Episode 308: Interview with Club Representative Jane Dewey

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The show starts with your hosts. Jennifer, Esteban and Sarah. I'm Jennifer And I'm Sarah. And this is episode 308 today's podcast is brought to you by Sonoma 10 0 8. Is your agility dog suffering from elbow osteoarthritis. So Nova 10 0 8 can help. It's a different way to relieve the pain that causes limping and lameness. Just one simple quick non-surgical treatment can provide pain relief for up to one whole year.

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That's HitItBoard dot com. Today. We're going to go back to our series on behind the scenes at a trial. So we've talked to a judge about the judge's responsibility and putting on a trial. We talked to a trial secretary about that aspect of a trial, and today we were very pleased to be joined by Jane Dewey to talk about the club side of putting on a trial.

Welcome to the podcast, Jane, Thank you so much. So Jane, why don't you start by just telling us a little bit about your history in the sport? I think it started really with just, you know, I had a dog as a pet, went to puppy classes. Some of my friends were already doing agility and I pretty much got hooked after my dog went over the first day frame.

And, but I never really, I kept saying this is just, you know, this is just for training. I'm not going to show I'm not going to show. So I didn't show for a couple years. And then I went to took my little nice little fat corgi on a leash to a trial and looked like pretty much fun. That's sort of how it happened.

I, but I did come from the horse showing world and there are an awful lot of people that have shown horses that transition into this. That's a lot less trouble. If you just throw your dog in a crate, you don't have to have a trailer that's substantially less expensive and sometimes, you know, a lot more fun as well. So that's how I,

how I got started. Excellent. And so from the club perspective, what is your involvement in, in the club side of things? How did you get involved in the club? Well, so when I thinking that when I did my first agility trial, I'm not even sure I've longed to the dog club, but I knew I needed a place to train more than my back yard.

I was taking lessons, a couple of different places. And so finally I had friends at long, the queen city, dog training club in Cincinnati, Ohio, where I live and I ended up taking some classes there and thought that would be a, you know, a good fit for me. It was nearby. They had a nice building and they did some at that point,

a KC was limiting clubs to nine days of trials, which usually was 33 day trials. And so I got involved in that right after the dog club had built a building, they were in an old facility, they bought some property on the location, location location. So there w like at 70, in Cincinnati, they're at 71 to 75 and 75.

So you can't beat that too much. Everybody can get there. And I joined, I joined that shortly after that, I met Sandy Schmidt who got me involved with Jen crank and her mom. And that's sort of how I started my, my agility career, if you want to call it that. Right. And I was just thinking, it just kind of popped into my head that I think for a lot of people,

we kind of take the club aspect for granted. I mean, many people are involved with their local club, but for agility, I think there's also many people who just show up to the trials and they don't think about the fact that every single trial is put on by a club, even the national agility championship is put on by the American kennel club.

So every trial that we go to, and especially for those of us, I think that live in big metropolitan areas. You know, we might have a show every single weekend, but every weekend it's the club that is putting it on is, is different every time. And I guess, Jennifer, what do you think about the different, I guess flavors of clubs?

Like when I think, I feel like there are breed clubs, so there's like, you know, like the corgi club might put on a trial, an agility trial, and then I feel like there are clubs that are agility specific. So it might be like the Austin agility club and they're all about agility. Whereas the corgi club might be about all things corgi and they put on confirmation and agility and obedience.

Is that kind of like the different styles of clubs that you see in your area as well? Yeah. I definitely think there's different dynamics to the types of clubs. So in addition to what you mentioned, we have breed clubs and then you have agility clubs and then you have just like the local dog training. So, correct me if I'm wrong, Jane,

but Jane, you guys are the queen city dog training. You offer obedience and rally and agility. So you guys are kind of the, Okay. The all around dog training club versus the agility club versus the breed club. And I know we've talked about it in the past. I'm not sure which podcast or where it was, but a lot of the local breed clubs aren't doing the legwork themselves.

