End Of Summer Slam 2013 And The Amazing Squeewok!

Ermagherd! Flyball!

Two weekends ago was the End of Summer Slam tournament held in Monroe, Michigan. This marked 2 years in the sport for Pan as she debuted in singles and pairs at Monroe two years ago before her team debut at CanAm. This year we debuted Cocoa in singles, pairs, and we even gave her some points with 3 heats in our last race Sunday after she finally settled into her job and quit scaring us about crossing over!

Photo by Gerry Bradshaw

I suppose I should back up.

Saturday Cocoa ran singles against another dog on our team, Hershey. She did awesome! Posted mostly 6.5 seconds after she remembered that the jumps are important and should be all taken in order. Lol.

Photo by Gerry Bradshaw
WHERE IS YOUR BALL, COCOA??

Then she moved on to pairs. We ran Trophy and Cocoa together and called it SWAT Secret Weapon. We were running against two little terriers and for some reason Cocoa did NOT like the little JRT she was running against and she crossed twice to chase. She has never before shown interest at practice at chasing, so we decided to hold back and let her run after the Jack, named 'Shorty' was finished so to not encourage chasing in the lanes and to not scare the dickens out of Shorty. No more errors. She ran about 7 seconds passing.

Photo by Gerry Bradshaw

Fast forward to Sunday. Ran pairs against our team first, so again no errors in crossing over. Then we have singles against... Shorty. Of course. Since Cocoa was still really interested in Shorty we let shorty run then we ran Cocoa. A judge, who is notoriously mean to certain members of our team and can be a bit... overbearing... shall we say? Approached us outside later to lecture us on why we should have pulled her from singles and put cocoa back in preflight and didn't understand (since he hadn't been there on the pervious day to watch racing) that Cocoa does just fine with our team in the other lane And in preflight you can only have your team in the other lane! The crossing is new and to prevent ruining the confidence of another new dog we held her. I don't regret this decision.

Paris against Shorty and a whippet was next. Talked to the team about their order. Shorty was running first against Trophy and the whippet's owner said her dog is also having some crossing issues, so to just run Cocoa and it would be fine, her whippet was not aggressive to other dogs. Did I mention that the judge who talked to us outside put himself on our race? So it was a little bit of pressure. Whatever, we are SWAT. We've got SWAGR. lets do it. Shorty was having problems completing. Shorty stopped halfway down the lane. Trophy ran and we let Cocoa go..... and she didn't cross!!! 4 good heats!

Cocoa's last pairs race was also against Shorty and she didn't cross there either! Good girl Cocoa!

So we decided to let her have her team debut since she appeared to get her crossing under control and she was focused.

Photo by Gerry Bradshaw

First heat we had a bad pass by our second dog, she reran but i think our final time was over 35 seconds, so no points.

Second heat Cocoa dropped her ball just before the last jump, we didn't rerun her.

Third heat - CLEAN!  25 points for Cocoa!

The best thing about the weekend was watching everyone else's reactions to Cocoa running.  So many people stopped to watch her run. So many people asked to pet her and see her because she's so small and fluffy.

Cocoa then proceded to practically die on the way home.  She was so tired she sprawled out on Jbiz's lap and didn't move.  We even poked her and she didn't move.  She was beat after two days of a lot of racing for a 5 pound ragamuffin!

As for the other teams:
Variety was seeded in division 1. Demo and Jbiz laid down some good start times for her first time running him.  Pan and I running third on that team after Malley eventually dialed in our passes, Bandy running anchor.  We banged out a couple 18.9's with that line up, which is that fastest time we have posted while any of my dogs have been running with this team.  If we had had a knowledgeable pass caller all the time we may have managed a few low 18's but, really, we run to run clean and rack up the points.  We don't want to lose the points on bad passing.

Our Standard team came in first place, but they ran against mostly pick up teams which couldn't place. We don't run for the placements anyway!

Photo by Gerry Bradshaw

shoulder parrot/backseat driver

I was most proud of Demo this weekend as not only did he have different people handling him (Jbiz ran him most of the weekend, and then a teammate's husband ran him in the last race while Jbiz was running Cocoa) but he also stopped double hitting on the box.  his turn looks pretty darn good right now.

Pan and Demo earned their next titles, which i wasn't expecting, so that was an added bonus!!

On to CanAm!!!