuring the way we classify races with the aim to make racing more competitive, hopefully decreasing the number of standout horses a race. Second, because the series would abandon the traditional earnings conditions, I wanted to make sure that there is still incentive for horses to climb the ranks; that their risk comes with a greater reward. Having some kind of playoff program over the dormant months on the racing calendar feels like a great opportunity to present interesting racing while also rewarding many of the horses whose job is to just hit the track day-in and day-out. We already see some forms of this idea, such as with Woodbine Mohawk Park's Pop-Up Series, though they are structured off our traditional series template. Besides, there are tons of exciting programs coming out of English racing over the last few years like the Racing League, so perhaps looking outside our box can help us to continually push the sport. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel with ideas like this, but instead I'm adding some golden rims and maybe a hydraulic system to our wheels to make them spin in cool directions while I drive. Yeah, gold rim racing...that's what I want.