Harrah’s Hoosier Park overcomes early season headwinds to deliver a record-breaking season
Gabe Prewitt on how the Indiana track increased handle by more than 30 per cent in 2025.
by Brett Sturman
When I spoke in March to Gabe Prewitt, then the new vice president/general manager of racing at Harrah’s Hoosier Park, he said he had reasons for optimism about the upcoming meet. A lot of which had to do naturally with Prewitt and team’s touch, and honestly, I don’t think there was much doubt that this year’s numbers would improve from the prior years.
But what might be surprising is to the extent the numbers grew.
In 2024, total handle for the Hoosier meet was $100.1 million. In 2025, that number exploded to $131.4 million, good for an increase of 30.1 per cent in just a single year. What makes that change even more astounding is that it goes directly against industry handle numbers this year. As of this writing, handle on all U.S. races is down 8.5 per cent on the year. So, looking at it another way, Hoosier’s handle this year is besting the total industry numbers by nearly 40 per cent.
The success didn’t come easily, though, and it wasn’t immediate. In that March column one of the things Prewitt was concerned about was being able to maintain the horse population to fill races five days a week over 160 days, and that did come to be a very real challenge.
“I thought we staggered a little bit out of the gate,” Prewitt said. “The horse shortage was severe, and so we were fighting through that for the first two months. But we were still putting up strong numbers relative to shorter average field sizes and smaller race cards that we were offering, where I’m going to say we were up between eight to 10 per cent on any given night. So, I knew if we could just steady on the horse population that we had a lot of potential there.
“It finally steadied, call it May, and that’s when we really got cooking with the types of numbers we saw at the end. We went on a streak of 16 to 18 weeks in a row where we were up double digits every night that we raced. Our field size was down slightly, but we had a comparable number of starters since there were a handful more of total races, and the resulting average handle per race was way up ($61,637 in 2025 to $48,322 in 2024).”
The massive growth in handle wasn’t by accident of course, but rather the result of different strategic improvements to the product and wagering experience. Prewitt details a slew of changes that included a revamp of the wagering menu, how races were placed throughout the card, and a shift in post-time to an earlier 5:30 slot as the meet was underway to capture additional market share.
“At Pompano, the late dollars in the winter always seemed to be there, but here, we’d get jammed up late with three or four other tracks sometimes,” Prewitt said. “There really wasn’t a point then in us going as late as we were, so we moved up the post time as an experiment to see if we liked it or not. It seemed it would have been beneficial to basically trade two races that would have been after 11 p.m. under the old post time and now put them earlier. Being the first signal out there and getting us off to a good start for the most part was an overall good move for us.”
Other changes included removing the passing lane, increasing race-by-race wagering analysis on the broadcast, and rethinking card construction to focus on bettor engagement.
“Anything we could do to grow the broadcast, and the wagering side was important,” Prewitt said.
Looking ahead to next year, the Hoosier meet will begin earlier than ever. The hope is to combat some of the horse population and scheduling challenges that were faced in the early going of this past season.
“First, it was tougher to get horses back going following a really bad winter, but that was also right when Oak Grove started as well,” Prewitt said. “Now, we’ll have a five-to-six week jump on them which should help us a lot.”
For next year, the 160 race days will be spaced out farther, which will give the Hoosier team the potential for stronger cards each night, rather than trying to fill five nights of racing each week with smaller and some lesser quality cards as was the case this past year.
Prewitt noted that the track also intends to continue experimenting with race formats and anything else that could liven things up, including more five-eighths mile events.
“We toyed with a five-eighths mile race one time this year, and it had a lot of action,” he said. “Just how the track plays being a seven-eighths configuration and not having the race flow you would have seen in the past at Indiana, maybe we try to mix it up with changing distances in different classes to make things a little more interesting and force some different movements.”
In a preview of what might be to come, Prewitt teased some possible new faces at the track next year.
“Sometimes when you have the same horses and same people night in and night out – it’s not to say anything bad at all but it’s just that the product can get a little stale,” Prewitt said. “We’ve had many conversations – and have a couple names up our sleeves that might surprise some people and if comes to play out, would really go a long way in mixing things up and having some new faces out there in the colony.
“The team is realistic about the challenge of building on this year’s sizable gains. It’s going to be even more of a climb next year because of the expectation set from this year and we’ll be starting at a higher point, but I have no doubt that we’ll be able to continue to grow this thing.”
