I made my (and Minnie made her) debut in Estonian AWC (Agility Word Championships) qualification competitions. Our qualification system currently is that dogs (from A3 and A2 grade) will run 12 courses divided in 4 different weekends from February to May. All clean runs or -5 results will give points and 4 most point collected dogs will be Estonian team.
Since Im curios about the courses and we are allowed to participate then I decided that Minnie will also participate. Of course, as she is 2y3m old then we do not go there for "results" but we go to get experience.
On 21 February we had first qualification competition. Judge was Anastassia Tamm. There was 27 medium dogs participating :)
1. jumping course. Course itself was noting very difficult, with a good flow, I would say. Most difficult part for us was entry and exit of the slalom. And she did not see the slalom entry (did i block it or she did not look for it?) and took the obvious jump. DSQ. But she worked very well and actually I was very happy that everything else went very well.
2. jumping course. A bit less flowy course. Again, she did not see the slalom entry and took a jump. DSQ. She was again working with me very well otherwise.
1. agility course. Again the entry of the slalom was difficult. The most difficult was the obstacles leading up to that. Third obstacle was tunnel that twas under the dog-walk and not obvious to the dog. If given too much support to find it, then too late for the slalom entry, because there was a trap jump. Minnie did not want to go to the tunnel (I was too focused on running away, maybe also the command was late). DSQ. Slalom entry was nice :) I was very late after see-saw (controlling it too much), therefore veeery wide turn on the jump after the tunnel. After the dog-walk we had the same situation as in the beginning of the course, tunnel entry in an angle under the dow-walk. And here also, she did not go to the tunnel. After that I was already too tired (shame on me) to give the command and to be on time, so it was a struggle to finish in a nice ways as other two courses.
Overall I was very happy of us. Three DSQ was expected. The runs showed that she cannot look for the non-obvious obstacles (slalom or tunnel entry) YET, the quality that comes with experience.
Here are videos of the runs: