At the 4th Westminster Agility Championship, I had the pleasure of running a wonderfully tricky and fun JWW course from UK Judge Paul Moore.  The opening sequence had several challenges, and allowed for multiple handling options.

The first challenge was the weave pole entry, and deciding which side of the weaves to handle from.  Having dog on right was clearly the best option, because of the location of the #3 wingless jump.  The most common way to do this was a front cross between 1 and 2 at the entrance of the weave poles.  The timing and position of this cross becomes critical — too late and your dog may enter at the incorrect pole.  Too early, and you may push your dog to the incorrect side of the poles.  And if you are in the wrong position, you may not give your dog room to enter the poles correctly, and force them to the wrong side.  The last is what happened when I ran Trek on this course in competition.

Alternatively, you could try crossing the end of the poles instead of the beginning.  I find this tricker, because of challenge #2 on this sequence, the off course tunnel immediately after the weaves.  If you are already handling the weaves with dog on left, then you ideally want to start to pull away or hang back from the end of the poles, so as not to drive them into the tunnel.  It is much more difficult to not accidentally indicate the off course tunnel with your body or motion if you are crossing the end of the poles.  If you choose to handle this way, you must start your cross when your dog still has 4-5 poles to go, and simply trust that your dog understand his weave training and will stay in the poles as you pull away.

To avoid the off course tunnel trap with Trek, I used a bypass cue (tapping my thigh), combined with my motion driving towards the correct obstacle, the #3 wingless jump.  This is a valuable tool that allows you to continue to move in the direction you want to go, while simultaneously telling your dog to avoid any obstacles they may see on the way.

Finally, you must avoid the off course jump between 3-4.  For dogs that do a lot of AKC, this looked very much like the typical pinwheel we see within courses.  You can indicate to your dog to not take this jump with deceleration on the takeoff side of #3, +/- another bypass cue between 3 and 4.  I elected to front cross on the landing side of 4 to drive my dog into the correct end of the #5 tunnel, but a threadle into the correct tunnel entrance is also possible there if you have difficulty making the front.

Here is Trek demoing some of these options

The other thing I really liked about this sequence is all the renumbering possibilities.  Here some other options to work on once you have this setup.

And here is Trek running some of those variations:

Posted in Agility Trialing
No Comments Yet Posted by agilityvet