Rip and Skye qualify in USDAA Team!

We had a local USDAA trial last weekend in Fountain, CO - only about 35 minutes away. This show offers DAM team on Friday and Katrina and I were looking to pair - we put Baby and Skye together in a Performance Versatility team, and we had Rip & Ice together and were looking for a 3rd. After almost not entering, we ended up partnering with Stacy Peardot-Goudy's awesome youngster SoBe. So it was a young-dog team looking to play with the big dogs.

What a blast we had! Skye and Baby had 1st place after 2 rounds, but some dropped bars in Jumpers and a mistake on my part in Gamblers moved us down to 5th place going into the team relay. We had a great clean relay run and moved back up to finish in 3rd place of the 10 teams.

The Rip, Ice and SoBe team did awesome (Rip's having a SoBe on Ice)! There were 18 teams total and we were in 2nd place after the 1st round, but slipped to 3rd after the Standard round with a couple missed contacts by Ice and SoBe and a dropped bar by Ice (Rip was clean, though not fast). After Jumpers we maintained our 3rd place position. We ended up going conservative in the closing of Gamblers (a timed gamble) and though we all had good points, those dogs that went aggressive ended up pushing us down to 5th place. We had an almost clean (1 bar) relay to finish it up and wound up sticking to our 5th place finish! What a great accomplishment - no offcourses by any of the baby dogs!

The rest of the weekend consisted of regular classes- we did not do the other tournament classes. Rip got 2 Qs - one in Advanced Pairs and one in Masters Gamblers. He had two awesome starter jumpers runs, but 1 bar down in each. He also had a clean (except for DW up contact) starter Standard run. Snooker wasn't our game this weekend as we failed to make it to the closing in both attempts.

Skye ran Snooker, Jumpers and Gamblers for the rest of the weekend - he had 2 great Gamblers runs with Q's (now that we dont need them for APD, we get them!). We had a great Jumpers Q and a Q in snooker that wasn't pretty. He had a "what the?" moment in a jumpers course on the third obstacle when he decided to head left when I went way to the right.

All in all a very good weekend. The weather was perfect and the company was great. One thing we see at this trial that we see nowhere else - the trains that had to rumble by 100 feet from the park every hour or so, blowing their very loud whistle as they went by.

I will post the videos I have in an upcomming post.