For The National Hunt side I think we should find a place for Auteuil some French jumping racing.

I would like to adjust the Group 1 handicaps, at the moment they are not as realistic as possible. I also think there should be more maidens at the beginning of the season (first two weeks) as it can be difficult to find a suitable race for horses who go over the same distance. I would also like to see the schedule made more international... Sure its a majority UK/Ireland based user base, but I'd like to see more of the American/Australian/Asian races added to the schedule just for a point of difference, even adding something like the global sprint challenge (we could extend it to mile and classic distances as well) for some added competitiveness. I also have some very interesting ideas for the lower handicaps and lower handicap finals, imo we should have a finals day with the Global challenges, group 1 handicaps and lower handicaps all included.

good ideas

Personally speaking I'm not in the dominating business . If you had a 30 horse limit I'd probably upload all 30 but I wouldn't necessarily aim at handicaps/even G1 handicaps. I would upload horses to cover more conditions though. Theoretically this is how a team of mine could look for next time out with a 30 horse limit. 4 horses at 5/6/7/8/10/12/14 = 28 horses. Two each for softer/firmer ground. All 3 year olds. Scrap the 2 year old and 4 year olds .

But I can't see that happening as I don't even want to run a full league team next time out. Instead I'd love to see a one horse series. Say triple crown challenge where you get to upload one horse and you run just that one horse across the Japanese/Australian/American triple crown races. Take those races out of the trainers championship. Would allow for those who play less to have a shot at winning something as no one horse can dominate all distances from 1m to 1m7f. Also makes entering horses for someone lazy like me easier too. Enter once and it just gets run one race every week.

I think perhaps put the Dubai world cup back to the third week, have some races in the second week as preps.

Start the season with all maidens.

Have a prep for the Kentucky derby.

There's no 9 furlong h'caps between week 3 and week 10 and if u got a 3 yo old then there no race until week ten.

The jump side is really good and the only thing I could see is perhaps have a few more fillies only races.


Plus i'm against banning horses from certain( group1) races.

As a newbie it's great, it's great fun even if u got slow/bad horses like me.

2000 Guineas?

think the novice side of the NH hunt schedule needs improvement, have at least 3 or 4 novice handicaps per week as well as the usual graded novice races.

I am a novice trainer, 1st time in league and did not have any real concept of what was expected when managing\entering horses into races.

An example from my own experience. I had a 3yo 8f colt who only got his first race in week 2 over 9f. I knew he did not stay this distance but needed to give him a run so he could enter the 2000 guineas. He was rated 88 after this run, but he managed 2nd in the guineas. Now rated 110. ( I know some people think the guineas was a false run race, but for me 2nd was a great achievement).

I would have horses under 90. They would get low marks from their maidens and then be kept for big handicaps. So you could say the horse has to run two or three times to qualify for certain races but that means expanding the schedule, which is already too big, or forcing people to have balanced stables. Having 30 spaces in your stables is a very bad idea for the league. I've only got 21 horses in the NH and look how thats going.

my point exactly
even reducing to 15 i think could be something to think about but 20 is about right

20 is a good number for the amount of races we have every week.

We are never going to be able to make the perfect schedule nor will we be able to use every idea, whether they are good or bad. The schedule already has enough races each week and we dont want more than twelve weeks. If anything we want to reduce the amount of races per week. This probably wont happen though its going to be difficult to put in new race series', more likely we will rename the lower band handicaps, or more foreign races. Id love to have Sha Tin or another big festival from around the world but its tough. Obviously I do look at it from where British trainers send their horses - Dubai, Breeders, Melbourne Cup. But the league is global and I would rather lose some of the races we already have to be replaced by those more commonly known by our trainers from around the world.

We cant have 40 races a week, it would just be crazy. If we have 30 races per week for 12 weeks thats 360 races.

Over the season every horse, providing you dont have six 5f sprinters, should be able to run 5-6 times after the maidens. If you break that down you'd then need:

5 x 0-80 5f sprints
5 x 0-110 5f sprints
5 x listed/G3/G2 5f sprints
4 x G1 5f sprints

Thats 19 races gone already without any 2yo races, 3yo only or 4yo+. You then have eight more fashionable distances and you are already at 171 races without races at 7,9,11,13,15,17,19 and 21f. No races for 2yo's and no maidens. No G1 hcaps or the additional maidens after the transfer window.

So where do we lose races and where do we add them? If every horse, in a reasonably balanced stable, is given 6-8 chances to run over the course of the season I think that is more than fair. This discussion is possibly a little early. We will know more come week 9 or 10. All suggestions are welcomed.

A couple of NH races I'd recommend are the 2 grade 1 mares hurdles in Ireland.

these would be great Ubar good suggestion

I would be really keen to lend a hand to creating a NH schedule. Though it would more be providing ideas and races than actual programming (obviously!).

I have found it REALLY hard to find races for my horses. Granted I missed week 1, but still. I have one filly who won't get a run at all until week 6 because there are no listed or group races for her at anything near her distance, which is 1m2f so not exactly an unfashionable distance. I think it would be handy to have maiden races run throughout the season, just one or two but to give people more chances to get a win. What if you're someone like me, most of mine (all 6 of them!) are rated too high for handicaps, but it is quite likely that they won't be good enough to compete in group races. I don't know yet, but because they ran well in the initial maidens they have handicap marks too high to compete in handicap races. If there were maidens, or more lower group/listed races in the schedule then I could target those whilst the top trainers target the G1 races.

The NH schedule needs a complete rebuild imo. We need to move with times and update the courses, races and make the schedule chronological.

In week two there were maidens over 1m1 and 1m3 and in week three a maiden over 1m2? Thats enough for three 1m2 horses without including all the 3yo trial races? Maidens over the season is a good idea but it just adds more races to each week. You only have one horse which is too high for handicaps?