Rip training update.

Rip and I have been in our "Young Guns" training class - this is the class for up-and-coming fast, young dogs and handlers who care about the details.
This week we did some jump grids and Rip did a great job adjusting to the spacing of the jumps, as well as his timing to bounce through them.
Rip seems much faster than Skye to me, which, of course, I am happy about. As he gets more confident, he is getting faster. It's going to be great to run this boy in an actual trial.

Since I was so busy last week with my parent's visit and our trial preparations and such, I hadn't had much time to train Rip. I need to keep doing more repetitions with his weaves, as in class he skipped a pole one time and he also came out early. I have to watch the pop-outs, and recently I have made sure to not reward immediately after the weaves, but make him do another obstacle after weaving before rewarding.

Other than working on tightening up Rip's wide turns, my other main concern is to focus on contact performance. I've been using the "box" for training a running contact with his DW and AF, and about 75% of the time his performance is spot-on, however... as Mr Rip is getting quite full of himself and confident, I have been getting some leaping of the contacts. His teeter is great and I haven't had any issue there.