So what they're doing is they're selling their name to another entity to hold the trial under their name. So you might have the local Boston terrier club and, you know, there's only one or two Boston terriers locally, but they will sell their name to an entity. And that's often what happens with in credit pause. We hold the trial in the Boston terriers,

I'm using that hypothetically name to then run it and be able to offer more shows. So I think the trial itself, it runs the same, right? Had some of the breed ones you'll have a higher percentage of a certain breed. I just went to the beagle trial a couple of weekends ago, and there were like 35 to 45, 12 inch dogs. And they were almost all Eagles.

There was one shelter in the 12 inch class. It was kind of funny. So like that dynamic is different, but you know, the show runs the same. I think what's nice about kind of rotating the style or the format or, or however that the club that's holding it is you hope to then not burn out any of your workers. So if a club's holding one,

the club members might be responsible for that one, but if somebody else is holding it that they have the workers from their local national club or their local breed club. And the hope being that, you know, you're not having the same crew work every single weekend or every other weekend and get to burnout on that. Got it. So then let's take a look at what the responsibilities are,

the club. And I know, especially in this age where we talked a little bit about this on the secretary podcast, where there's a little bit of specialization of, of roles going on, where you have instead of the club, providing the secretary. A lot of times there are now professional secretaries, and then sometimes it's the club that provides the equipment.

It's the secretary. Sometimes it's the facility that provides the equivalent. So the equipment, so understanding that your view is just kind of like a, a sample view of what a club does. How does your club work in terms of, you know, where does, where does their responsibility start? How you know that the club is the one hosting the,

the trial. So I guess the that's really like, they really are at the very beginning of the entire planning process, right? Yes. And to go back to what Jen said, cause that's part of what you just asked me is Queens queen city is a licensed AKC club. So we are not permitted to have anything on our premises except for a KC trials that we are running.

Now we want to run our building out and have another group come in and run that like N U K I trial or something. You can do that. But we, as a club are only permitted to do a K C events. So, and we have to fall within their guidelines. And it does give our club a different set of rules to go by because we are even our constitution that our dog club is governed by what AKC says.

So we are within those guidelines, that being said, what Jen was speaking of was so when, when they, in the course of things, I think AKC realized maybe nine days limiting a club to nine days of trials was a little stingy. So they went to 12 days in the midst of that. I don't know what, what point this happened.

But up in that Jen's mother was doing, they were doing these what we call hosted trials. So when we won it, we built, we had one building and our dog club of 12,000 square feet. We built a second one, which allowed us to have, you know, quite a nice space for creating and then a separate agility rang. And everybody wanted to come and use our facility.

Well, we rented it out once or twice, but the problem was for us, that we all had to be there anyway, to make sure the equipment was handled properly, to show them how to do it. But because this breed club was running the trial and it was not as well organized, it wasn't, we didn't feel it was representing what the product that we wanted to put for.

So we said no more rentals. And so now we do 20 trials a year and yes, it gets really tiring. But so it starts with someone approaching us, say the beagle club and they say, gee, we'd like to have a trial. So they have, if they have been licensed to have a trial by the AKC, then we're all set to go.

When we started this, a lot of trials, a lot of clubs had never done a trial. So they didn't have permission from the AKC to host to try to be the host of the trial. So then you have to do a match or prove that you've got seasoned people in your club that can do all of the trial secretary and the trial chair and all that stuff.

So once you get that all situated, then you, the hardest thing I think in Ohio and Jenkins, probably comment on this too, is where we've got a lot of trials within an hour or whatever. It's the mileage a hundred miles. You have to be a hundred miles apart. And so then you have to find a date. So that's sort of where it starts.

The club approaches you and says, gee, I'd like to have a trial. Then you get your calendars together, find, get a list of dates. And then you take a peak at what AKC has available within that a hundred mile radius. So that's how it starts. So that's your, I guess that would be what comes to me. So I'm the trial coordinator.

