Episode 347: Interview with Penny Leigh, Director of the AKC Agility League

Sarah: Today we're going to be talking about the AKC Agility League, and we are joined by special guest Penny Leigh, who is the AKC Agility League director. Welcome to the podcast, Penny.

Penny: Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah: We are excited to do this podcast. I actually spoke with Penny at AKC Nationals this year, and we were talking about the AKC Agility League and what it is. And it's something that I personally have not done, but I started becoming aware of it because of students who were doing it. So we were getting people submitting video and saying, "This is from my league from this week." And we were taking a look at videos and things like that. I don't know about you, Jen, but I feel like for myself and the goals that I have, I kind of know what different things that I'm doing in agility, what venues, what events that I'm shooting for. And so this just went under the radar because I wasn't on the lookout for something additional to add. Do you know what I mean?

Jennifer: Yeah. When it first was announced and I read about it, I honestly will admit that I was very skeptical with how much it would take off and I thought, "Oh, it's one more thing for people to add to their plate, and how do we have time to do the league courses if we're already doing our regular training?" And I have been very, very surprised, in a good way, with how much it's taken off, at least in our area. So I think just like with particular organizations or particular even dog breeds, it's all very regional. One organization might be popular in another area. I don't know how the league is looking at from an entire United States, and maybe Penny can tell us that, but in our area League is actually becoming quite popular. We have multiple facilities that are doing it, multiple teams, and we actually have another facility that's getting ready to add it on.

And I'm hearing nothing but good things about it. A lot of the fun and the camaraderie that it's bringing to the table, but also it's putting just enough pressure on people to try to get the clean run or the good score when people are depending on you. So when teammates are there, whether it's live and, okay, you rent the field for two hours, so you only have so much time. Or just knowing that you have a teammate and a team score, it's kind of like that middle ground between it being a little bit more pressure than a class or a private lesson, but not as stressful as a trial that it is helping with people's mental game and the ability to get it done. And it's showing a direct improvement into their trial results as well. So I'm with you. It wasn't something I read up on and knew a lot about initially, but its growth has already been very large in our area in a short period of time. So I think we're going to see nothing but more of it.

Sarah: Exactly. So Penny, let's start with you giving us the rundown on what exactly Agility League is, maybe a little history.

Penny: Sure.

Sarah: And what the point is, how it works, that kind of thing.

Penny: Sure, sure. Absolutely. Well, a little background, the League, of course leagues are nothing new. I mean, leagues have been around in sports, human sports for a long time, and there are leagues in dog sports as well. But the idea came about through Gina DiNardo, who is the executive secretary of AKC, and I think most of us are familiar with her because you see her name, her signature on all your title certificates from AKC, if that name sounds familiar. But Gina is a longtime tennis competitor, and she is very active in the USTA tennis league. And for some time she has thought bringing a team aspect to some of the AKC sports would be a positive, because most of our sports, or really all of our sports are individual sports. It's you and your dog going out getting a score, which is great, but she wanted to try something with teams, and agility really seems to lend itself to that.

The agility department proper really didn't have time to take on another project, because I think everyone knows how busy they are. They've added on the ISC program, they have more national events. I've been with AKC nearly 19 years, and I'm a long, long time agility competitor. I've been competing since before AKC had a program. I started in the early '90s. So I was tapped to work with Gina and work with a team within AKC to help develop a league. And in addition to that, I'm also a former flyball team member. Of course, flyball is a team dog sport, and my husband and I are active in disc dog league because there are some very well done disc dog leagues in the country. And I really drew a lot on the disc league as a model to how to do this league. So really, and I'll just say that the pilot program, we started with a pilot program in May 2022.

We just invited some groups around the country to try it out for us. I also pitched it at the NAC that year, and I recruited a few that way. So we had 19 groups, they fielded 40 teams, and we did one level, just master's, and we got tremendously great positive feedback from that, that we really... I mean, we also learned some things and helped us tweak it, but the groups loved it, and many of them are still with me today running every season. So the board, the AKC board of directors officially approved it in August 2022 as a full-fledged program. And since then, of course, we've added multiple levels and many other bells and whistles, that basically how it works is I say it's just like a softball league or a bowling league, except for people who love agility. And it is not in competition with your trials on the weekends. We would never want to do that. We want to accent and help people be better and train for their competition on the weekends.

So it's not like choosing either or. It should be, this is another way to train. And like Jen said, it's a way to train with a little more edge than your average group class, because while league is low pressure, it's definitely not no pressure because you're being timed, you're being judged, and you want to do well for your team. The team rankings come out every two weeks, so you want to do well. And plus we have every level. We have novice, we have intermediate, which we call freshmen and sophomore, then master's level is senior, and then we have PhD, which is our ISC division, and we have Ashley Deacon as the course designer, and he has just beautiful courses for that division. So we offer something for everyone, and so I'm able to compete in the program. I'm a captain, I run dogs in the program, and it has definitely helped my young dogs, and it's also helped me with my master's level dogs. So it's been quite a ride the last two years to work on this.

