Stocksbridge Flyball (November)
Love the Sheffield tournaments, they’re a friendly bunch.
Kim and Mollie were both in the same team, and they were storming all day. Mollie’s haircut apparently made a difference, she was particularly crazy! Kim was running anchor and she gets hilariously competitive. You’ve not seen a competitive dog until you’ve seen Kim coming over the line in front, looking across to the other lane to check she’s won, and then making as much noise as possible with a ball in her mouth whilst eyeballing the competition on the way back to me. I think we came 3rd in the end.
Unfortunately Mollie and Kim are in a bit of a scratch team at the moment. They both run around 5-5.2s, which are respectable times considering they’re 9 and 10 respectively (yes, Kim’s nearly 9, but I’ll save that for another day!). However, at the moment they’re running with 2 dogs who run around 6s, because we don’t have enough 5s dogs to make up a team of their own. We still have some good racing, but it’s a bit frustrating to be running 22s times all day when we’re used to running steady 20s times. Two seconds isn’t a lot but it does make a difference between 10 points and 25 points, especially when both girls are going for their Milestone awards.
Not really a rant, just a gentle whinge, since I love my teammates and I know how hard this team picking business is.
Dylan’s team also ran well, we haven’t all settled into our roles yet and a couple of still inexperienced dogs and handlers who haven’t run with some of the more experienced dogs/handlers before caused a few problems. I think we lost pretty much every race, but we really shouldn’t have done since the dogs all ran well. Dylan felt to be struggling a bit, but I think Wilmslow probably took it out of him a bit. Physically he’s more than able to do 2 mix days, but it’s still a bit much for his little boy-brain to handle. Had a fab 5-leg race with Newton Heath (in their first Open tournament!), who brought in their fantastic little Working Lab (I think?) height dog who we just couldn’t touch. She is amazing! Definitely one to watch.
Another double day in 2 weeks with Wyre/Doncaster; I think I’m allowed to say it’s tradition now to have my last two shows of the year crammed into one weekend! We haven’t actually got confirmation of entry to Donny yet, so I have my fingers crossed for that one. Guess we’ll just have to see what happens!