So I do all that. And once we have the date, then the next, you know, next thing is getting a judge and in my viewpoint, because I've been doing this a long time, it's getting harder and harder to get judges. COVID sort of caused a lot of them to rethink whether they wanted to do this anymore. If they were close to retiring in,

you know, it's just, the whole vibe has changed and getting judges it's really hard. So, and, and if you lose one, if somebody gets sick and you have to replace them, it's it, it can be a little, it can be a little dicey, but so it starts with the date first and then, and then a judge.

So other than availability of the judge, like what are the other factors that go into finding a judge? Like who makes that choice? Well, and this is where the trial secretary, the trial secretary for our club, who does most of the trials is wonderful. And we have a really good relationship. So we sit down and decide, you know,

we've got sort of our list of judges that we like, but I've been trying to get new faces. You don't want to show under the same judge all the time. Now, if we're hosting a club, I've had clubs want a particular judge in that case that they, if they want some, a certain person that somebody that has, you know,

say it's a peaceful, is they want somebody that he has a visual of to judge the agiley trial. We try to accommodate that. Interesting. Yeah. I think that the judge selection is one of the pieces that I think can be really interesting because I've found that there can be just almost radically different styles in different areas of the country, based on the judges that competitors like to see there.

And so it can really kind of skew, I think, in both a positive and a negative way, it can kind of skew the, the experience, I guess, for, for people who live there. So I know, you know, for a long time where we lived there tended to be a move towards the like easiest judges, you know,

and, and are there any of those left anymore years ago? This was years ago, but we, you know, but as, as, as people who were trying to compete at the highest levels with our dogs, right, it could be frustrating to not ever see any of the more interesting challenges that even you might see at nationals, you know?

So in terms of like preparing yourself and preparing your dog. And so it's always been interesting to me, like who is making that determination. And it sounds like it's basically the clubs, you know, it's the club clubs prerogative on who they bring in. And then I think, you know, then you can end up with like a cycle in a certain area of country where people start to express a certain level of competition and then not wanting to really move outside of that.

I think judge location plays a role in things. And not only from the standpoint of, you know, a judge, I think a lot of judges would much prefer a direct flight or a drive to their, to their site. But I know Jane you and I have spoke that when you have those more local judges, especially in winter in Ohio, you don't want to judge,

that's going to risk getting stuck and getting a delay on their flight. So I know that at our facility, a lot of times in the winter, we tried to book more local judges who aren't going to have a, maybe aren't going to have a flight that they can drive in, or they're coming from big cities where there's been a lot of flights.

I'm sure in your experience, Jane, you've had judges who have gotten trapped by weather or whatever. And then a lot of time zones, you know, you don't want to have a judge doesn't want to come from California out to Ohio because they're going to lose an entire day on travel with the time change and the flight and everything. I know when my mom did a lot of judging,

she always would kind of say she likes to stay east of the Mississippi because it makes traveling and the time zone and everything easier. So I think that becomes a factor, not just, you know, judges that, you know, in judges that you like and develop a relationship with, but also just location plays a huge role in, I see judges names that I've never heard of.

And then I look at where they're from and they're all out west and they just they're, they've never come to the Midwest or out east to judge. So I think that plays a role in things. I don't know if that's something that you guys consider for your trials is where the judge is coming from or the ease of traveling, getting them to your facility.

I don't consider that at all. And I, I, I never thought about it because I'm, I'm booking. And so, because it's hard to get judges I'm working on 2025 right now. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So, and I will, I will say, I don't want to jinx this. We have never, we have never had a judge who had any problems Ever,

and I've been doing this maybe eight years. So I guess we've just been lucky and sooner or later, it will catch up to us. I've been at trials though, where one of my, one of my friends had to take over and judge, because believe it or not, there was not another judge at the trial to do it. So, but no,

in fact, I've got my, my trial tomorrow. Watch this not work just coming from Utah. Okay. And if anything happens, you can absolutely blame us because after two years to talk about it today and have it happens, I don't know how other people do it, but I think it's really rude to send multiple requests for a trial to several judges.

