State champ times three:
Steven Kocher didn’t set his sights beyond the district level, but he recently edged the best in the state to claim the 201617 Ohio High School Senior Bowler of the Year title.
“I thought I had a chance to win the Southwest District title, but not the state,” said Kocher, who attends Northmont. “That never even crossed my mind.”
The board of directors of the Ohio High School Bowling Coaches Association annually selects a senior girl and boy bowler of the year from the Southwest, Northwest, Northeast, and combined Central, East and Southeast districts — eight total district recipients for District Senior Bowlers of the Year. Of the statewide applicants, those receiving the most votes earn the state award. Kocher earned the boys’ title while Mechanicsburg’s Ally Hosier won the girls’ state award.
A 3.0 grade-point average is required, but the award is based primarily on bowling performance throughout high school. Among Kocher’s many accomplishments was an OHSAA individual state championship in 2014. He qualified to state with the Thunderbolts in 2014 and as an individual in 2015. He earned GWOC player of the year honors in 2016 and landed on the GWOC first team all four years. He has three perfect games and an 800 series to his credit as well as a 249 high average.
The award provided a capstone for a youth bowling career that spanned 13 years as Kocher was on the lanes by the time he was 4.
“I had constant motivation, while growing up, from my brother Michael,” Kocher, 17, said. “Wanting to beat him motivated me.”
Winning the individual state title — a significant point of pride now — came as a bit of a surprise when it happened his freshman season. “I thought we were just there as a team, I didn’t even know I was eligible for an individual title, so I was definitely surprised when they told me I won,” he said.
The Englewood bowler, who will attend Bowling Green State University this fall, is considering bowling for the collegiate club team. His bowling to-do list still has a few outstanding items like making the cut at the upcoming Junior Gold Championships in Cleveland in July. Among Hosier’s accomplishments are three Division II state championships — two with her Mechanicsburg team (2014 and ’16) as well as an individual D-II state title this year. Hosier was also a fourtime Ohio Heritage Conference player of the year.
“When she came in as a freshman, it was an easy transition for her because we had a strong team,” coach David Bush said. “This year, she was the only one left from the state championship teams so she had a much bigger role.”
As he does this, he begins to choreograph an equine kick line that quickly resembles a bugle-blaring cavalry charge.
Until recently he’s billed the unique view from his back-seat perch as “the most exciting 30 seconds in sports that nobody gets to see.”
Mike, with Becky’s help, is the starter of harness races at Miami Valley Gaming in Lebanon, Hollywood Dayton Raceway at Needmore and Wagner Ford roads in Dayton and at 46 of the 66 county fairs in Ohio that have pari-mutuel racing.
Woebkenberg said he and his wife start some 3,000 races a year, and they’ve been doing it for 25 years.
While he guesses there are fewer than 50 starters now working harness tracks in the United States, it’s a certainty that few, if any, are more immersed in the sport than he is.He’s a former driver. He helps with blacksmith duties between races at the tracks. And there is a good chance some of the race bikes upon which the drivers are perched in his races were built by him at his nationally known Superior Sulky shop in Farmersville.
Woebkenberg is also a tireless promoter of the sport, which is a why in 2011 the Ohio Chapter of the U.S. Harness Writers Association presented him with its Rambling Willie Award, an honor named for the famed Ohio-owned pacing gelding and given to an Ohioan who has done the most for harness racing over the past two decades.
And because Woebkenberg has not rested on those laurels, he’s had to amend that “most exciting 30 seconds” claim.
Thanks to him, the past two months or so at Miami Valley Gaming — where the race cards run through May 8 — other people have been able to share his up-close vantage point at the start of races.
He’s begun taking some fans along with him in the race gate (as the starter’s vehicle is known). They sit next to him and get an unbelievable and up-close experience of sight and sound and an appreciation of the drivers and those magnificent animals.
The other morning Woebkenberg was standing on the sidewalk outside his Superior Sulky shop in Farmersville. On one side of him was an aluminum training cart he had made. On the other was a smaller, sleeker race bike.
But at the moment his interest was directed across Jackson Street from the 1868 building that houses his business.
“That was once the high school here in town,” he said of the stately brick building that now proclaims Masonic Temple over the door. “And that yellow brick building over there was the blacksmith shop. That building and mine were owned by brothers. They’d build the buggies over here, then roll them over there and take them up to the second story to paint them before bringing them back here to sell.”
He then nodded to a building farther down the street: “That white brick place was the stage stop in town.”
Just then the postman came walking across the street. The two men called each other by name and exchanged pleasantries, and that made Woebkenberg smile: “All this is small town personified.”
Inside his shop, where several horse carts and race sulkies were in various stages of assemblage or repair, you also found an eclectic collection of racing and horse-themed remembrances of times long past.
It made you realize just how deeply Woebkenberg has embraced the sport since he grew up in Lebanon in the 1950s.
He’s a third-generation horseman, and with a warm smile he said one of his first memories is being with his dad, John Woebkenberg, who had just driven home a winner at the Ross County Fair in Chillicothe:
“I have a picture of it. I was just 3 or 4. My mom had made me a set of racing colors to match my dad’s. He’s in the Winner’s Circle, and I’m setting up there on his shoulder in the race bike.”
His dad taught him everything from mucking stalls to how to handle various driving dilemmas on the track. And at age 16, Mike debuted in the sulky at the Warren County Fair.
Years later he began to realize there were other ways to make a living in the sport. He began to build and repair sulkies and horse carts, and then one day, he said, a friend had him paint some mobile starting gates for him.
As payment the guy gave him a starting gate unit and suggested he try starting races at a couple of county fairs.
