The family lived in Defiance, in northwest Ohio, and Brady’s equine obsession had begun when he started going to county fairs with his family, especially his grandparents Herb and Gay Varner.
“He was fascinated by the animals and every year as he got a little older, we’d let him venture a little farther,” Jane said. “Pretty soon he spent all his time in the horse barns doing whatever they gave him to do down there.
“Most kids when they get the fair, they want to be up on the midway, but not Brady. He’s didn’t care about the rides. To him, the fair was the harness horses.”
Like many other kids growing up in Defiance he played the traditional sports and showed some promise on the basketball court.
“Once his dream was to go to North Carolina and play college basketball,” said Jane, who was all for part of that plan.
She is a manager at the Nostrum Laboratories in nearby Bryan, while her husband Mark is an electrician at the General Motors plant in Defiance.
“We had worked all our lives and we wanted him to go to college,” she said. “Brady has an older sister and we put through school and we had saved up money and planned to do the same with him.”
But while Brady’s hoop dream eventually would fade over the years, his horse wish never did.
“I just always asked and asked and asked for a horse,” he laughed. “It took a lot of talkin’ into, but finally I think my parents just got tired of hearing me and they decided, ‘Let’s get him a horse and see what happens.’”
Partnering with a local trainer, Bill Webb, Jane said they spent $3,000 to buy half of a cheap, three-year old pacer named Solid Stand.
Brady was just 13 – not yet old enough to get a license to drive a harness race – but he could help with care of the horse, who raced for them the first time at Hoosier Park.
“And he won!” Jane said. “We were new horse owners and I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God! This is the greatest thing on earth!’”
Although the hard realities of the game would also come, Brady’s interest never waned. After his sophomore year at Defiance High School, he gave up basketball to pursue harness racing. At 16 he got a license to drive on the Ohio fair circuit and won his first race at the Putnam County Fair in Ottawa. Two years later he had his license to drive at the pari-mutuel tracks.
He told his parents he was forgoing college to pursue harness racing full time – an idea that didn’t sit well with Jane at first – and a couple of years ago he moved from Defiance to the Miami Valley to be closer to the resurgent harness racing scene that came with the two new racinos: Hollywood Gaming at Dayton Raceway off Needmore Road and Miami Valley Raceway in Lebanon.
He lived first in Middletown, then Bellbrook and Centerville before finally settling in Lebanon, where he now stables the 13 horses of Galliers Racing, LLC.
“College?” his mom said with a chuckle. “I guess you’d say he’s learned in the college of hard knocks.”
After getting just 12 official wins in his first two years as a driver, there’s no denying 20-year-old Brady has finally graduated.
At its annual banquet in January, the Ohio chapter of U.S. Harness Writers Association presented him – after he won 24 of 293 races as a driver and 15 of 161 as a trainer in 2015 — with the Peter Haughton Memorial Award for being the state’s up-and-coming, rising star horseman.
And Galliers is doing even better this year. As of Thursday, he had 35 wins and $276,615 in purse money as a driver and has had 25 victories as a trainer.
Wednesday night in the 11th race at Scioto Dows, he drove Insomniac, his 4-year-old bay gelding trotter – to 1:53.1 victory and won by 19 lengths.
Monday, he’ll be on the card at Dayton Raceway which opens its third season with matinee racing. Post time is 2 p.m.
The 75-day meet will feature Monday and Tuesday matinees every week and evening racing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, where the post time is 6:15 p.m.
Resurgent Ohio racing scene
“When I first got into the business, Ohio racing wasn’t looking very good,” Galliers said. “Everybody was telling me, ‘Go to college. We might not even be able to race here next year.’
“But then, just in time, casino racing was passed in Ohio and things turned around. It was a night and day difference and I just got lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. And it just keeps getting better.
“The Dayton purses are up something like 40 percent and they just continue to grow. The Miami Valley purses were great this past winter and it’s the same at Scioto, where we’re finishing up now. It’s a good point in time to be racing here.”
That’s not to say it’s been easy for Galliers, who is one of the youngest drivers regularly competing here.
“The Ohio driving colony is no joke,” he said. “We’ve got like 5 of the 20 drivers in the U.S. here. Being just 20 years old, I’m still learning and it’s not easy going against those top guys every night. ..That’s why it feels so good when you can do well against them.”
Such was the case last February when he surprised a lot of folks – including rival top drivers like Josh Sutton, Chris Page and Jeremy Smith – and guided Jackie’s Rocket, his 4-year-old mare pacer to a come from the back of the pack 1:53.4 victory in the $20,000 Herb Coven Jr. Memorial at Miami Valley Raceway.
“That’s one of my favorite races ever,” he said. “I’ve had her since she was a baby. She had a lot of problems and went through a lot and then she has a race like that.”
Galliers is beginning to have more races like that, thanks both to his maturation as a driver and an upgrade of the horses in his barn.
He’s assisted in his training by his girlfriend, Katie Rammerswaal, who once worked for top Canadian trainer Rene Allard. Brady’s parents own parts of most of the horses in his stable.
“That money we saved for his college education, I hate to day it, but we’re buying horses with that now,” Jane said. “But the truth is, we believe in him and what he’s doing. He works hard and he keeps learning and he’s just getting better. He’s doing what he always wanted.”
Brady agreed:
“My dream is just to continue to move up in the sport. One day I want to be in all the top races and be driving the best horses. I just hope to keep getting better and better horse power in my barn.”
While he’s grown up and times have changes one thing has stayed the same.
The Christmas wish remains.
Brady Galliers is still asking for “a real race horse.”
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