Teamworks Spring 06 NADAC-Sunday's results.

Clover and I ran in the first class of the day. That is one advantage-disadvantage of moving up to Elite classes. Elite classes always run first. I don't have the map for it, but the class went very well. The course was more difficult than yesterdays and Clover went past one jump and I had to bring her back. She still Q'ed and we placed first in our class. Out of the four dogs in my jump height 2 Q'ed.

After jumpers was the regular run. I thought it was a good run. I had to start her 2 times in the weave poles, but we came in under time. We are still running novice because of weave poles. The course time was 44.12 and our time was 37.70 seconds. But when we looked at the scores, we had a 5 point deduction. I don't know what the deduction was for. 5 point deductions are either for not completing the gamble, ie crossing the gamble line or knocking down a bar. I know she didn't knock down any bars, so I must have stepped on the gamble line. I talked to a couple of people that watched my run and they can't remember any faults, oh well.

This is where the rule changes hurt me. If it was the old rules, I would have gotten a 5 pt Q, but with the NADAC rule changes and me running in standard, they no longer have 5 point Q's. Also, now they have integrated the gamble into every standard run and call it a distance challenge. You have to successfully complete the distance challenge to Qualify on the standard run.

Clover did well on her contacts. She held the 2 on 2 off on all the contacts.

The Tunnelers run went well. It was a more difficult than yesterday's run because there were 2 call offs. Clover missed the entrance to tunnel number 7 but I called her back right away and we only missed a couple of seconds. She did the call offs very well. We ended up Q'ing and placing second in the class with a time of 26.65 seconds with a course time of 30.4 seconds.

The next run was Chances. This is the first time that I competed in Chances and the first Teamworks trial where they have had it. In the past you obtained gamble titles through completing distance challenges that were embedded into regular courses. Now, as I mentioned before, the distance challenge is mandatory in the regular classes and they have made a new class called chances, where you have to complete 3 challenges--distance, discrimination, and direction. In novice you have to do one, in open you have to do 2 and elite you have to do all three.

All the old gamble points from before transfered to the new chances class, so I'm able to run Elite chances. All I have to say is that I should have ran chances yesterday instead of today! Yesterday the distance obstacle was the dog walk, today it was the weaves. To explain how the class was run, obstacles 4 and 5 were the direction challenge since you had to change direction, Obstacles 6,(weavepoles) through 8 were the distance challenge and the teeter and tunnel were the discrimination challenge. The dashed lines below are the lines that the handler can not cross.

I made a handler error by deciding to do a lead out to after jump 3. So I had no momentum when I got to jump 4 and had to stop at the line. Clover saw me stop and would not go all the way out to jump 5. There fore she would not do the weaves. Since I knew it was blown at that point, I crossed the line and tried to get her to do the weaves. After trying to start her once and not succeeding, we left the ring.



The final run of the day was the most disappointing. It was a touch and go run. It started with a tunnel and then went to the dog walk, where she blew her contact... I mean she went flying! I brought her back and made her repeat it. The same happened at the A frame. I made her repeat it 2 times. Before we went on to complete the course. Needless to say, no Q's here! As I mentioned yesterday, we are definitely going to have to work on tunnel-contact contact stays.




Over all the weekend went well. We had a 50% Q rate. It gets to be a tiring weekend when you run so many runs. I was glad to be home realtivly early though, although I got home around 5:00 each night.

I will post the actual times when they are mailed out.

The next trial is the AARF Nadac trial at Sanford in 2 weeks. I am only going to be running on Saturday, but I will be running 6 runs. And I moved up the regular class from novice to open, so we will be attacking the 12 weave poles.

Lots of work to do with weave poles and contacts in the next 2 weeks.