Fools In Love a Lighthouse Longshot

Fillies and mares take center stage in the 10th race here Saturday, with a field of 11 entered in the $100,000 Lighthouse Stakes at a mile and a sixteenth.

Trainer Kelly Breen recognizes the deeply competitive nature of the race, but feels he has a good chance to take the major share with George and Lori Hall’s Fools in Love.

“It’s an awfully tough race,” he said, “but if we get the right speed scenario, the race may set up for us.”

Fools in Love, a 4-year-old daughter of Not for Love, broke her maiden at Monmouth at first asking as a 2-year-old, but is still looking for her first stakes win here.

She finished third in the Colleen and second in the Sorority in 2008, and has been on the road ever since. She finished up the 2009 season by taking the Orleans Stakes at Delta Downs in December, and this year ran on the grass at Gulfstream before going to Philadelphia Park, where she won her most recent start on May 11. In that allowance event for non-winners of three, Fools in Love raced wide in the stretch and was up to win by a neck at one mile.

“Stew (jockey Stewart Elliott) had that race measured the whole way,” Breen said. “He never even turned his stick.”

The Lighthouse will be an open betting event. The likely favorite is Larry and Cindy Jones’s Just Jenda, who won the Monmouth Beach Stakes last out and has a perfect record at Monmouth.

The field also includes Cheval Corporation’s Ask the Moon, who finished third in the Monmouth Beach, and last year won the Lighthouse Stakes for trainer Ned Allard.