Inaugural Agility Trial
Wow! It has been a busy 10 days for our club! Last week we held our first group show in conjunction with the massive Rocky Mountain Cluster show, and this weekend we held our inaugural agility trial! Thank goodness we have such a strong group of worker bees who are always happy to lend a helping hand :)
We are absolutely thrilled that our inaugural trial went so well. We filled to capacity each day and had an awesome judge, Terry Egler from Wisconsin. Everyone loved Terry's courses and we received a lot of great feedback on what a good sport he was --- there were certainly some Sports Center worthy bloopers with some of the energetic Novice & Open dogs! There were so many compliments on our rosettes and festive atmosphere...people even commented that they are going to try and MACH at our trial next year so they can take home one of our covetted MACH ribbons!
This trial was open to all breeds and canine partners, but we did want to do something extra special for the sporting breeds entered in our trial. After all the master and excellent sporting dogs had run both standard & jumpers courses, Judge Terry handed out QQ ribbons to each sporting dog that completed the feat that day. Then he presented our High in Trial Sporting Dog rosette (talk about a covetted ribbon!!) to the sporting dog with a QQ and the best yards per second on the day. Saturday's winner was Mary Rios and her Golden Retriever, Colby, and Sunday's recipient was Ali Varallo and her German Shorthaired Pointer, Emma. The feature video above is of Ali and Emma's runs that garnered her HIT.
We are also thrilled to announce that we had two MACHs at our trial! One went to Pancho the Chihuahua and the other to River, the German Wirehaired Pointer. We also handed out about 25 new title ribbons, so there were a lot of dogs who were able to move up this weekend.
No trial is possible without many helping hands and ours was no different. Our terrier friends who hold their trial at Denver Dog Sports in December lent us all their parking signs and split the cost of building new parking stanchions for the parking lot. They were also on hand from clean up to tear down to help make this trial a complete sucess -- our sincere appreciation to Andrea, Jerry, Pat, Patrice, John, Twila, and Harry. We were able to lock down the gorgeous Denver Dog Sports for this weekend too, we are so lucky that Kathy Lantz has taken on this business. It is so nice to be able to compete in a dirt free arena, in a facility designed completely for dogs, and most importantly -- comes with AKC regulation equipment! We also had Mary & Steve Rios who helped transport Terry back to the airport while the committee cleaned up the facility, thank you!
Finally, our thanks to the trial committee members who went above and beyond. Dale Hokens -- chief course builder, Ginger Sammonds -- chief ring steward, Krista Voytilla -- judge's liaison, Katherine Hokens -- MACH/PACH bar design/creation, vendor liaison, and general huge help to the chairman, Sally Maxwell -- hospitality, and Angela McLean -- our treasurer, and Jenny Follett -- trial chairman. Thank you all for making our inaugural trial such a fun place to be, none of this could have been accomplished without you!!
