X's Debut Tournament

All I can say is WOW!!! Seriously the weekend could not have gone better. We had our first tournament as X Flyball last weekend. We went in with one team each day and a few singles. I'm not sure what everyone else on the team expected but I expected to do decent but knew we would have some kinks to work out. Never expected the weekend to go as well as it did.

Let's start from the beginning of the recap. The LV Chapter left pretty late on Friday night. Made it to SD at around 12am Saturday morning. Unloaded the truck, by the way Alex Hunter is a packing wizard, we were able to fit about 11 dogs in the truck with the box and all our luggage and equipment. Holy crap, and we didn't even need to strap anyone to the top of the truck! So with about only 3 hours of sleep we head off to Ramona, set up all our stuff and BAM the weekend started!

First race of the day Drastic is up for her singles. She has been out for about 8 months due to an injury and had actually just been back on a box for a little less than a month. She had looked really great the weekend before at practice but you never know with a green dog. She gets out there and does great. Posting pretty consistent 3.8s. She would have had some 3.7s in there if her sleepy handler had woken up a little earlier in the day. I think at one point Steph and I were like "Did you sleep through that light, Nicole"? LOL, but in all fairness it turns out that Drastic, the sweetest little girl ever, is very hard to start. Steph found that out when she gave it a try later that weekend. Darn, and we were having fun blaming Nicole for her bad starts. :-) Drastic is back and was the most consistent she has ever been. We are so looking forward to having this crazy girl in our line up.

Next up was our first team race. We went into all pretty confident I think. Our line up on Saturday was Seek, Truce, Tripp and Prada. Then my space cadet BC, Truce decided that she was a little unsure of passing. She had been doing fine during practices so I don't really know what was going through her head at the time. It was her first time running in the pack and only her second tournament running on a team so I'm sure all the stuff that was going on was just blowing her mind. I ended up having to start her at like the 15' line and actually run up to the line with her a few times. I also waited for the returning dog to pass her. Wow, not really how I expected our first team race to go. I was really bummed about the whole thing but my team was great about it. Super supportive and let us work through her issues all weekend. At the end of the day on Saturday she was passing into the oncoming dog nicely as long as I didn't push her too much. She was not scheduled to run on Sunday but I really wanted to keep working her passing so she could get used to it so we ran her on Sunday also. By the end of the weekend I was so proud of my baby girl! She was passing like a pro and running pretty solid. She and I were able to work it out and we might not have been able to post any record breaking team times but we ran clean! Woo Hoo!! By the end of the day on Sunday Truce posted her best time of 3.97 in the pack. Her box has always been an issue but her box turn even seemed to improve! Go figure, I think this baby dog likes to race!

Okay back to Saturday, after our first team race Psycho's first single was up. It really is the weirdest thing. When I debut a dog I am not really nervous at all. I think I will be, or I think I should be but but when I'm in the lane with my dog its just me and the dog. I don't really see anyone else. At that point there is no more training I can do, but now its just time to go out there and have some fun. So I went out there with Psycho and had a blast. If anyone knows Psycho, they know he loves to have fun. He is just a crazy little red ball of energy. Once he is in working mode he doesn't know there is anyone else there besides me. We had a few spit balls but he ran two clean heats. Over the course of his singles races on Saturday I saw things we needed to work on. Him bringing the ball back farther over the line and a few striding issues. His box held up so I am so I am very proud of him for that. I really can't wait to get this little guy in a line up. He is so much fun to run.
Click here for Psycho's debut video.