Sarah: And so then I guess how does it work from the perspective of somebody who wants to participate? So as a complete outsider, having just looked through the website, my rudimentary understanding of it is that you get a couple of people together to form a team, you find a location that you can set up the course, you set up the course yourself and run it. And then I'm kind of unclear what happens after that.

Penny: Well, right. Well, you have a lot of the components, right? So anyone can form a team. It can be a club, it can be a private training school, or it can just be an individual. And we have a lot of people who put for their facility, "My backyard." So you can just be somebody with a backyard full of equipment, you invite some friends over, and you guys have a league team. You choose which division you're going to run. I might say we have three different field sizes. We have limited, that's for people... We have so many groups that don't have space for a really full-size course, so this enables them to do something a little more competitive with that smaller space. That's a minimum 50 by 70, it's called limited. And then we have regulation, which is minimum 70 by 100. And then we have extended, which is a hundred by 100, and you have to have that to do the big ISC courses, obviously.

But yeah, so you form a team and you come up with your team name, you decide which division you're in, you enroll during our enrollment period. We have three seasons a year. Fall, which we are enrolling for right now through September 11th. That's the cutoff date for fall. And then we have winter, and then we have spring/summer. So we have three seasons a year. The season is 12 weeks. During that time you run six courses. We give you a two-week window to run each course. There's six rounds. And so round one, on the Monday morning of round one, the courses are released, they're emailed to the captains, and then we post them, and they have two weeks to run that course and report their scores. This is all on the honor system. There's no video, and I feel like it's been outstandingly successful.

We have had no doubts of anyone doing anything that wasn't above board. And so the captains report the scores through an online submission program that we have. And then at the end of each two weeks, the rankings come out and we have rankings for individual dogs in every jump height in each division as well as the teams. And so generally, if you're running regulation or limited, you're generally getting two jumpers courses, two hybrid courses, and two standard courses each season. For PhD, Ashley alternates agility and jumpers for the PhD, the ISC division. And then we just added on for fall, we have a new division that's just starting called elementary, and that is going to be for baby dogs. They still have to be at least 15 months old, but that will be no weaves or teeters. We had some feedback from our competitors who wanted this, particularly instructors who had students who wanted to be part of League, but they weren't quite ready for prime time couldn't, they're not quite weaving yet.

So we created this, we've gotten great feedback on it. It'll be kind of like an ACT test, but an ACT test that runs for six rounds instead of just one day where you go do your ACT test and get your title. So a major goal of this program is for the beginners and to give them confidence. And we hear from them that it does give them confidence to get them ring ready. So you're running in a little more comfortable environment with people you know, but it runs more like a real trial and just to get more people into the ring into competition, that's one of the major goals of this program.

Sarah: I love it. That is so interesting. One question that I had with the teams is, so one team, do they all have to be physically in the same place?

Penny: Yes.

Sarah: They use the same field, they have to use the same field?

Penny: Yes. Yes.

Sarah: Okay.

Penny: That's a good question. Yes. This is not... Our goal, we do not want to see cross-country super teams created where they're just submitting video yet. No, we do. I mean, the whole point of this is also camaraderie and teamwork and coaching, so we really want everyone to be together. That's actually something that we hear a lot from people that teams not only run agility together, they bring potluck, they go out afterwards to the bar, they do things together in other ways, and I just think it's really special. But with that said, we do make exceptions sometimes. Sometimes we have someone who has to be away, they have to miss this round. We will let them video and send it to their captain for scoring. They do have to be able to measure the course, because course yardage is crucial. So they have to be able to measure that course and give the captain the course yardage.

I might mention all the courses have a maximum course yardage on them, and you can't go over that. It's okay to go a little under, but you do have to tweak your course and measure it and make sure it's not going over. And the reason for that is during our pilot season, we did not have any rules like that. And we learned real quickly, I mean, it was crazy. We'd have people with 200 yards and we'd have people with like 130 yards. Some people just stretched it out as big as they could and other people didn't have the space. And even though it is yards per second, basically, plus faults, it was not working. So now the course designers, they put a maximum course yardage on it. And that's why if you are running at two different places, because like I said, occasionally we'll allow that as an exception if you have someone who has to be on vacation or they run someplace else or they're sick and they run at home, they have to measure and send it in.

And their score will be based on their yardage while the rest of the teammates, their yardage might be a little different. And the team's score, I might mention, is an average of all the members' scores, so every team member does contribute to the team score. You must have... The smallest requirement for a team is three dogs and two handlers, but you can have up to eight dogs on a team. So three to eight dogs, three dogs is sometimes a little risky because three dogs is a definite requirement to qualify as a team. So if you have an injury or someone gets sick over the season, you're down to two dogs, you have a problem. So you can get a substitute, but we usually advise people to try to have at least four, so you have a little buffer, but three is the minimum requirement.

