Andrew Bell continues to excel

Former Boggabri greyhound trainer Andrew Bell is enjoying another successful season in Sydney, with two more trainer premierships in sight.

Bell relocated from Boggabri to Werombi, a town in the Macarthur Region of New South Wales, Australia, in the Wollondilly Shire, at the end of 2017.
In his first season as a Sydney trainer in 2018 he made an instant impact, winning both the Richmond Greyhound Racing Club and Goulburn Greyhound Racing Club trainer premierships.

Now, Bell and his team at Cedar Lodge Kennels are on the hunt for the top trainer prize at both the Nowra and Goulburn clubs in 2019.

With just 75 days to go in the current season Bell is leading the Nowra Greyhounds premiership race by 104 points from Tomerong’s Francis Goodwin.

He leads a much closer race for the Goulburn Greyhound Racing Club premiership by two points from Gunning’s Jodie Lord.

In the past 12 months Bell and the team at Cedar Lodge Kennels have had 129 winners.

In the 2019 calendar year they have had 780 starters and boast a 9.2 per cent victory rate with 72 wins. They have also had 89 second placings and 88 thirds.

Bell said that he and the Cedar Lodge Kennels team were well and truly on track to achieve their 2019 goal.

“Our plan when we first came here was to get 52 winners a year, one winner a week, and we ended up with 104 and doubling our expectations” Bell said.

“This year we wanted to reach at least 104 winners if not better it.

“We are currently on track for between 104 to 110 winners provided everything keeps going well.”

Bell said that he was enjoying the success that Nowra had brought to the Cedar Lodge Kennels team.

“Back In February we headed to Nowra, we’d never been there before,” he said.

“The first week we went there we got three winners so we said ‘let’s come back here next week’.

“Since then we’ve pretty much had a winner there every week.”

Cedar Lodge Kennels currently has 140 dogs on its Werombi property, about 35 of which are actively racing.

Bell said that about 25 dogs raced each week, and that the team went to meetings almost daily.

Bell told The Courier that Cedar Lodge Kennels had a bright future.

“We had a very good year in our first year after the move,” he said.

“When we moved down here we only had like 10 dogs from the bush and we didn’t have dogs that were going to be competitive.

“As we won races we bought better dogs, so in that first year we ended up with a whole heap of good dogs so we had a really good last six months of the year.

“Now we have turned our focus to breeding.

“The sires that are used to mate the bitches with are very expensive, some of the are $8000.

“I’ve bought a lot of them to breed our own pups, but we are probably not going to see a lot of that flow on for about 18 months to two years, those pups coming through.

“We are building to something better, breeding our own dogs so we don’t have to buy dogs.

“It’s a really good feeling too to breed the dogs and rare them and break them in then be able to race with them.

“It’s been a goal of ours, an ambition and a dream, to build this up into an empire that we want.

“At this stage in our setup we are in the building stage of breeding our own pups.

“It will take about two years to have us in full flight but i couldn’t have asked for any more along the way.

“It’s been terrific.”