DZ's Adventures: Flyball Fun!! Tournament We Come!

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Flyball Fun!! Tournament We Come!

Tournament We Come!

Dante has his first tournament coming up!! We've been helping Koira's mom and fellow blogger of; So Fly "My Life With Flyball Dogs", train up a new team in our area and it's been going unexpectedly better than we thought! Dante has been the perfect demo dog for the new group, we've made new friends, and it looks like we may have our own competing team soon! We've been running under the team name "Animal House" but Koira's mom has really wanted to start her own team and that dream has finally come true for her!

We're now running under team name "Apupalyptic Flyball" it's awesome! I even helped to design the logo.

And now Dante has his first tournament this Saturday. I'm hoping that he doesn't go all Space Cadetty on me and forget our training, but so far he's exceeded my expectations. When he's got his working brain on, he's really focused on me. Of course it helps that I have his most favorite toy in the entire world in my hands. Focus is really important for flyball since all of the dogs are running off-leash, we have to be able to send them down a lane and have them come back despite all of the distractions going on around them.

I thought for sure though that this would be a sport that Ziva, she's focused, loves to run, is super fast, loves balls - but she finds the noisy environment to be slightly terrifying so we've taken a break from training with her to focus on Dante and polishing up his skills.

We've been training Dante for flyball since June and he's been making great progress, check it out!

Here is his box turn in June 2015, I've also included some links if you want to see how far we've come since we started:

Flyball Box Turns

Flyball Wall Turns

And in July we were up to running one jump, doing a box turn, and bringing the ball back.

First Animal House Club Practice

Flyball Demo in August with Animal House

Well thanks to So Fly, we're now up to running with full teams! And with his first tournament this Saturday we're dedicating this week to working on his distraction training and box turns.

Tonight starts session two of training the new team, Dante gets to demo for the students while I help So Fly train the newbies and polish their skills, after class Dante will do some full run's with Koira, Thursday we run with Animal House, Friday we rest, and Saturday we compete!

Here is our recent work with team Animal House! Dante and Koira are doing full run's together.

Just a reminder, here is what a flyball race lane looks like.
You have two teams of dogs, four dogs to a team, and it's a relay race - first team to finish wins!