There must be something in the water around Wautoma, Wisconsin, hometown of Coty Rosin. The area has spawned many a racehorse trainer including Rosin. “The Rice family, D. Wayne Lukas,” Rosin said. “There were many good horsemen.
“My dad had horses and was race caller at the fair meets,” he said, so Rosin began learning the trade early. “We used to gallop horses on the snowmobile trails.
“They outlawed the fair meets when I was a kid. They were a lot of fun. There was no purse money really but there was the Calcutta.” A Calcutta is usually run as an auction where participants bid to ‘buy’ contestants in the race with the winner getting a portion of the final pool.
Rosin experienced enough to know that horse racing is what he wanted in his life.
“I started working for Mac [Robertson], then Jamie Ness,” he said. Rosin hung up a shingle as a trainer from 2009 to 2012 before going to New York as an assistant. “I worked for Tony Dutrow in New York. I spent three years. There is no better place to train a horse than Belmont,” he said.
The New York experiment was somewhat overwhelming for a “guy from the Midwest” – the hustle and bustle of it all. “It never lets up. That’s why I went to work for Joe Sharp when he went out on his own. I wanted to get back to Kentucky.” He returned to training last year and enjoys the relative tranquility in Shakopee as well. “Canterbury is beautiful.”
Rosin spent the winter at Oaklawn before again shipping north to Canterbury. “I had 18 [horses] but they claimed three away from me. In 17, 18 years I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said of the activity at the Canterbury claiming box. He was on the losing end of a nine-way shake for a horse in late June. He says that current demand outweighs the supply of useful horses. “You try to claim one that won’t win and then [through the process of elimination] you wait your turn and hope to still have the horse when it does win.”
