THE SUNSHINE COAST NEWSPAPER COLUMN - STUART KENDRICK PUSHING FOR YET ANOTHER PREMIERSHIP

By Graham Potter | Sunday, March 29, 2015

Graham Potter writes a weekly column for the Sunshine Coast daily. Due to demand from those having trouble accessing the paper these columns are now also published on HRO courtesy of the Sunshine Coast daily.

With a third of the season left to run multiple premiership winner Stuart Kendrick is well placed to defend his Sunshine Coast Trainers’ Premiership title.

Kendrick currently heads the table with twenty-seven winners, already one more than his winning total last season when he annexed the Sunshine Coast Premiership in his first full season at the coast.

Top city trainer Robert Heathcote is a couple of winners behind Kendrick at this stage in what already appears to have come down to a two horse race.

Claiming back-to-back premierships would be nothing new to Kendrick as he dominated the Mackay scene, taking out five trainers’ titles in succession before electing to make the move south.

Changing the location of any professional training set-up, irrespective of the owner support or quality of runner in the stable is no easy task.

Neither is moving a young family and so it is to Kendrick’s credit that he made the move stick both professionally and personally and was able to establish himself in his new environment in a relatively short space of time.

He has also done enough to edge into the top ten trainers on the metropolitan scene in Brisbane where he currently sits in ninth position.

A solid all-round effort.

Will Kendrick complete the Sunshine Coast Trainers’ Premiership double?

That will be an interesting sideshow in the coming months but you can count on the fact that Heathcote, who relinquished his metropolitan premiership mantle to the Tony Gollan stable last season, is unlikely to go away quietly and Kendrick’s chase to hold another multi-premiership winner at bay is likely to remain a challenging one as these two trainers take their battle right down to the wire.

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The final of Racing NSW’s Country Championships will be contested at Randwick next Saturday and it has got to be hoped that race-commentator David Fowler’s call in his personal blog on horseracingonly.com.au for Racing Queensland to replicate the Country Championships in Queensland does not fall on deaf ears.

The original concept was innovative and, as such, lent itself ideally to a strong marketing campaign which captured the imagination of the country areas it targeted.

Bathhurst, Port Macquarie, Tamworth, Wagga Wagga , Grafton, Goulburn and Dubbo were all allocated regional qualifying heats. Each of the qualifying races carried prize-money of $100 000 with the winner and runner-up of each race moving forward to the grand-final at Randwick, which carries a purse of $300 000.

While Queensland cannot be expected to match the $1 million stake investment made by NSW, they should be searching high and low to pull some rabbit out of the hat to take on board a concept, at whatever level, that has really taken hold south of the border.

At very least it will help make those who race away from the big smoke believe that their interests are being well looked after.

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Has Racing Queensland angered the gods?

Between Gatton, the Gold Coast, Doomben and Kilcoy, no less than twenty seven individual races were abandoned in the last ten days for a variety of reasons.

But then I guess at least Racing Queensland still has all that left-over stake-money to redistribute,

I wonder what they are going to do with it?

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