Flyball Links and Notes

To better prepare for our flyball training class/time, I've been gathering resource information.

It's interesting how there's not a lot of recently updated flyball information, most of the sites look like they haven't been updated recently. I don't necessarily recommend everything I'm putting here, but I've gotten some information of use from the resources:

- 2 day flyball workshop in Indianapolois in Feb. I'll be at vet conference and there's NO way I'll give up Ken Ramirez for this!
- Videos of training and tournaments. I wish the videos were in youtube or at least just bigger.... but, it's a good collection to see how this group progresses their new dogs.
- A Denver team has a REALLY nice website, it's clean and neat and easy to read and follow. It's good to see how they've laid out their classes and what info they give beginners before attending.
- The massive amount of text on this page makes it hard to read, but this Atlanta group was very kind to post their 'training manual'
- This is a handout, I'm not sure when it was written or who the author is. I have a feeling it is not the most recent handout and some of the technical training pieces are just incorrect. But it may be useful for us to have some sort of handout to give to students who have dogs appropriate for the class?


Griffin is so cute! He ended up crashing the last jump of this, I was probably too much of a distraction, sitting at the end taking photos while someone else was working him!

And that's how I do research. I read and read and read what I can find online, sometimes I order books/DVDs/etc. I watch videos posted online that show the activity (if available). I have a document that I use to save interesting links, there are a bazillion categories.

After I review information, I break down the dog skills and handler skills and prioritize. I look for the most basic small parts of the behavior to build on, and the different ways we can categorize the behaviors. We continually monitor progress (or lack of) and adjust accordingly.

Yesterday I wrote out the basic outline training plan for our flyball training times at PosiDog, and it ended up being a few pages. I'm going to work to condense it to a page of big font for each station and all as one page for everyone who is helping. I also feel like we should have a progress check sheet like I've talked about for other classes to help people know what to work on at home. It's supposed to not be a class but just practice time with helpers available, and so we can answer questions. But last week I ended up helping more than training my dog and that was not a very good thing. We had three beginners to the class (all have had some sort of class experience with it before elsewhere) and had to do some repair training to get proper behaviors and speed.

The goal is to finish up this modification so that I can take the training plan sheets for tomorrow.

(Why do I keep switching from "I" to "we"? Arg!