Not your typical horse-racing duo has produced your not so typical horse-racing podcast.
The Hot 2 Trot podcast came to life in December when Dawnelle Mock and Ashley Eisenbeil teamed up to produce the podcast for the Pennsylvania Horse Racing Association (PHRA).
It was Mock’s idea to start a podcast, so she searched for a potential co-host. Initially, the pairing was going to be with a male but there were no available options that Mock felt would work for her, so she turned to her co-worker, Eisenbeil, who was working for the PHRA as its director of marketing.
“Dawnelle came to me and said, ‘I feel the most comfortable if you did it with me. You are more familiar with Thoroughbreds and I am more harness,’” Eisenbeil said recently.
She agreed and they decided to really play into the angle of two women doing a podcast in a traditionally male-dominated industry.
“Women are definitely becoming more and more known in the industry,” Mock said. “On the harness side, it was women who won most of the big races this year and even on the Thoroughbred side we saw a female trainer win the Belmont (Stakes). There are a lot of women on the broadcasting side, it’s not just trainers. I like that we can highlight that through the podcast.”
The tag team’s chemistry is clear when listening to or viewing the podcast. Mock grew up in the age of social media and has family horse-racing roots in western Pennsylvania. Her family owned Standardbreds and she is now an active owner herself in the Standardbred racing game.
Her first job out of college was running social media for the Meadows Standardbred Owners Association (MSOA). The Youngstown State marketing major was then promoted to marketing director before landing with the PHRA in September 2022 as digital content director.
Eisenbeil stumbled into the horse- racing industry by chance. She graduated from Penn State in 2007 and was working in the event-planning industry for a company with three locations of golf courses and conference centers. During one of her wedding events, she impressed a guest, who was a family member of a couple being married.
“I gave her my card and she called me that week and asked me to interview at Pimlico and they offered me the job on the spot,” Eisenbeil said. “It was because of my ability to multitask and event plan. I went into my first year at Pimlico as ticket sales and operations for just the Preakness.”
The York, Pa., native spent seven years with the Maryland Jockey Club before being hired by the PHRA in 2017 as the director of marketing.
The duo agreed they needed to do something different to stand out in the saturated world of podcasts. They are the only horse-racing podcast with two female hosts but where they have really succeeded in separating themselves is how they present the sport. They have interviewed stars like Hall of Fame driver Tim Tetrick and leading Parx jockey Frankie Pennington.
But they didn’t just talk about their successful careers on the track. They gave their listeners a side of Tetrick and Pennington that hasn’t been explored before by talking as much about non-racing topics.
“We want to show the personalities and stories behind these training stables and drivers,” Mock said. “Get their take on their personal favorite horse. Put a face to the name and get a feel of their personality. “It is why we try to make it fun and not so serious.”
“We might be talking to a trainer who has already been interviewed but they haven’t asked him what his latest Netflix binge was,” Eisenbeil said. “Our industry is so vast between aftercare, breeding, and racing. It is a lot to comprehend. Breaking it down with these smaller interviews for newer people who aren’t so familiar and humanizing them. That’s what we are really trying to do.”
They have a segment called “Racing for Love” that highlights the many romantic relationships across the horse-racing industry. It is this type of segment that helps draw a demographic that Eisenbeil said is a majority female 28-48 age segment. They also have highlighted the PHRA foal cams that allow viewers to see the birth of racehorses at Whysper Wynd Farm in Pennsylvania and at Delaware Valley University.
“No one is really catering to their demographic,” Eisenbeil said. “So that’s kind of why we really pushed the female, the girly, the purple, kind of edgy content. We started off doing some of the interviews like Racing For Love, which was my idea, because I always found it so interesting there are so many couples in the industry.”
For more information and to access the podcast, go to pennhorseracing.com/hot-2-trot/.
Original Source Credited to lancasterfarming.com
