In October of 1997, just a few months shy of her 8th
birthday, Morgan had developed a severe case of obedience ring-sourness, a disease
peculiar to upper level obedience dogs who had been competing for many
years with an inept handler/trainer. She was a Utility dog who could
score in the high 190's at matches, but would barely complete half the
exercises in a real trial. She knew the difference, and it didn't
matter what we did - she simply hated the trial arena and flatly refused
to perform for me anymore. Even her Open went to heck in a leaky
handbasket. I was frustrated and more than a little bit angry at
her for that attitude, because I knew she could do Utility; she simply
refused to when it counted. So I went looking for something else
to do with her that we both could enjoy. Flyball was out; she
didn't care for tennis balls at all even though she'd retrieve dumbbells
until she dropped. I knew about agility, but didn't know much
about the meat and potatoes of it. At Petco one day, I spotted a
big white van with the words "USAgility
Training Center" painted on it, and by luck, the owner of the
van was just walking into Petco. I got her card, gave her a call,
and shortly thereafter, started my first agility class with Sandy Crook
(Brandy Bostons) right here in Poway. And it was good; it was very
good. Suddenly, Morgan found her calling. This was not the
rote repetition of obedience training; this was new, and different every
time. And it was challenging. Morgan was the dog who learned
EVERY utility exercise in less than two days and had them all perfected
in less than three weeks. But agility - there was so much more to
learn, and as we progressed, the challenges grew and grew.
Morgan was, actually, only going to be my "training wheels"
dog in agility. I figured that her daughter Jazzee, the Rocket
Dog, would be the one to go with. I'd learn with my steady old
girl, who was of course much too old to start competing in agility, make
and correct my mistakes, and by the time it was Jazzee's turn to train,
I'd be a good handler. Okay, that WAS the plan, anyway.
In May of 1998, Morgan and I were at Missile Park in San Diego, at
the Papillon Club of America Specialty AKC agility trials. We were
in Novice A, at our first trial, my 8 year old girl and I. I just
thought we'd do a coupla trials for fun, just to get the feel of
things. Jazzee hadn't started training yet, because I didn't feel
I was a good enough handler yet to start her. So, here we were at
the line, me nervous as hell, Morgan just waiting for the action to
start. We were near to the end of the 20" class, and had
watched every run prior to ours. I had walked the course a dozen
or so times, planning every cross-behind, every hand signal, every
turn. The timer gave us the "go", I sucked in a good
deep breath, and off we went! 37 seconds later, Morgan flew over
the final jump to cheers and applause-and a big blue ribbon! At 8
years and 3 months of age, she had bested 41 dogs in both Novice A and B, the next oldest being
a 3 1/2 year old Border Collie!
It was the start of a career that was awesome. Morgan went 21 straight blue ribbons and qualifying
scores in NADAC/ASCA, USDAA and AKC regular and games classes before her
first defeat, earning her NADAC Elite Regular Vet and Open Jumpers titles, her
AKC Novice and Jumpers titles and legs in AKC Open and USDAA Performance Dog I and
Performance Jumpers. Her first ever run in Elite Regular resulted in a second out of three in
Veterans Regular, with a clear round that was a bit slow to
qualify. After that start, she only failed to qualify one more
time and was only defeated once to complete her Elite Regular Veteran's
title in 5 runs!
10 January 2000....we
have just finished a weekend of NADAC trials up in Wildomar, California,
and what a great weekend! Morgan was the only one to go; Jazzee
came into season the day after I mailed the entries. On Saturday,
Morgan took her first qualifying Elite score of a perfect 10 with a
second place finish to a just-turned-seven BC who has been in Elite for
quite awhile. And on Sunday, she took her second qualifying Elite
score of perfect 10 and a first place finish to the same BC! Her Elite
Jumpers round on Sunday was perfect but 4/10ths of a second too slow,
thanks to me forgetting the course right out of the start!
I can't thank Sandy Crook enough for all her help and support
throughout our training and trialing. She has a way of making
things clear and helping handlers to see the best way to run a
course. She has that wonderful virtue of patience (altho it is
sometimes sorely tested, I'm sure!), something I wish I had! In
one of Morgan's Open Jumpers courses, there was a very tricky section
that if your dog could work away from you AND knew lefts and rights,
you'd fly through it with no problems and pick up a ton of time;
otherwise, you probably wouldn't qualify. Thanks to Sandy's
training on those lefts and rights and also working away, Morgan
absolutely flew through that section flawlessly with me simply standing
in the middle of the whole mess directing her, giving her a time good
enough for not only first in her class, but good enough for first in the
Regular Open Jumpers class too!
And of course, I want to thank my old girl Morgan for being such good
"training wheels". She was so easy to train, and wanted to
be challenged in her training, which made agility with her so much
fun! Sure, we're retired now; at the end, we were not the fastest on course anymore; used to be a
time when she'd be tops not only in her Veterans class but also top the
regular class dogs too, or come close. She's was slowing down a bit
towards the end; she still had her good days when she just flew, with a big
ol' grin on her face, hugely happy. She loved
to show off at times, and she knew when's she'd done a real bang-up
job. At those times, it brought tears to my eyes just to see how
happy she was when she looked at me after a great run with that big grin
and those big shiny eyes saying "hey world, look at me!! I'm
GREAT!!"
