By Betsy Burke Parker

To appreciate the complexity behind 9 year old Pauly Aguilera’s (left, ©Tisa Della-Volpe) dream of someday being champion jump jockey, consider what brought the Maryland third-grader into horse racing. 

In a sport populated mostly with lifers – sons and daughters of generations of horsemen and women, rare is the steeplechase leader not born into the game. It’s not so much that it is bluebloods: working lines are enough, but, typically, there’s a couple pages of pedigree behind almost everybody in racing. 

Pauly Aguilera’s trip to the winner’s circle takes more twists and turns than the Alfred Hunt course at Glenwood Park, but everyone in his family agrees, it was a journey that began 25 years ago, 2,000 miles south of Maryland’s Hunt Valley. 

Bad choices, good results

Manuel Aguilera Sr. (right, ©Tisa Della-Volpe) grew up south of Mexico City, youngest of four sons of a career government father. Aguilera left home at age 12 to flee what he saw as controlling parents that directed each of their sons into the military at a young age. Instead of trading one type of control for another, Aguilera took off, after a scary few weeks of solo travel joining an older brother in Houston, Texas. 

Aguilera says he already had a bit of what he calls the “Chihuahua effect”: the youngest kid in his family without older brothers at home to protect him, and he was sort of a little guy. Perhaps not helpful as son of a controlling father, the trait gave Aguilera a level of maturity beyond his years. And the rage he kept carefully packed away, unless he needed it, gave him street smarts.  

He made it to Texas, but moved on again just a couple months later when the brother turned out even more strict than his parents back home. 

Aguilera knew literally no one when he went to North Carolina, then Georgia, for construction work. Looking back, Aguilera reflects that the same problems dogged him no matter where he went, as he retained a penchant to “get in trouble and choose the wrong friends.” 

But he was young, and from experience and the relentless work ethic he’d built maintaining his parents’ rental properties back home, jobs were easy to find for the Chihuahua. 

He moved a few more times, picking up a little English along the way and staying busy. It wasn’t much, he says, but life in the states was better than back home, and he made his own rules as he made his own way. 

Fast-forward to 15 years ago, when a random invitation flagged the course, as it turns out, for Aguilera and those to come. 

He was living and working in New Jersey by this time. “My brother, Pedro, was working for Billy Meister,” who at the time had foxhunters, steeplechasers and a few flat horses at his farm near Cockeysville, Maryland. Pedro invited Manny down to the Green Spring Valley Point-to-Point.

Aguilera says his life changed that day.  

“I’d never seen anything like it,” he recalls the intoxicating energy of his first jump race experience. “I fell in love with the sport. The power of those horses to go those miles over those jumps. It was incredible.”

Aguilera wanted in. At first, Meister said no. 

Hell, no. 

“We got back to the barn, I think from the Maryland Hunt Cup,” Meister picks up the story of their first meeting, and his first impression. “Manuel was sitting there in the shedrow. He had all these nose rings and earrings, all this long hair. I was like, get this guy the hell out of here.” 

Two weeks later, Meister gave Aguilera a second shot at a first impression. He needed help, and Pedro said his brother needed a job. 

He’d gotten the memo that he needed to clean up his act. “He was clean-shaved,” Meister recalls with a chuckle. Gone were the rings. “I gave him a chance.” 

Meister hasn’t regretted it. 

He knew nothing at all about horses or horse care, but Aguilera was smart, Meister says, a hard worker and the Chihuahua effect shined as a positive in the now older, more mature Aguilera as a drive to learn. 

To be fair, it was a steep learning curve. “I’d run out of the stall if a horse moved,” Aguilera says he was, initially, quite scared of horses. “Billy Meister taught me everything” from mucking a stall to wrapping a leg. 

His English got good, and he learned the lingo. Aguilera became Meister’s right-hand man, he says, an important part of day to day operations and race day help. 

