ARCADIA, CALIF -- Leana Willaford spent Christmas in an unorthodox manner, bedding down stalls and setting up shop in Barn 38 at Santa Anita Race Course. Her best present came a few days later in the form of manes and tails; Thoroughbred runners prancing off the van from Hollywood Park and into the stable yard.
By New Year's Day she had Bill Mott's West Coast operation up and running.
This is a small string, about 10 horses from Mott's overall average of 100, but it is made up of high-quality purebreds, most of them owned by Khalid Abdullah's Juddmonte Farms and inherited from the barn of the late Bobby Frankel. Sons of Storm Cat, daughters of Distorted Humor, they are in keeping with the rest of Mott's stock -- far above the runners Willaford trained in her solo days when she saddled for a $5,000 tag at Prairie Meadows.
Mott has gone several years without stabling horses at a California track, and he's never kept a string at Santa Anita. Predominantly an East Coast man, he bases the majority of his winter stable in Florida at Gulfstream and Payson, where he's training now. But when the Hall of Fame horseman received the Juddmonte runners, it was Willaford he trusted to manage his Western string.
It's a big increase in responsibility from the 34-year-old's original role with Mott's operation -- she joined the barn as an exercise rider in December of 2000 -- but not one she's unaccustomed to. The daughter of a farrier, Willaford grew up on the backside of the now-defunct Playfair Race Track in Spokane, Washington and was already an experienced horsewoman when she joined Mott's team, having honed her skills as an 18-year-old breeze rider of 2-year-olds in training sales and while training on her own from the ages of 20 to 25.
She soon proved to be quite an asset.
"It didn't take long to figure out she was capable of doing more," the trainer said. "She grew up around the track and not only had she galloped for a long time, she'd also trained on her own. She wasn't starting out from scratch; the racetrack is in her blood. And usually when you've got somebody like that, when they have that background of growing up around the racetrack, they know what it's all about."
Willaford earned Mott's trust in the mornings aboard some of his top contenders, including King Cugat, Sharp Susan, My Typhoon, Sand Springs, and, more recently, 2009 3-year-old contender Hold Me Back.
"I knew the pedigrees since I'd always followed racing, so when I went to work for Bill it was very exciting to go down the shedrow and think wow, a Grade I winner, a Grade II winner, by a champion, out of a champion," she said.
Mott appreciated her feel for a horse and recognized that inexplicable connection or "knack" that some people have with Thoroughbreds. He began to send Willaford to supervise and saddle stakes contenders when they shipped out of town, and when longtime assistant Ralph Nicks went out on his own in 2004, he offered her the assistant trainer's position with the string at Belmont Park and Payson.
People often ask Willaford why she hasn't followed Nicks's example after six years of working for Mott, but she's in no hurry.
"There are a lot of factors involved," she said. "Training horses is very expensive by the time you pay the workers' comp bill and the tax bill and the feed bill; it's no easy thing. And you need to have the right opportunity, you need to have quality horses to win the quality races. So I'd have to have a really good offer. On top of that, what are the chances of me going out on my own and getting the quality of horses to work with that I have now, working with Bill?"
Today, an uninformed visitor could easily expect to see Mott himself walking out of the new California shedrow. The trainer's Girl Friday has carried out her boss's orders to the letter since she arrived in California on Dec. 24. Whether she'll become a permanent fixture on the West Coast scene remains to be seen (it is likely that she'll return to New York for the summer, where Mott maintains stables at Belmont and Saratoga), but under her supervision the initial runners, horses like Flourish, Cosset, Ad Infinitum, Treat Gently, Proviso, and Dreamt, will spread their wings.
"I'm extremely lucky; there are a lot of really good horsemen out there that don't get a shot at working with runners like this," she said.
And there's the added bonus: Willaford's current assignment offers the excitement of a new frontier.
"We're starting from scratch out here with crew and everything," she said. "I can gallop, I can saddle horses, but the big challenge is teaching new people the way we like to do things. When you're starting a whole new outfit with all new people you have to be willing to teach and encourage them."
"She's been doing that for a long time now," Mott said. "Obviously, being an assistant trainer, you're not only determining what goes on with the horses, but you're teaching the staff. Most of our work is a lot of repetition and it's a system -- the daily routine -- and then you've got certain details that you want done as far as the care of the horses and bedding of the stalls and that sort of thing, but all of that pretty much becomes second nature once you've been with an operation as long as Leana has been with mine."
Claire Novak is an award-winning journalist whose coverage of the thoroughbred industry appears in a variety of outlets, including The Blood-Horse Magazine, The Albany Times Union and NTRA.com. She lives in Lexington, Ky.