So doing it one judge at a time, and some of them are great. They get back to you right away. I waited three weeks and get a re going to get a reply back. So I've sort of gotten to the point where after, you know, eight days, I'm, I just move on because I just, I feel like it's sort of insulting to send it out and then say,

well, he just, weren't quick enough. You know, we don't need you now. I don't know how other people do it, but when you're doing 20 trials, it's a lot of back and forth and emails and all the time I've been doing it. I just, I just messed up with one with the date, but it's for next year.

So hopefully I'll find somebody, but I'm always afraid because, you know, when you go back and forth with that email thing, you sort of can get confused as to what you're talking about. Plus, I guess I plugged him into the wrong place on my spreadsheet and yeah, it was embarrassing, but anyway, it happens, but we try. So when we hire a judge,

we have, we like to have a certain sort of environment on our club. We have, you know, we have a lot of very competitive people. We also have a lot of people in our dog club that never trial any place else. And we just like to have a good time with good courses that are challenging, but, you know, and you can't please everybody.

So it just, it is what it is. And it's amazing also theater. And I think everybody has some people like technical. Some people want flowing. Some people just want once in a half around, like they used to do it. And that never, that never bothers me. I hear a lot of stuff and people will, you know, half the people will love the judge and the other people who don't care for him.

So that's life just go on from there. But I think the best, the best thing that we do is we, I just really try to make my judges feel appreciated. Traveling today is miserable. And in my estimation, you know, I wouldn't stand, I'd rather trial my dog, then judge any day of the week. And I don't know why they want to do it,

but I'm thankful they do. And so we try to really make them feel important. And I try to protect them from me on the happy exhibitors. I, I, I generally, I always stand behind my judge of anything that's happening. So Excellent. And so then once you've, you've got your date, you've got your judge. What are the other things that you're responsible from,

from the club side? So it's usually the club providing the volunteers, right? Right. So we have a hosting contract, which actually Jen's mother helped me develop the law a long time ago. So once we work with a club, we really generally don't have to do that contract thing. What they do is like Jen said, they've sold their name.

So the, their name goes on it. And they, Casey requires that they have a trial chair and a total of five members there to represent them in case something goes awry. And you have to have a bench hearing with an incident. So for that, that's all that's required of them. And we do everything else. We assume the responsibility of paying all the bills,

collecting all the money. They have a set fee that they get. So they know upfront what they're going to get from the two days, if it's a two day trial. So my job is to down to, so it starts with sending in an application to AKC. You have to get that in. Like, I think it's 18 weeks ahead or something and they're getting slower and slower.

I don't think they have as many peoples. They used to processing those. So I send them in as early as possible. So once you get your application, you're good to go. Then you have to, if your trial secretary does her, does the premium, that has to be approved by Casey. I'm looking at my notes here. I'm afraid.

I'll forget something. You have to make sure one of the things is when you do as many trials as we do your equipment gets and we use our equipment then of course, for classes, you know, so you're always constantly repairing things. We have an extra boards for the Teeter and stuff. You can't just think that you're going to get away with one Teeter or whatever.

Then you have to order the ribbons. You set the, the class order, you decide what classes you're going to have. And now that they've got that agility championship or whatever, they call that where you have to have all the premiers and the fast and time to beat. You almost have to have those, or nobody's going to come to your trial because everybody's chasing those as well.

It's not, I don't know about you, Jen. Cause I haven't been there since for a year or so, but it makes the day long adding those extra classes. That's the one thing I don't like, like my trial this weekend is going to go to six 20, something like that. Yeah. Next week, two weeks from now to, Yeah.