So after Psycho's singles race Stare was up! I think I was more nervous for Stare's race then I was for my own dog's debut. Stare started his racing career with fireworks. I'm not sure what time he posted on his first run but the other dog false started so they reran and Stare had to wait and boy, did he get pissed! The next run he was all fired up and ran a 3.752!! If you took out Kathy's reaction time it was a 3.686 line to line. The most amazing thing is he doesn't even look like he is trying that hard. I can't wait to see what this boy has to give when he is going full out and actually realizes what's going on! He has a super bright future ahead of him. Over the course of the weekend Stare continued to amaze us. On Sunday he posted the exact same time of 3.752! He won fastest singles time both days. It was awesome to see how happy and proud Kathy was of her Stare Bear! Thank you to Pam Casselman for breeding such a wonderful dog. Also huge thanks to Mary Kline and Lisa Kronz for this wonderful addition to X!
Click here for Stare's debut video

We only had one team racing each day, something that we all were not use to, so we filled the time with our favorite activity, eating! LOL, at the start of Saturday morning we looked at all our snacks and wondered why we brought so much. By the end of Saturday we knew why we brought all the snacks, to eat them all. I guess our goal by Sunday was to eat every last snack that we had brought. :-) Before some races I was so full I didn't know how I was going to even move. Still we made lunch and thoroughly enjoyed it. Gina proved to be the master of grilling the perfect grill cheese sandwich. We all ooohhhh and ahhhhed over how perfectly golden she could make our sandwiches. You can tell on X we all enjoy our food. Racing went pretty late on Saturday so we stayed for the Lickety Splits BBQ. I'm disappointed with myself that I didn't take more food pics over the course of the weekend but really, I was too busy eating it all to bother with the pics. Steph did take a pic of how awesome Gina made our grilled cheese sandwich though. Here ya go!

With Truce's passing issues starting off right from the get-go we were just racing clean to help Truce get over her issues. I can't even recall what our team times were. By the last race of Saturday we were shocked to realized that we only had to win one heat in order to win 1st place in Div 1. I have no clue how that happened. I guess it really pays to run clean. We knew the other team had us on time especially with the 5-10 ft passes I was passing with Truce. On the last heat of the last race of the day we just decided to go for it. We had no pass caller for that race, so we really didn't know what our passes were. The only thing we could base our passes off of were our dogs' usual times. So I think everyone moved up to tighten up their passes and I backed Truce up to where I was hoping she would be able to pass and we went for it. Steph and Seek helped us out with a great reaction time (.01) and we pulled it off! We saw our anchor dog hit the box at pretty much the same time as the other team's anchor dog and it actually looked like their dog hit the start/finish line first, but when we saw the time we had beat them by like a 100th of a second. We were all ecstatic. It had been a very long time since we had even played flyball to try to win so this was a lot of fun, even if it was just for one heat. Taking 1st place was just icing on the cake to an awesome day.

On Sunday I ended up pulling the Psycho Man because he had started to limp. He jammed his toe the previous weekend and by the end of the day Saturday it started bugging him. That was a bummer but he showed me he was pretty solid in the lanes and we will be working hard to get him on a team for our next tournament. We ended up winning 1st place on Sunday too with our slower team (Pirate, Truce, Choice, Raven). Again it wasn't until the end of the day we realized we had a shot at winning and really don't know how we pulled it off at the end. Sunday was supposed to be our "points whore" team. Raven, Nicole's 8 year old BC, was only about 600 points away from her Top Flight Expert Plaque. I don't know how we did it but we ended up winning 1st place in Div 1 again, and it was not until awards were announced that we realized that Raven actually got her plaque too! I guess we all don't know how to do math because we all thought we had not gotten enough points. So we were all very excited for Raven. Congrats Raven! She is now in semi-retirement and will enjoy training puppies and chasing birds.

More awesome accomplishments of the weekend, Seek and Prada both bested their singles time. Seek with a 3.84 and Prada with a 4.0! Pirate and Tripp also had new personal best times of a 4.03 for Pirate running start over 7" and 4.04 for Tripp running in the pack over 9"! Replay warmed up on Saturday and did awesome! No one could ask for a more perfect BC. Later did full runs during warm ups on Sunday and rocked the house! The little guy sure got pumped up with all the engery. He was totally focused and rocked his box turn. Go Later!

The future looks bright for X! We have an amazing group of dogs and an amazing group of people who love to have fun with their dogs. I am so looking forward to achieving each new milestone and accomplishment as a team. Thank you to everyone on X for an awesome first tournament. Here is to many more to come!