Countdown to the Flyball Season

It's less than 2 weeks until our season starts. Our 1st show is Acremead and I am so excited. All the problems from last year are gone and I'm really hoping I can enjoy my racing! Teams are going to be a bit of a juggling act with availability and the volume of height dogs but it'll be fine!

Training has been going well. We have been mainly doing team training for the last few weeks as in the last couple of years we have found we have come out a little off the pace so we wanted to get the dogs a bit more race fit this year. Most of the dogs are holding their turn in the racing environment (with props in), just got to hope they do in proper competition. Our intermediates are ready to race, they run against another lane with no netting and are doing great. The only problem we have is with Loki spitting his ball if he's in the pack. We are working on it and it's improving but he may have to run last for a while. Shani, loki, merlin and ruby are going in as a Starter team at Acremead then all being well they are going on Open teams at Easter. We also have 3 new Starters, they are amazing. Nice, drivey Collies, makes my life easier. Would like to get them out sometime this year too.

After the RR seminar I didn't do full runs with Asher for a few weeks. I worked on box, getting him higher and having more respect for the prop. He did really well and was doing lovely turns but I realised it was going to need more repetitions than I had time for before he was racing again. So I raced him normally on Sunday and the 1st leg he did his box turn was AMAZING, after that they went down hill a bit but were still mostly better than before. The plan is to try to still work on it when I can but to really make a big effort to retrain at the end of this season.

Our big aim for this year is to qualify for Div 1 at the Champs again. I think that is going to be a big ask, we'll certainly need to be sub 17 and maybe by a fair amount. I was very pleased with 17.05 last year although I hoped we might just sneak under 17 as the max out time for those dogs is around 16.8-16.9. One of our new dogs should certainly make a dent in that, we'll just have to see if we can get it together particularly in the 3 qualifying shows before the Champs.

Really interested to see how all the teams come out this year, particularly ones that went to the RR seminar. Wonder how many will bring props for warm ups or suddenly are now armed with tuggies! Also if there will be any surprises, all it takes is for a team to have a couple of good dogs come through over Winter and bang they end up in Div 1!

Also new website address is www.bristolballistics.dyndns.org