Yeah. It's interesting that it, that, that grand champion title is having an actual effect on, on behavior, I guess. Yeah. I think for us, for the, the positive part of that is we have parking, but not an overabundance of it. So, you know, you don't have as many cars in your lot. You don't have as many people or as many dogs that makes it a little,

a little less chaotic in the building because you've got, you know, we're getting like 38 runs in premier and 55 and time to beat and fast. So those take, that takes up a lot of runs. I think in the beginning of the grand champion, people who were going for those cues, the number of people that were going for those cues with smaller and they would just trial shop,

meaning they would go to the trial that was offering faster, was offering time to be. And if you didn't want to offer it at your trial, no big deal, you didn't offer it. And you just kept to the standard classes. It seems that now more and more people are attempting to go for that title. And they're putting more pressure on the clubs to offer time,

to beat, to offer fast. So you're seeing clubs offer it more or it used to be okay, Friday. We do time to be Saturday. We would do fast and Sunday we would do premiere. But now you're seeing the repeat classes on the same day, but it is exactly, as Jane said is you're seeing less people and it's a little bit less chaotic here in Ohio.

We have so many trials and so close together that we, you know, people can disperse and we can have small trials and still accommodate everyone. But you know, if it's 300 runs, 300 runs is 300 runs. It doesn't matter what classes they're in. So if you just offer standard and jumpers, it's one 50 and one 50, you still have a 150 dogs and you know,

potentially 150 handlers. But if you offer four or five classes and all of a sudden those dogs are doing four or five, you have less dogs, less people. So we've seen the same issue at our facility where you're seeing less number of exhibitors, which makes things less crowded, alleviate some of the parking issues. So I do think more people are going for the grand champion and it is putting more pressure on the clubs to offer those extra classes.

But 100% makes the day longer. We offer the fewest classes on Sunday when we know the judges have to catch flights, people want to get out of there. People want to get home, but it does make the days longer. Yeah. I, I, I have an, a graph that I did. It's pretty, it's been many years now and I really need to refresh it because it basically showed the number of entries by year.

And then it was like a bar chart. So it was broken down by the different classes and it went all the way back to before, time to beat in fast were added. And you can see that we don't have a ton of growth if any, in like masters jumpers with weaves, right. We're not actually growing the number of people we're growing the number of entries because we've added these other classes,

but I don't have more current data on that. So definitely on my list to refresh that so we can take a look at it. Cause I think it's really interesting and it it's, I think it's good and bad because I think we do want to grow the number of competitors in the sport, right? It's a little bit of smoke and mirrors to say our sport is growing.

If it's just growing because the people who are in it are showing more. And not that there are more people showing. So just in terms of like health of the ecosystem in sport and things like that. But anyway, well I will have to, I'll have to pull those stats at some point. And then Jane, tell us a little bit about,

I I'm sure that this is a little bit kind of the informal responsibilities, but what is it typically like in terms of taking care of your judge in terms of their travel, going out to eat, you know, kind of the, the wining and dining aspect or that, you know, showing, showing them the love, the appreciation them while they're there?

Well, the transportation is a big thing and I have always save a decision to make, because it was a lot easier to deal with this when Cincinnati was a Delta hub. But now, you know, now the flights out of here are not great. If you live in certain locations, the last flight out is like 6 45. Well, you know,

sometimes we're still showing at that point or you don't have enough time to get to the airport. I like to have my judges a Rent-A-Car possible. Cause then if there's something they want to do when, you know, on their own or whatever, they can do that. But I always look at when we're, you know, when they're flying out is,

and that determines whether they can hit, we can do the rental car or whether we're going to have to do transportation. And then I, we always put them up this really pretty nice hotel that actually even allows dogs. So that's nice. I think sometimes the hotels you have to deal with are just, you know, sort of crummy, but this one's very nice and they actually liked the dogs.

