In his mind’s eye, Bill Knauf can see a future for Maryland racing that looks a lot different from the present: big crowds enjoying a glittering new facility at Pimlico, full fields attracting robust wagering, a graded stakes program that elevates Maryland’s Thoroughbred product to the top levels of American racing.

“I think you want to get it back to, we’ll call it, the ‘A’ tier tracks,” is how he puts it.

The question, of course, is how to get there from here.

“Don’t get me wrong: it’ll be a little bit difficult,” he acknowledges.

Knauf will be the president and general manager of the new nonprofit entity, to be called by the Maryland Jockey Club name, that will oversee day-to-day racing in Maryland under the auspices of the state-created Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority.

The nonprofit takes control of the day-to-day product January 1. Control of Preakness weekend will remain, for 2025 and 2026, with 1/ST Racing, the public-facing identity of the Stronach Group, longtime owners of Laurel and Pimlico.

Knauf arrives in Maryland after 26 years at New Jersey’s Monmouth Park: a track that, with Maryland’s impending shift away from corporate ownership, bears more than a few similarities to Maryland.

“I think it is similar in the sense that you’re out a little bit on an island,” Knauf says. “You’re not part of New York. You’re not part of the Stronach Group. You’re not part of Churchill. And so you really have to fight for that wagering space.”

One of the tools in his toolbox, he believes, will be the new Pimlico. The current iteration of Old Hilltop is set to host the Preakness in 2025 and then be torn down. In theory, at least, the new Pimlico will be available to host the 2027 Middle Jewel, which will also be the first run by Knauf’s group.

Maryland racing’s day-to-day product, like that in most of the country, has seen crowds dwindle in recent years, especially at Pimlico, where a few hundred people rattling around a facility built for tens of thousands can feel like a ghost town.

But once the new Pimlico is available, Knauf expects to see crowds.

“You’re going to have a $400 million-dollar facility. People are going to want to come and see this,” he says. “It’s going to be spectacular. There will be all types of different offerings and hospitality.”

Knauf also intends for the new MJC to be more aggressive in trying to lure non-bettors to the track, whether with food trucks, bands, festivals and the like.

“I’m a huge subscriber of that, just to get somebody in your facility to introduce them to the racetrack because racetracks are beautiful, and racing is exciting,” he says.

And maybe, just maybe, once they’re there, they’ll place a bet. Or two.

Knauf’s intention is for those visitors – and for seasoned bettors – to find wagering opportunities not currently available at Maryland tracks. Sports betting is one amenity the new Pimlico will almost certainly offer, and fixed-odds wagering on racing – win-place-show bets in which the bettor receives the odds at the time they bet, rather than post-time odds – is also “on the table,” he said.

Dennis Drazin, whose Darby Development manages Monmouth, helped spearhead the legal fight for sports wagering and quickly implemented it at the Jersey Shore track. At Laurel, though the MJC built out a room to prepare for sports betting, it never actually offered it.

Sports betting “was a multi-million dollar net profit for Monmouth,” Knauf says. “It helped Monmouth become stable financially, to be perfectly honest. It was that big of a difference maker.”

Given that the new MJC is projected to be $6 million in the red in year one, those millions are no small matter.

In addition, Knauf believes there is a higher crossover between sports bettors and horse players than between horse players and, say, casino gamblers.

“When we opened the sports book [at Monmouth], our nighttime simulcast handle immediately went up 20%,” he said. “They’re watching football games, they’re watching baseball games, and there’s a lot of downtime in sports. So you’re gonna bet some races in the middle.”

Monmouth pioneered the introduction of fixed odds betting in the US, and while it hasn’t made a big national splash, Knauf said that it accounted for about 10% of the win-place-show wagering on-track.

One thing that’s not on the table, at least not “right off the bat,” he says, is a reduction in takeout.

“I don’t think the takeout is something yet we’ll tackle,” he says. “First of all, the 12% [takeout] on the Pick 5 is unbelievable. If anything, I think we’ll put a focus on that; I think not enough people know about that.”

In a sense, the panoply of options he envisions – different types of wagering, food trucks and festivals, and the like – represents an “all of the above” strategy for the company. The new MJC’s core challenge is increasing revenue to erase the operating deficits that have plagued the Stronach Group’s MJC consistently for the last decade.

“I think it’s something where we are going to work to try to get to be profitable,” Knauf says. “Do I feel like we can get there at some year? Yes. I don’t know when that is, but I do feel like we can get there.”

As much as the new MJC may adopt an all-of-the-above approach, Knauf recognizes that it its core business – selling wagers on horse races – needs to improve if the company is going to break even or even turn a profit. At the current meet, the MJC’s daily average handle of slightly more than $2 million is about 19% below last year’s comparable figure.

The new MJC is predicting daily average handle will rise one percent in 2025. It’s perhaps not as dramatic a turnaround as it may seem; the company will also race only 120 days in 2025, its shortest calendar in decades and more than 30 fewer days than 2024.

So Knauf characterizes the projected increase as “a pure numerical-based assumption that less races, a little bit higher [wagering] per horse per race, that [daily average] goes up.”

In the longer run, he says that to get to the “A” tier, Maryland will need to increase purses significantly; not, perhaps to the level of New York or Kentucky, but to a “more competitive” level. That, he believes, will trigger “more attention” to the races, while perhaps attracting bigger name trainers or jockeys to spend more time in the Free State.

He also thinks next year’s shorter calendar will create a “better product” with the bigger fields that often attract wagering.

One other component: increasing the number of graded stakes run in Maryland. The two MJC tracks gave away nearly $12 million in stakes purses in 2024 but hosted just 10 graded stakes, with eight of those over Preakness weekend. Those 10 represented by 11% of the 89 stakes run in Maryland, a percentage lower than at nearby competitors like Monmouth (20%), Parx (12.5%), Delaware (17.6%), and Colonial Downs (13.8%).

And if all these things work the way he hopes? “Maybe it’s a different class of bettor around the country that starts to wager on our product,” he says. “I think it’s a great product to wager on, and once you can convince that faction to turn on your product, I think they’re going to like it.”

Maryland is making a big bet on racing: a $400 million state investment, a new state agency to oversee the new nonprofit track operator, an entirely new approach that puts the industry in charge of itself to swim, or sink, in the years to come. The entire racing ecosystem – from the betting public to the backstretch workers, from those who work at the track to those who toil on farms – depends on how well all of this is executed.

Bill Knauf thinks all the pieces are in place.

“I think all the tools are in this state to make it successful,” he says. “The Preakness. A beautiful new facility. A populated metropolitan area. I think everything’s here.”

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