As Aguilera’s horse skills developed – and there was a deep level of natural ability paired with the natural affinity, Meister told Aguilera he was the right size to be a rider, maybe even a jockey – 5’7” and naturally light. He needed a rider, so Meister taught Aguilera how to ride. He learned how to post, how to hold the reins, how to gallop. Meister taught him how to keep a clock in his head for speed work and, eventually, taught him how to jump. 

Aguilera became Meister’s go-to work rider, especially for the tough ones. “He was truly a natural,” Meister says. 

Riding races wasn’t in the picture. He wasn’t born to it. He never expected it, Aguilera says. 

“Billy comes in the barn one day and tells he’s named me on Saluda Sam” in a point-to-point turf prep at Green Spring Valley. Aguilera says the dictum came as a shock. “I thought he was kidding.”

Turns out he was serious. 

Meister says Aguilera’s soft manner and patience had made him invaluable at home on tricky horses like Saluda Sam. The talented Irv Naylor jumper was notoriously tough to train, but Aguilera got along with him great, so Meister thought he’d have fun riding his favorite horse in a real race. 

They were also-ran at Green Spring, but it gave Saluda Sam a good early-season prep for that year’s sanctioned season and it gave Aguilera a literal feel of the power that initially attracted him to racing. 

“Manuel is just the greatest,” Meister says. “I can’t say enough about this guy. He’s the best employee I ever had.

“And I’ve had a lot of those.”

Something he’d perfected as the adolescent runaway, Aguilera has always been an observer. Working out of Meister’s barn and following the Maryland timber circuit, NSA races and mid-Atlantic racetracks, he had plenty of top horses and riders to observe. Looking back, Aguilera says some of his favorites have been champion jockeys Willie McCarthy and Sean McDermott and local pro Willie Dowling. “Two of the greatest I saw were Darren Nagle and Paddy Young.

“You just watch them and try to ride like that.”

Aguilera 2.0 (and beyond) 

When they met, future wife Amanda says the jump jockey influence extended farther than the saddle. 

She noticed something funny about Manuel. His propensity for observation had morphed into modeling. 

“I didn’t realize what it was at first,” she says with a laugh. “But then I realized. I mean, here’s this Mexican horseman, but some of the things he says sound Irish.”

They married in 2014, and as the Aguileras (right, with Betty McCue, ©Tisa Della-Volpe) built their family and blended in Amanda’s daughters, horses played a big role. They keep a few horses in training at Alex and Sue Glassock’s Harford Hill Farm near Monkton, and spend the balance of their time at Betty McCue’s farm with lessons and pony race prep. 

Pauly pretty much grew up at the barn. “When he was a baby, Amanda went back to work,” Aguilera says. “She’d pack me diapers, some bottles and he’d come with me to the farm.”  

“Imagine all the things he was learning and picking up,” Amanda adds. “He had this Breyer horse that looked just like Saluda Sam. He would wait until the guys were done in the wash stall and he’d take his Breyer horse in and give him a bath.”

Lifelong horsewoman and career elementary teacher McCue knows from experience that kids, like horses, go through phases of development. They go from loving something to fearing something in a split second. Something that doesn’t bother one kid rattles another.  

Pauly had gotten rattled.

A few years ago, Aguilera (right, with Pauly and Junior, ©Tisa Della-Volpe) called McCue to help Pauly regain his confidence in the saddle. “I’d put him on a green pony who popped his shoulder, wheeled and dropped Pauly,” he explains. For two years, his son didn’t want to ride. “Then we started going to Ms. Betty’s, and she worked her magic with him.”

McCue says she took her time with Pauly, letting him stay on leadline as long as he needed and wanted, and building back the confidence he’d lost. 

“Little by little, Pauly didn’t realize Ms. Betty had been doing more and more,” Aguilera says. “She’d trot him over little baby jumps, and she’d take the leadline off and stay right beside him so he didn’t know he was riding by himself.

“I knew she’d worked her magic when we were driving home and before we’re out the driveway Pauly’s asking when can we go back.”

