“I really got the hang of it. It kind of just came easily to me, which I credit to a lot of riding and working with horses my whole life. Everything is very similar but I’m still learning the differences.”
The daughter of a top trainer in Ohio, Kiara Morgan was not really involved with harness racing for most of her life. Instead, she rode horses and showed quarter horses. But fresh out of high school and having separated herself from stable life, Morgan dove head first into harness racing.
Her father, trainer Virgil Morgan Jr., was hesitant to let his daughter work on the farm at first, but he eventually welcomed her to the operation – consisting of more than 60 horses stabled at his training center in Asheville, Ohio. Morgan began working for her father in Dec. 2018, the winter following her graduation from Grove City High School, just as a helping hand.
“Every horse, every day, needs to jog a certain amount of time on the jog track, so I would just start out with that,” Morgan said to CityScene Columbus. “And then gradually, he would add me into what we call the training sets.
“I really got the hang of it,” she also said. “It kind of just came easily to me, which I credit to a lot of riding and working with horses my whole life. Everything is very similar but I’m still learning the differences.”
Then by June 2019, Morgan began to hop into the sulky as an amateur driver behind her father’s horses. She began qualifying at Scioto Downs and drove her first race on July 9 at the Clinton County Fair – a second-place finish in a $600 race behind a horse named Arts Delight. She then went on a tear at Ohio’s county fairs, winning numerous divisions of Ohio’s Ladies Series before making her first start at a pari-mutuel track on Sept. 26 – winning in back-to-back amateur driving events at The Red Mile.
“My most memorable win, or one of them, would be when I went down to Lexington, Kentucky,” Morgan said. “And then I went back the following week, (the meet continued), and I won the next amateur race.”
In her driving career, Morgan has won 20 races from 82 starts and banked $61,843. Alongside driving, she has started to claim horses with her father and has overall sights on broadening her involvement in the sport.
“Between me and my brother and my dad, we have three to four horses right now, but that can always change when claiming horses,” Morgan said. “Come this summer, we’ll probably have five to six horses, just the three of us racing per week. That will keep me pretty busy. And then I have a few of my own that will be racing.
“Going into the future, I would like to definitely own and train horses of my own,” Morgan also said. “The driving and the amateur (racing), that’s always fun and I think it gives a person a lot of experience just being on the track. From a trainer standpoint, I think there’s a lot of stuff that I can use to my advantage and learn just being in a race, sitting behind the horses in the race, and obviously it’s a lot of fun.”