During my University days I spent most of my Marketing lectures in the Uni Bar sampling a few or down at the Tote but I did pick up enough snippets to understand the importance of Branding in the marketplace.
I have some major concerns in the message Melton is sending in regards this issue. It has a glut of restricted and low level provincial races being run there currently and to be honest, I am sick of it and guarantee I am not alone.
My belief is that Melton should be held up as the pinnacle of the sport, a place where participants strive to get to. In much the same way that country football or cricket doesn't get played at the MCG we need to adopt the philosophy that "less is more". Take a leaf out of the thoroughbred fraternity who only use their flagship tracks at Flemington and Caulfield for major racedays and use subsiduary tracks at Moonee Valley and Sandown for midweek and below par winter meetings. Any individual who gets to play at the "G" earns it by performance and you don't get any easy wins at Flemington in any class.
There seems to be 3-4 meetings run at Melton per week currently and the standard is quite simply abysmal the majority of the time. An owner should get a buzz out of having one good enough to race there but the meeting I watched there last Sunday (30/5) was the last straw. Most races were bottom up points in field selection so not only were we getting the lowest classes racing, we were getting the worst horses at that level. Not surprisingly the thing that goes hand in hand with bad horses is bad drivers and it was almost comical watching a few of the races. That simply should not be happening at the headquarters of Harness Racing in Victoria.
It is also very confusing to mug punters as well as I regularly hear comments such as "this thing ran 3rd at Melton so must go okay" and I haven't the heart to tell them that it was in a R0 race that should have never been run at the headquarters of Harness Racing. No doubt these punters will soon become disenchanted with the industry and stop investing on the product totally.
My guess is that it all comes down to narrow minded administrators who are looking to get a quick return on their investment on the facilities in place there instead of thinking about what is best for the industry long term. By taking the long term approach it would allow Melton to become a showcase track where punters are confident they are backing the best horses and best drivers and thus inject some much needed confidence back into the industry. Whilst Moonee Valley had a few shortcomings both as a venue and a track, all punters knew that if they saw a meeting programmed at the Valley on a Friday or Saturday night then it was a Metropolitan class meeting and any midweek meeting was for lower class horses. With Melton, the average punter has no idea currently.
It isn't rocket science, set a schedule in place so that if a punter sees a Melton meeting he knows what he is getting and utilise one of the major provincial tracks should the need arise to cover meetings from other tracks. Victoria is extremely lucky to have numerous top class tracks all within a 90 minute drive of Melbourne all of whom were recently upgraded as part of a track rationalisation scheme!!!. I would only race at Melton on Friday nights with Metro class racing and have an upmarket provincial meeting on a Wednesday night with an additional 20% of prizemoney compared to regular country class racing to attract the best fields of that ilk. Treat it as a centre of excellence.
The venue could easily be marketed to attract crowds there on non racing nights similar to other clubs of its size and the name of Tabcorp Park, Melton would actually hold some prestige to all participating in the industry.
