Back when we were running Dogwood Training Center in Ostrander, OH, I was pretty much in the weekly habit of curriculum design. Of course that was the “big” training center concept. We had nightly classes, four levels of student instruction, camps, mini-clinics and a smattering of private lessons. For something like eight years I had the simple chore of designing a floor plan to accommodate all of the activities for the week; complicated by the notion that we did a lot of split group work (meaning that the floor want divided to accommodate two groups working at the same time.) And, because we had an ongoing League Play, whatever was the game of the week had to be perfect nested to the set of equipment.

Today my curriculum design requirements have changed in fairly dramatic fashion. We no longer do weekly classes, favoring instead a twice-monthly mini-clinic format. The chief difference is that the equipment is not locked into a specific set (where it must remain all week). Indeed, for a four hour mini-clinic the equipment really needs to be rearranged and in some cases pieces substituted. While it may be true that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, if you don’t actually change anything it will become painfully evident after a short while that you are skinning the same cat, over and over again.

Bear with, while I indulge myself in a design process.

Attacking the Weave Poles

We haven’t had a good workout on the weave poles for awhile. So it’s high time that we bring the obstacle up as a featured proofing and handling challenge. I want do design a variety of challenges that incorporate speed building approaches, tricky handling riddles, and problematic dismounts. If you just practice the weave poles as an isolated obstacle it’s easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency about whether the dog truly understands the performance.

In t his first sequence I set the dog up for a hammering approach from the off-side. The handler cannot help but attack the first two jumps in his best approximation of a straight line because the wider and loopier is the performance of the two jumps the more problematic becomes the dog’s approach for the entry to the weaves. A considerable complication is that the dog dismounts the weave poles dramatically to the right. So the handler will either have to figure a way to have dog on left through the performance, or have a pretty good technical Tandem on the dismount of the weave poles.

 

The interesting bit here will be the handling of the near back-to-back performances of the weave poles with jump 35 being the transition. Most of my students will recognize that the dog needs to turn to the right at jump #5. Not only is that the natural turning direction, but it also considerably sweetens the approach to the weave poles. The real question is, how will the handler accomplish that turn? With dog on left the turn might be a bit problematic. The handler must smoothly bend the dog’s path to the jump—which is presented at a considerably depressed angle—without indicating turn so much so that the dog does not turn back, as though to jump #7. Truly the easier handling might be to work through jump #3 into a Front Cross so that the weave poles at #4 can be picked up on the right side. This necessitates what we call a layered Tandem at jump #5. But it might be clearer to the dog in any case.

A Note Aside

Okay, I’ve just run out of time. I feel bad about not writing to my weblog more often… but as Spring has finally settled in, my schedule has me very busy. I have 4-day camps the last two weeks of the month and I have a full day with my own students on April 27^th.

The Dogwood and Redbud are in magnificent bloom… the consequence is that so are my out of door chores. Every available moment has been spent in fence building, clean-ups (burn pile), putting in my garden … and more and more than you can imagine.

I’ve snuck down to the pond a time or two; and happy to report that the Bass are finally biting. At the end of next week my brother will come down to stay the weekend and we’ll get our share of fishing (and maybe drinking beer). I’ll write more to the weblog when I have that week clear.

You should know I’m absolutely terrorized by my email in basket these days. The known spam blocker saves me about 3,000 unnecessary files a week; but messages that are legitimately written to me come in at a pace of about 50 a day. I feel overwhelmed by it all. And if I am tardy in taking care of business you’ll just have to understand, and have mercy on me.