Tom Ryan

At a track like Naas that goes all year round with Flat and National Hunt racing we’ve no break really and we have the pedal to the metal most of the year.

The Birdcatcher meeting would traditionally be the feature offering on the Flat here at Naas and that is on Sunday week, the 21st of October, but today our lads out on track were birching fences and hurdles to get ready for the opening jumps meeting on the 10th of November, just six days after we have the Flat Season Finale meeting here so we keep a lot of balls in the air.

At the current time we’ve been racing and redeveloping so you have to keep the eye even more on the ball.

At Naas the board and the staff were very forward thinking in how we approached the redevelopment. We took guidance from Turnberry Consulting, who are recognised all around the world, and we looked at a complete venue wide plan for Naas and we’ve implemented 75 per cent of that already.

Naas was obviously a track that benefited from the Curragh undergoing their own redevelopment project as well and from 2016 when the conversation to run those Curragh fixtures in 2017 and 2018 was taking place we were very determined to do a really good job of it.

When the previous Curragh development was being discussed in 2007/2008 we were in the mix then to run the Moyglare and a couple of other Group 1’s so when we got the second chance to go at it we were determined to go at it strong and do a high class job.

The ultimate aim at Naas is always to keep striving to go forward and we would dearly love a Group 1 race to go alongside our Grade 1 hurdle. We did get to open and close the Flat season for the last two seasons and that will remain the case again next year and I think that is a great compliment to our team.

If you look at Naas and how it has evolved in the last number of years, we will run 14 Flat meetings this year all going well and we also serve a very important part of the National Hunt season, especially with the meetings leading into the Festival’s centering around our Grade 1 race in January.

In recent years there has been a lot of investment on the Flat track, both on the surface and also the watering system to keep the track right and this year the watering system got full use and catered for our needs very well.

Most of the challenges facing a racecourse manager are to do with the weather. The weather is the great unknown and you have to set yourself up to survive the pendulum as it swings left and right.

Unfortunately through the years here there has been an odd cancellation because the weather conditions were unfavourable and that is hard on the staff who have packed the place out with hospitality and worked hard on marketing the fixture. I would like to think in recent years we have increased our capacity to cater for more extreme weather events — high degrees of rainfall in particular — but when you are working with an outdoor activity weather is going to be the number one challenge.

I think Naas has become a yardstick track across both codes. It has been that way over National Hunt for many years and increasingly so on the Flat in recent years. If you win or are placed in a two-year-old maiden here or a bumper or maiden hurdle, invariably you have a very nice prospect to go to war with or a very sellable commodity because of the reputation of the quality of the racing at Naas.

There are a number of different ways we can improve and the focus here is ‘always forward’ and we’ll always look for an opportunity to progress. A lot of progress has been made but we keep striving forward to the next step and certainly a top flight race on the Flat has to be the next step.

Collectively I think the Irish tracks are trying to widen the appeal that racing has. I believe the rolling out of the Wi-Fi systems that the tracks are installing in conjunction with HRI is going to be a big thing and a lot of work has gone into that so that if you have 5,000 or 25,000 at a fixture the system fall over and ours is due to go live for the Birdcatcher meeting.

There is no magic wand to recreate the attendances of old but I think it is a battle that Naas, and all the racecourses are willing to fight and I think we will get a result.

It’s hard to believe but I’m here as manager at Naas nearly 12 years now. I came from a farming and bloodstock family where my father kept a few mares in Tipperary, not far from Captain Swan and Charlie in Cloughjordan.

After doing a third level degree I spent a few very good years with the Coolmore team which brought me to America and was a great experience.

I then went and got some further education on the business side and actually departed racing to join an electrical contractor to work on the sales and commercial side. But in 2006 Margaret McGuinness was retiring after 37 years service and the post was advertised. I applied, did a couple of interviews and was delighted to get a call from Dermot Cantillon one day to offer me the job.

There was a lovely thread to link my time from Coolmore to my current role at Naas now. One of the farms I worked on for Coolmore in America kept the dam of Giant’s Causeway, Mariah’s Storm. Her last filly foal by Storm Cat that I had anything to do with before I left to come home was You’resothrilling and she ended up in front of me again at Naas in 2007 when she won a Group Three in my first year here as manager.

So I saw her as a foal before I left, I watched her win here as a two-year-old and now we are watching her produce all those fabulous horses like Gleneagles, Marvellous and Happily.

I’ve tried to go from strength to strength since I started here in Naas and there’s plenty of more road to drive into in the years ahead.