“I needed a driver to help me, and Becky volunteered, and it exploded from there,” he said.
Becky — who had grown up outside Gratis and shown horses when she was younger — was a natural. She had been helping run her family’s bulldozer business in West Alexandria, Mike said: “She’d run D-8 Cats (Caterpillars) and all that stuff, so it was just an extension of that.”
Over the years the pair has started races at various harness tracks across the Midwest, and with the resurgence of standardbred racing in Ohio, Mike has been able to stay deeply involved in the sport he champions whenever he can.
“I believe we have one of the most unique sports going,” he said. “Men and women race on equal footing, and you may have drivers who are very young — kids can start at 16 — and, on the other end of the spectrum, a few years ago I started (Hancock County Sports Hall of Famer) 93-yearold Doc Schoonover.
“Pro football and pro basketball careers are short, but in our sport you can drive into your 40s and 50s and 60s and still be competitive.
“And we have these amazing animals that we’ve spent 300 years breeding to do what they do so effortlessly, so wondrously now.”
For the fans, he noted the broad scope of pari-mutuel wagering:
“We’ve got all the stats of baseball and basketball that people get excited about. We’ve got the percentages of what the drivers do and what the horses do. The program shows all the past performances, so you can get a pretty good read on a race.
“Or, you can just come in here and say, ‘My daughter’s name is Susie, and this horse’s name is Susie, and I’ll go with that.’
“I think it’s hard to beat us for entertainment. If you’re a person in your 20s, you can go to the races with your date. It’s free to get in and sit down. You buy a program for $2, and if you bet just $2 on the 14 races, that’s $28 total. You can’t go to the movies for that and get this kind of entertainment.
“And there’s definitely no chance at the movies that you can win and they’ll give you some of your money back.”
“All right,gentlemen, gather ’em up and bring ’em in,” Woebkenberg barked into his PA microphone as he looked out onto the track where 10 drivers had been guiding the 10 fillies and mares entered in the fifth race at Miami Valley a few days ago.
The truck’s back window was open on what was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, but it does not close when the racing is done in the rain or the bitter cold and snow of winter.
Leading into the rolling start of the race — as he takes over the vehicle’s accelerator from Becky — he said he’s able to maintain the proper speed not because of a speedometer, which his wife has up front, but because of that open window:
“I judge the speed by the sound of the horses’ feet. When you train a horse, you learn how fast you’re going by the sound of the feet, and I’ve retained that.”
And remarkably, as his wife attests, the speed Woebkenberg accelerates to never fluctuates by more than 1 or 2 mph. That’s even more surprising considering he’s moving along backward at about 14 feet per second.
By the time the starting gates fold in and a harness race starts, the field is moving along at 35 mph.
There’s a big difference between the starts of thoroughbred and harness races, he noted:
“Thoroughbreds look like they magically jump out of a box a quarter-mile away, but we have horses who are in full flight, going wide open, when we close the wings.”
Before the start, though, Woebkenberg must get the field lined up and charging ahead as one.
As he pointed out in the start the other day: “Some of the horses have their heads pressed right against the gate and are pushing to get going.” Others, he said, might be more unsettled and hang back. And through it all, he said, “the drivers’ minds are spinning: ‘Is the two horse gonna be leaving? If he leaves, can I leave and get the two hole behind him? Is the eight horse leaving? If he leaves, what am I doing?’
“And I have to meld the 20 personalities — 10 horses and 10 drivers — into a fair and equal start, and I’ve got 30 seconds to do that. I end up with 10,000 pounds of horses glued to the wings just 6½ feet away from me. And then we’re going full bore, and — boom! — the gates open.”
At that moment Becky accelerates, and the gates fold in, and the truck moves to the outside of the track, where it continues to flank the field from 15 feet away throughout the race.
Along the way, Woebkenberg not only is serving as a second set of eyes for the judges, but should there be trouble — like last Sunday’s race crash that left three drivers sprawled on the track and three horses running loose — he and Becky are the first responders.
She pulls the gate up tight on the downed drivers so they don’t get run over by competitors or loose horses. Last Sunday, Mike jumped out the truck and caught one loose horse while outrider Ashley Holliday got another.
Luckily the three veteran drivers — Josh Sutton, Jason Brewer and Jeremy Smith — mostly just suffered road rash and bruises, Woebkenberg said. The horses were unharmed.
As for the fifth race the other day, it came to an end with the horses snorting and straining down the stretch and the drivers, many all but lying horizontal in their sulkies, loudly urging them on but, thanks to recent rules, not using their whips as forcibly as in the past.
There was no incident, and The Biz, a bay filly driven by Greg Grismore, won and paid $11.60 on a $2 wager.
When Woebkenberg brings fans along for the ride, he then takes them to the paddock, where they are introduced to one of the drivers who just competed, and that post-race conversation is videotaped. Woebkenberg posts it on his Facebook page, and the Ohio Harness Horsemen’s Association puts it on its own.
“I’m getting like 30,000 views,” he said. “It’s pretty unusual. It would be like going to a Reds game and after the first inning — and I guess we’re down to Bronson Arroyo as our one good pitcher now — anyway, it would be like Bronson coming to talk to you in the dugout before he goes out for the next inning.
“People seem to really like it.”
He said they see what he sees, and maybe they agree with him: “I think I’ve got the best job in the world.”
And it will stay that way if he remembers one thing:
Not to become too much of a back-seat driver.
“Oh, no,” he said with a grin. “Becky is a very strong lady of German descent, and she made it real clear when we started this. She said, ‘You yell at me, and I’ll throw those keys into the infield, and I’ll walk home.’” He shrugged and whispered: “Just in case, I keep an extra set of keys in every gate.”