So that's helpful. And then I always just wait and see, I say, we'll do whatever you want to do, but let's see how the first day goes because I keep records. So if I've had a judge a few times, I know whether they, I do a time schedule, that's basically for myself, but we send it out to people which sometimes they want to grouse that I was,

you know, 30 minutes off and they didn't get there on time because they don't allow enough time. So it's sort of a two-edged sword, but I like to have a timeframe in which I'm thinking I'm working. And if the day goes really long, you know, I mean, cause to be 4 30, 5 o'clock and we have a little discussion about, Hey,

you know, we're going to be done in an hour, not for another hour, hour and a half. Do you think, just let me know whether you want us to take you out for dinner, which way it will always do. We, we used to carry in a lot. Sometimes we do that. My carry in place that I liked sort of became unreliable,

but we will do that. A lot of judges, if they're driving, a lot of them bring their dogs with them. And during COVID we moved all our secretary stuff and everything into the kitchen. We have this big kitchen and it's great because sometimes we've got 12 dogs kenneled in there and it's nice for the judge to have their dog in the crate behind them.

So when they're in there doing their paperwork, they can give a little dog, a pat. So if their dog has been locked up all day and we have an excellent dog Walker who is actually assistant trust secretary, but she walks everybody's dogs. So they do get out. So that's how, you know, at the end of the day, if your dog's been locked up all day,

lots of times, they would just prefer to go back to the hotel and let their dogs out of their crates rather than have to, you know, if you're going to go out someplace, even a faster place, it's over an hour to eat on a Saturday night. So depends. I just let them decide. We're sort of whatever, whatever they want to do.

Right. Excellent. So if there are clubs out there that are established clubs and they, but they've never done agility and they have a couple of members, you know, pushing them to hold agility trials, what would be your advice for getting started for like an established club that now wants to add an agility trial? Well, I think first they need,

because the rules sort of change and I'm not sure what they are now, but the first thing they need to do is contact AKC and see what they have to do to get their license. That's why they used to have a lot of matches. Do you remember the days when they had patches And that's how you do that? You have to put on a match if you don't,

if you can't convince them that your club is capable of doing it and there's a process you go through. So I'm going to, first of all, contact AKC, cause I don't know what, what you need to do now. It's been a long time since we've done that. Right. And then there, and then I think the other boat that people might be in as you have a group of like-minded competitors,

you know, maybe there isn't a club in their area, but they've been getting people that live nearby together, every Sunday setting stuff up and they think, you know, maybe we should become an official club and then, you know, we can host a trial. So then what would that process look like? That's where you have to, you know,

go to AKC and you have to say, you know, these are, these are who our officers would be and we would have the members, You have to have a constitution and all, all that, all of that stuff. And I can remember my club and we wanted to change something more constitution. We had a hierarchy, constitutionalist, whatever that is and get all the wording all has to be.

I mean, it's, you know, I'm not very good at that part of it. It does that. That's just way too in the woods for me. I, but yeah, some people really thrive on that stuff, but yes. So there was a whole, I'm sure it's online somewhere on their, on their web, on their website to do that.

But I think the easiest thing is to do what they do. An incredible is what we do is just hope, you know, just ask a club that's already established to host it and come to some arrangement about what you want, how much you want to help them. If, if you want to earn more money than the going rate for loaning your name out on the week on the weekends and stuff.

But there is a, there is a symbiotic relationship between the dog, the dog club that is doing the work like queen city. And now this weekend, it's funny, Jen said that while at the Boston's we are having the Boston's Austin teary club. So, you know, you, you do have to work together in order to make, to make it good for everybody.

Yeah. That's so interesting because that concept of renting out your name was not something I had ever heard. So for me that is, that's like the, the thing that I, that was most new to me in this podcast was, was this idea of, of renting out the club name. Oh, there's probably a better way of saying that I don't have to ask a Casey,

what, what they really want to call it. But, but they're the ones who, I mean, because John's mother did all the research on this, when we, when they, when they started doing it, I can't take any credit for our process because she was very generous in sharing with me how, how we could, how we could do it.

