I just had 4 days of agility trials in Milwaukee.  That means I was up just as early or earlier than if I was at work.  The trials, nicknamed “Hounds”, are held at an indoor soccer arena and are huge with 450 to 500 dogs entered each day.  It is not uncommon to go home ribbonless from an event like this so we were fortunate that yesterday Cori qualified in a very tough Excellent Jumpers class and came home with a 4th place.  There were 340 dogs in her class with 31 running at her jump height level and only 4 of the 31 qualifyng so we were quite pleased.   The people running the trials kept track of the number of “nq’s” (non qualifying runs) for each day and less than 1/3 of dogs running qualified.  Yesterday out of 940 runs there were 655 non-qualifying ones.

 The trials are well organized and for 4 days it is like living in a different world with many top canine athletes and their handlers/trainers there competing.  The shopping is good there, too.  I will say that I think the novice level courses now are getting very tough, especially for first time competitors and are more on the equivalent of what the open classes used to be like.  I saw very tight spaces and many “traps” on the courses, something that you usually wouldn’t see in novice until the past year or so. The beginning of the novice course yesterday was the exact same beginning as the excellent one the day before (same judge) except a broad jump was in place instead of a triple.   I am concerned that many of the first timers are not prepared to run that complexity of course and may become discouraged.   Since we need newcomers to the sport to keep the sport going perhaps AKC needs to revisit the complexity of the novice courses.  Okay, off my soap box…..tomorrow is a work day.  And as a t-shirt at the trial said: “A bad day at an agility trial is better than a good day at work”.