Flyball Fever Challenge

Val, Chris, Jan and Shannon took part in this trial of American format racing with dogs Harry, Lacey, Ruby, Freya and Breagh. We came 1st place on the Saturday!

Our 20.5 team ran on Saturday and were running faster than their normal seed. Fastest time was 19.77. Most of the heats we ran under 20. Our dogs would normally run slower in the afternoon on grass. Saturday afternoon , every single heat was faster than the morning times - we got consistently faster thru the day. Each of the 4 dogs was as fresh for race 5 as they were for race 1. From a pure dog perspective - they ran better and faster in this format. The Flyball Geek website was an enormous bonus and we were able to easily track when we were due to race. (Though my smartphone had a glitch on Sunday and we were a few mins late). 3 of the dogs from Saturday also ran on Sunday with the same seed time and they maintained their time of sub 20 secs with a slower 4th dog and consistently so. Kristian and Katie and the High Flyers did a great job. Our team had a great weekend and would like to thank Wuff n Ready on Saturday for box loading for us, and Time Flyz for box loading for us on Sunday and High Flyers for ball collecting. Would do it again and would recommend anyone who didn't try it, to give it a go next time and have an open mind.

Movers and Shakers... Basingstoke...

Well, the weather was good for us in Basingstoke, great venue (despite the thieving gypsies !) ... only one mover and one shaker (lots of dogs in "no mans land" still).

Shaker...

Freya hits 955 points... and is guaranteed her Flyball dog  award after Englefield ... nice work Freya :-)

Mover...

This is a special mover for the Rooky Racers, Alfie has been with us from (almost) the start, and  on May 8th 2010 left a successful starters team, that won at Imber Court, to go open... and what an opening points haul... 225!... in context, no other dog has ever had such a large points haul on their first outing!.

Over the next 4 years Alfie has been through the good times (400 &405 points in one day) and the bad times (let down by other dogs racing who had not renewed their BFA membership, so lost 6 months worth of points).

Other good days = being in the winning team at the BFA UK Championships for two years in a row (very impressive !).

Alfie is a "home grown" Rooky dog; never raced for another team.... this makes the 3rd Silver Flyball Award of the team all that more special :-)  Nice work Alfie, Nigel and Diane, our first home grown Silver Award*.

* At Englefield we were asked "who did Ruby, Lacey, CJ and Radley race with before the Rooky Racers"?... they were genuinely surprised to know they were home grown...  just like every other dog on the team :-)

Andy