So, because I wanted to make sure if I made a mistake or did something against AKC, I didn't want to do anything that would jeopardize my dog club. Right. And so we were really cautious to follow and she'd had it all approved. And then I called them and made sure that I was interpreting it correctly so that we didn't do anything that they would not approve.

And Jen, so is the idea here that you have like established clubs, like queen city, like and credit paws that are clubs, but also have the facility and the equipment. And, and then y'all are partnering with these smaller clubs where they may not have all of that. They have the club name, they have the club members they want to put on a trial is that,

Well, I will be very clear that queen city is a dog club. They are a club licensed or ABC Incredibles is a business. So legally we are not able to hold a trial. So incredible is dog training is a business. We are, we are a for-profit as opposed to clubs are not for profit. So we are not able to hold trout.

So I cannot hold a trial in the name of incredible paws dog training. So like Jane was mentioning her local club queen city gets nine days where it started to become a thing is when people wanted to hold more than nine days or went up to 12. Right? So queen city was given, they get 12 days a year to hold agility trials while they wanted to hold more than that.

So what's the solution. And as Jane walked us through it's then to kind of borrow or work with another club. So I incredibly pause and like my facility, my business went about it a little bit different because we weren't allowed to hold trial. So I was a agility business. For-profit offering classes, offering seminars. I had the facility, I had the equipment,

but I was not legally able to hold a trial. So then we would have clubs who said, well, we will hold the agility trial, but we need your help. We don't have the equipment, we don't have the facilities. So we kind of worked with them and said, okay, we'll do it under your club's name. You have to provide those,

you know, members there, but we'll do it at our facility. And then there was again, like kind of a mutually agreed upon split of funds of who was going to get what, and depending on the work. So I, it is a little bit different when you're talking a business versus a club. And in my experience, you know, I've been in this sport.

I very, very long time clubs are harder and harder to find you have more businesses coming in. And then the businesses, because they're not AKC license, can't hold a trial. And that's where that kind of borrowing or loaning of the name or the hosting of the trial comes into play. And so if clubs start to fall apart, if we see less and less clubs,

eventually we are going to run into a problem because all of these businesses and I can name plenty of them across the country. A lot of, you know, handlers that do this for a living and teach for the living, have their own business. It's a business. So it's a little bit different when you're dealing with a business versus a club. And that's kind of how it came about with us is we weren't allowed to hold a trial,

but we had the facility. That means the knowledge, the people we wanted to the trials. And so that's how we went about doing it. And that's why my mom was so involved in the process and figuring out how can we make this work. Awesome. Alright. I think I understand that. So, Jane, is there anything else that you would want agility competitors to know about the club aspect or,

you know, any, any misconceptions that you run into a lot of times or any, you know, plead to help at your local trials and sign up for working spots, things like that. Right. So one of the things that is the work workers, you always need workers. And I find it really important that people step up and offer. So I do the work,

I'm also the worker coordinator and it is a really tough job. Sometimes you get to the end of the day at our club, we do all the master's classes and the premiere and all that stuff. First, the open and novice dogs go last. And that's really a nice environment for those young dogs. It's quiet. Our, our ring gates are solid so that,

you know, you can't peek through and see what's going. So I think it's a very comforting environment for those dogs, but because we've lost the majority exhibitors, we get down to the end of the day. And sometimes, you know, we are, you know, we've got one rank, one bar center and the person at the, yeah, just doing two jobs that are far setting and leash running,

and it can get really sort of crazy, particularly on Sunday when some of my exhibitors will stay and help, which is really nice on Saturday. But then they, you know, they everybody's all ready to go back home on Sunday. So, and I think people don't really understand. They sit there and they show their dogs and if they never step in the ring and help,

I don't think they really understand what's going on. It's really important to help out. You can't do it without the majority of the people that are exhibiting helping. Now, at the end of the day, my, my club members have really started to step up, but I found that I had to email them personally and say, Hey, I need you guys to stay.

