The 12th annual Christopher Castleberry Classic returns to Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort today, an event organized by friends of the late Fountain Lake graduate to raise money for scholarships given in his honor.
The event will start at 11 a.m., with the sixth race of the day named The Castleberry Classic and the organizers have a private room reserved for those attending.
"We have our own bartender, our own gambling clerk and then a buffet. We have our own grandstand roped-off section in case you wanted to go out there and actually watch, physically watch the horses," Nick Brumley, one of the organizers, said.
"This will be the 12th year that we have been running this charitable event. It's changed from golf to the horse track and then last year, whenever they canceled all of the in-person room reservations at Oaklawn, we actually, in September, we had a baggo contest at a brewery in Little Rock, which was successful," Brumley said.
"Last year we made $9,000 profit, so on a COVID year, that's pretty good," he said. "This year we're anticipating another, hopefully, maybe $10,000 or above year."
Castleberry, who died in 2010, was "a close friend of ours who went to college with us at Henderson," Brumley said, noting he was also a graduate of Fountain Lake High School.
"We were fresh out of college, most of us graduated in 2006 and then some of us went back and got master's degrees, and we all stayed very close," he said.
"When (Castleberry) passed away we decided to try to make a good thing out of a bad thing, so it's really just a chance every year for us to get together and just try to raise some money and give it away in his name so that maybe he's not forgotten, because he's definitely not forgotten on our minds," Brumley said.
Half of the money raised each year goes to scholarships and the other half goes to ensuring the event continues to take place in the future.
"So what we do is we raise as much money as we can. We give half of that away that year and we put the other half into an endowment account with Raymond James," Brumley said.
In the past 11 years, they have given out $26,250 in scholarships, with $9,500 going to high school students in Fountain Lake and $16,750 to students at Henderson State University, he said.
"We usually give three scholarships, so we usually give two to Henderson and one to Fountain Lake. We've entertained maybe giving one to Henderson and then one to Fountain Lake and then maybe one to another high school or another organization, and we're fine with that as long as we can keep raising money and giving it away," Brumley said.
"It's been a fantastic thing in Castleberry's name," he said.
Once the endowment fund reaches $100,000, "then whatever interest is provided, you give that away and you never touch the principal and in theory it would live on in perpetuity forever," he said.
They opened the account seven years ago, and are about halfway to their goal, Brumley said, noting "the main workhorse" of the fundraiser has been Marlene Stanley.
"She's the one that started it and 12 years later, we're still doing it. We're still raising a bunch of money," he said.
While thankful for all of the event's sponsors, Brumley said he wanted to "give a shout out" to Heritage Building Systems in particular.
"Last year we were not sure we were going to be able to raise any money during a COVID year, and they partnered with us last year and this year, and they are a huge reason of why we've been able to give away so much money," he said.
"We've actually had a lot of people signing up. Generally, a lot of people don't sign up until like the week of, so we may have 10 or 15 people signed up," Brumley said. "This year we already have 30, so we're anticipating it to be (bigger)."