Of course, it’s easy enough now for Ness to look back and see those early struggles in a sepia tone. Sunday at Laurel Park, he sent out Sing Scat to an easy win in the opener to secure the 4,000th victory of his training career. 

Only a dozen trainers have won more than Ness. That roster includes fellow Mid-Atlantic stalwarts Jeff Runco (4,655), Scott Lake (6,343), and King Leatherbury (6,508).

Ness wasted very little time reaching the milestone win. In fact, he’s won 13 races in the last week, so just about as soon as the mark came into view, he reached it. Still, he said, his predominant emotion wasn’t joy.

“Relief. Luckily, we weren’t at that level very long,” he admitted. “It’s kind of a longevity milestone, I guess we’re gonna call it.”

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Ness’s runners topped the million-dollar mark in seasonal purse earnings for the first time in 2007. Every year since, he’s topped $2 million, and in 2022, he reached a career-high with more than $10.3 million in purse earnings from 326 wins and more than 1,200 starts.

For his career Ness is winning at a 25% clip and has been pretty much a model of consistency. His win percentage has topped 20% for 14 of the last 16 years. For all the winning, though, Ness said individual wins don’t stand out.

“They’re all the same to me,” the 48-year-old said of his wins. “Obviously, your graded stakes are important, but they all feel almost the same. This is my job: I approach it that way. It’s on to the next and on to the next. If you keep it humble and keep an eye to the next, you might get another 1,000.”

Ness made his name for the most part with claiming horses, but he also owns four graded stakes wins in his career. Two of those have come in 2023 via the efforts of the stellar Virginia-bred Repo Rocks, a winner of five of seven since coming to Ness’s barn last November.

Repo Rocks is the currently the best runner in an operation that includes, Ness said, about 140 horses in training and, including broodmares, babies, and layups numbers around 200. His runners are spread among three tracks, with strings at Parx Racing, Delaware Park, and Laurel Park.

Ness credits his wife Mandy and his staff.

“There’s a lot more than just showing up in the winner’s circle; there’s a lot behind the scenes,” Ness said. “They say it takes a village. It takes a community to run a big stable.”

Ness has at times raised hackles in the racing industry. He won more than 30 percent of his races three times in a five-year span ending in 2012 and has occasionally run afoul of racing rules. He was suspended 100 days in 2017 for a series of clenbuterol positives that had occurred years earlier in Florida. More recently, he was initially suspended six months after a horse of his came back with a positive test for bufotenin, a ruling later rescinded by the Pennsylvania Horse Racing Commission.

Through it all, though, through bad horses and good, owners coming and going, the one consistent has been the frequency with which Ness visits the winner’s circle. In fact, he returned two races after his milestone win when Starship Laoban won.

“You know, I’m fortunate,” the trainer said. “My job is something I would do if I didn’t get paid. It’s my hobby. It’s my passion, and instead, it’s my job. Very, very few get to do that. So I feel blessed to be able to be in that position.”