BAA Promotion & Agility Training

Please excuse the unrelated Mollie photo, I love her paws and couldn’t resist including it!

I’ve just noticed that the League Tables on the BAA Website have been updated!

My application with Kim was obviously successful as Kim is currently 2nd in the Novice Medium Dog of the Year League, 8th in the Novice Agility League and 8th in Novice Jumping League. All good places to be! I don’t expect her to do particularly well this year in the Leagues as I’m going to be cutting back on the number of runs we do per day/weekend, so she naturally won’t have as many opportunities for points. It would be nice to qualify for the Finals again or get promoted to Graduate, but I’m not going to chase points or campaign her for it. Considering our training session this week I’m wishing she was still in Primary but we’ll see if she can be a little bit less manic at shows!

Dylan wasn’t promoted, thankfully, so he is still Introductory. He’s currently 13th in the Intro Maxi Dog of the Year League, 29th in the Introductory Agility League, and 9th in the Intro Jumping League. I’m really optimistic about the BAA shows this year with him, he was absolutely fantastic at training and I can’t wait to run him at EMDAC. He really kicked up a gear and I think that’s partially due to me sorting a startline routine which gets him switched on and excited. I’ve discovered that he hates being made to wait etc whilst still on his lead; we get a faster and more responsive run if I leave his lead behind as we start approaching the first obstacle and set him up with him loose. Everytime I think he’s going to just set off without me though, and I really need those waits!

It does make me smile though, one week I’m saying how much I love working with Kim, and the next I’m saying how much I love working with Dylan! This week was the first time I’ve really felt we were working together, we just had a lot of fun and blasted around all the sequences with no problems. He nailed every weave entry and was turning nice and tight, although we did have a few more poles falling than I would have liked, which was obviously a result of the extra speed he was working through. Having said that he wasn’t flinching and pulling up after knocking them (positive!) but was making an effort to correct himself and clear it when we approached the next time, so I’m not too worried at the moment.