We set the course at the end of the day for the next morning. And you know, nobody wants to do that, but it doesn't take that long. And when you sort of freshen things up at the club, but those are the kinds of things. The other thing that has really important in a dog show is food. And during COVID, we didn't do any food.

And so it's amazing to me. And so we've gone through a really easy thing with just bringing in some way, these people will work for a subway sandwich. I mean, really that's anyway, but so we do food and then I do a lot of, I do some worker food at the end of the day, just to keep people going for my club members who were there.

I mean, some days I'm there 13 hours and by if you're doing a three-day trial by the day three, I mean, you know, that's pretty exhausting. So I try to have lots of sugar available. And so I think that's an important thing. I don't think people understand all of just, just the little things that we try to do to make their experience better.

Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But last trial, we had somebody in our chairs, our viewing area, the chairs are not that close to the ring, but some dogs, tail was wagging and it was an open and the dog and the ring saw it and they lost their too. So we had a couple of those. So this week there would be no dogs and yeah,

we'll see if that's better for everybody, but we're always trying to improve the product. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we just annoyed people. And then we do away with that and try, I like to try and change things up. The other thing that I do, which, and I obsess over that and I, they all laugh at me, but I wasn't.

I had four children in six years and in my household, everybody wanted to be treated equally, no one cutting up one more lollipop than the other. And so when I get those trial numbers, when the trial has closed, that's when we decide what the height groupings are going to be. I'm probably the only person in the world that obsesses over this.

I bet nobody else really even cares, but I try to break it down so that they're not sitting there for an hour and a half scribing or something. It's hard, it's hard. And you know, the other thing is a lot of my, a lot of us are not as young as we used to be in. After you sit there for an hour,

I've seen people stand up and they could barely walk. I try to keep it as close to no more than 50 in a group. So I do all these gyrations and I could get even more creative, but they won't let me. So when you're doing that, this is what I think of the fours and eights should go together because of the, a frame and the,

so those have to be grouped together at the same thing with the 20, 20 fours and the sixteens just got sorted, you know? So you never know when you come to our club, until stuff goes out, you'll know, it'll be told a small or a small Dettol we take, like, if it's the Boston's, those are small dogs. They,

so we start small. If it's the golden trial, we start large, but it might be not true all the way down. It might be thrown in the sixteens might be thrown someplace weird, but I try to just make it. So I don't like it when some, you know, the first group that's working in the ring has 25 dogs. And then the last group has 65.

I don't think that's equitable either. So I try to do those running groups equally. Totally understand. Yeah. And it sounds Like it, that's, it's very specific to the person putting together the schedule. So it's going to be, you know, some area that countries, I'm sure they stick to the same schedule every weekend, other areas of the country.

I'm sure it changes every week, depending on the entries. So it's just one of those things that varies from place to place. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Jane. I think this is really helpful for people to even people who are familiar with how a trial runs to really think about for a minute, the, the people who are putting on the trial that normally kind of stay in your,

in the background of your experience, right. And appreciate what they're doing and understand the, the limitations that they're working under, but also that everybody is, is working to put together a wonderful trial experience to as much as they have the power to do that. So thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome. I hope it wasn't too long.

That's a long time to be talking about putting on a trial and I have to leave shortly to go do that very thing. So, all right. Well, good luck this weekend. I hope we didn't jinx you with your never having had international problems and you'll have to let us know knock on wood. All right. That's it for this week's podcast.

Happy training. Thank you for listening to bad dog agility. We hope you enjoy today's episode for more information, updates and links to all our socials. Just check out our website, www dot bad dog, agility.com. If you haven't already signed up for our email subscription, we would love to have you join the BDA community until next time, take care.