We're not actually doing any team training at the moment, just Trish and I getting together to do some work with the youngsters once a week. Haze, Squirrel and Kitten are doing some really nice chute work...we now have the chute up to a 45 deg angle with the ball on the lower station and all 3 are still doing a nice clean '4 footed' turn (although 'heffalump haze' does take a bit of persuasion...she's SO like her mother!! lol). We'll 'proof' this stage more and then the next step will be to move outdoors and add a hurdle to drive them off the chute faster and get them chasing away. There's no hurry with any of these dogs so it's just small bits at a time, just keeping it fun and always leaving them wanting to do more. I must confess I haven't really done much with either of the boys yet though (don't know why!?).
We've also been doing some chute work with the cockers, Drake already has a nice turn but he seems to have lost some of his enthusiasm for flyball since he first started training, I think it's a combination of a few things that happened to him in his first few months of competing (...being kicked in the face on a training day by a particularly clumsy individual...being 'gone at' by other dogs at training and in competition, other dogs on the same team fighting with each other and having a really bad day running in the slippery mud at Mottram back in May) that have slowly chipped away at his confidence so it's all about building that back up. Since we formed the new team he is only running with dogs he knows very well and there's no animosity between any of them. For all his bounce and madness he's actually quite a sensitive little soul (bless) but the instances where he would just lose the plot and refuse to run have thankfully stopped, he seems much happier and is back running consistently. The chute training for him is all about it being fast and fun and no pressure to help him regain his manic drive and enthusiasm he had when he first started out, it seems to be working so fingers crossed we'll have him back up to full speed again soon! Teal is a funny one (this is something I'm starting to learn about these cockers!), when she first started training (must be 18 months or so ago) she wouldn't touch the box, she really wasn't sure about it at all, so I trained her on the chute at home to get her confident enough to trigger the box and it didn't take too long before she did but the recent chute training we've been doing with her has revealed that she is still not very confident on the box. Her technique and speed between the chute and the box is vastly different (the chute is MUCH better) so it's now a case of proofing her chute technique over winter to try and get her to transfer that to the box by the start of next season. Teal is already proving to be a valuable asset to the team being a relatively quick but small height dog but hasn't yet really fulfilled her potential, if we can get her running at her optimum who knows what she'll do next season?!
As the season is winding down and we're doing much less competing, we are going to have to find a decent outdoor training venue to keep our competition dogs fit and be ready to move the youngsters onto the next stage of training.
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