Courses, Gem City, Dayton, OH Sun, May 31, 2009

We're sitting in a restaurant waiting for our first flight back home, so I'll try to get a few words of wisdom from Dan on his Exc JWW course.

As for my Exc Standard, I really liked the flow of this course.  There were a few unexpected surprises that caught handlers by surprise.  Specifically, handlers didn't support jump #11 and jump #17 which incurred refusals for several dogs.

As for Open Standard, I felt like this was one of the nicest courses I've designed for this level.

In Open, courses will either more closely resemble Excellent or Novice in terms of the degree of handling & challenges. I liked this one because it more closely resembled Novice and while it had the appropriate amount of side-switches and challenges, it was a straight forward course, just like Novice generally is.

Okay, I asked Dan for words of wisdom about his Excellent JWW course and he stared at me with a blank look. He's tired/jet lagged from the weekend so I'm going to go with thoughts aren't going to happen right now. That often happens with judging...you give so much at the trial that afterward you're just beat.

Wait, Dan just mentioned that on jump #5, dogs were by-passing due to handlers not working that specific jump or just taking it for granted. He mentioned that Yvonne Mancino with Flare, the Dobe, was the only person who handled this sequence on the inside and that it worked really nice for her. Dan also mentioned this is how he thought most folks would have handled this section.

I did see Yvonne's run and it was BEAUTIFUL!