For their birthday each year, Amanda gives each of her five kids a “free pass” for the day. She lets them ditch school, and, within reason, they can “do anything they want to do,” she says. “They just tell me what they want to do and I make it happen.”

For Pauly it was a no-brainer: he wanted to spend the whole day at Ms. Betty’s. 

“She makes it fun,” Aguilera says. 

McCue was one of those horse sports lifers, born into the game, part of a Warrenton, Virginia horse family that rode and showed and hunted together. She and one of her brothers raced on the point-to-point circuit. She married horseman Joe Hamilton; son Anthony Hamilton today is assistant to Hall of Fame flat trainer Shug McGauhey. (Douglas Lees photo, left, of Puller Hughes with Betty Hughes (McCue) hunting with Warrenton Hunt in the 1970s)

McCue married Maryland Jockey Club photographer Jim McCue. 

McCue says she has gotten most of the Aguileras in the saddle. After Pauly started riding, then racing, “then (Amanda) wanted to give it a try. Boom, she was riding too. Daughter Ximena decided she wanted to learn, so she began to ride and now races. The next daughter also wanted to learn to ride so we got her riding as well. 

“And little Junior is racing now.” 

Aguilera has gotten back into race riding, too. He won on McCue’s Prince Khozan at Rappahannock point-to-point and at Piedmont with her Band Tour. 

Manuel won the Open Flat at the Rappahannock Hunt Point to Point in early March aboard Betty McCue's Prince Khozan (©Douglas Lees)

“I enjoy so much seeing the whole family riding together. I think it brings back memories of my own family,” McCue says. “The entire Aguilera family works very hard at making the farm succeed.

“Whether it’s feeding, clipping, fixing things or driving trailers to the races, they all pitch in. I consider Manuel my partner in the horse business. I would not make a decision without conferring with him first.”

The horse Aguilera credits as a big reason he grew to love racing so deeply, Saluda Sam still plays a role in his family's story. A few weeks ago, Pauly rode Saluda Sam, long retired to Betty McCue’s farm, in a horse show at Paddock Place in Jarrettsville, Maryland. 

They were 2 foot jumper champion and 2’6” hunter champion.

As fun as it is to win a horse show, Pauly has a bigger target. 

“My dream is being a jockey over timber,” Pauly says. His favorite jockey is 2022 NSA leading rider Parker Hendriks. Hendriks, who like his own father Ricky started out in pony racing, posed for a photo with Pauly after his large pony division win at Cheshire last week. 

“My short-term goal is to be champion jockey, like Parker Hendriks,” Pauly says. “My long-term goal is to win the Maryland Hunt Cup.”  (Pauly raced toward his goal at last weekend's Cheshire Hunt Races, riding in all three pony flat races and winning one. Tisa Della-Volpe photo)

Youngest in the clan, 4-year-old Manuel, Junior won four leadline pony races last spring on McCue’s Thumper. 

Junior recognizes that it’s a partnership, pony and rider, but maintains there’s an X factor in leadline racing. “Your leader,” Junior says, “they have to be running.” 

“Most kids – most people, love the feeling of going fast, but they also love the feeling of feeling safe,” McCue says of the delicate balance of developing confidence and keeping fear in check. “The trick is to get sweet, safe ponies for them to do their first races on. Maybe these ponies are more than happy to follow the field around a pony race, taking their time, doing this little canter in behind the other ones.

“You know what the kids say when I’m making entries for their next race? They’ll say, ‘Put me on something that can win.’ Every time.”

Flat jockey and former pony racer Maddie Rowland to SheHero on Betty McCue:

“Everyone that has met Ms. Betty has adored her. She is not only an incredible horsewoman but definitely one of the nicest, most honest and hardworking people you will meet. Ms. Betty is a huge reason I became a jockey at 17 years old. She gave me opportunities on amazing ponies and horses."

(From Maddie Rowland's Instagram, after a win in 2019 at the Brandywine Hills Field Masters Chase)