Sarah: I love the idea behind this of creating those social connections. And when you talked about potluck and stuff like that, it made me think about times in our career where we've just informally gotten a group of people together who all had the same goal and we were setting up courses on a consistent basis, like getting ready for an event like World Team Tryouts or something where we would all get together, everybody would pitch in to set up this big course. We would run it with five or six dogs over one to two hours, and then we would always end up starving and going out to eat right after like clockwork. Even if we didn't plan to, we always did it.

Penny: Exactly.

Sarah: And it just ended up being part of the routine, so I could see that that social aspect is really an exciting part of this program. And I really love the fact that y'all have put together this thing that people can look forward to and enjoy, and they're getting something out of it. And that even though the perfectionist in us might say, "Well, how accurate is the yardage?" Or, "Is everybody setting up the exact same course?" And all of this. At the end of the day, everybody is having a great time. Everybody is getting work and getting practice and getting better at the sport. And I love hearing how you just kind of put this together, and it's on the honor system and do your best with your setup. And it's just functioning as intended with people really, really enjoying their time and their experience. So kudos to you guys.

Penny: Well, thank you. We have teams all over the country, including Alaska. Alaska is actually one of our biggest states, because they don't have a lot of trials, so they love the league. We have teams in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and really all over the country. And I'd say our hotbeds are Midwest, Southeast, and East. The West is a little more sparse, but we still have representation all over the country, and we're growing. But one reason we started our nationals, which we just had our national, some people may have seen the coverage on AKCTV, or heard some of the buzz.

We had our second one just this past week, is because we feel like every year we should bring everyone together to be on the same playing field and meet each other, because people do connect with these teams all over the country. But oftentimes it's just a name on the rankings. Or on our Facebook group, you might reply to somebody or comment. But the nationals, you get to meet these teams that you've been running against all year and didn't know, maybe didn't know, and it was a great event. And we had a team shirt competition, and we had a crating area decoration contest. And I'm here to tell you that is about as competitive as the agility. People go crazy. It's unbelievable.

Jennifer: The crating competition was amazing. I followed it online.

Penny: It's unbelievable.

Jennifer: And I looked at the photos and I'm like, "We don't even have setups this elaborate at our breed national specialties," because I know that's a pretty big thing at Sheltie Nationals, Border Collie Nationals. People went all out. If people did not check out those photos on the Facebook page, it was incredible, the detail and how elaborate the various crating setups were. That was really fun to follow online.

Penny: It is. People build stuff. I mean, they really love it. And the team shirts are super creative, and we require them all to wear their team shirts in the finals and it looks really good. It's just a real... It's a nationals and it's got some really great agility, but it's got a different vibe. It's just a little lower key, little more fun. And we have the novices there. I think that's something that's unique about our national, that we have the novice teams and the sophomore teams, which are open level. And some of them run around, because they have the TV cameras on them and stuff, but everyone cheers for them. Everybody goes over and cheers for them and makes these new handlers, new dogs feel great. It's got a real positive vibe. And we have world team members running. We had some cream of the crop out there this past week putting down some super agility. And then we have people who've never ever been to... hardly been to a trial and come to this national event. Like I said, it's very heartwarming to me.

Sarah: I love it.

Penny: It was fun. Yeah, it was a lot.

Sarah: Yeah, I love it. It's like the agility, fun, lighthearted stuff that we didn't know we were missing or that we've forgotten what it felt like or whatever. I love it. It sounds so fantastic. One thing that I wanted to go back to and really highlight that you had mentioned was the deadline for the upcoming season, because that is just a week away as we're taping this, and it's one of the reasons that we wanted to have this podcast and let people have a chance to jump on board, if not for this season, then maybe for the next season. So I wanted to highlight that that date is September 11th, and I know this is all on the website, and I will put a link to all of this on the show notes page. But can you just kind of walk through the process for if somebody wants to actually join a team? Basically you need a captain, you need teammates, you need a facility, yes?

Penny: Yes. Yes, you need a captain to head this up. The captain will enroll the team first. You do need a facility. And like I said, that doesn't have to be any place official. It can be someone's yard, but you do need all the equipment. You do need all three regulation AKC contacts. You need at least three tunnels. You need a number of jumps, so you need everything you would need to build a master's level course. And if you're doing PhD, it's helpful to have a wall jump as well, but you don't have to. We'll let you sub a panel jump for PhD. But yes, you need... And then once you enroll your team, then you send out, there's a handler dog enrollment link, and you forward that to the folks that you want to be on your team, and they sign up themselves and their dogs and they have to have the captain name and the team name.

The team names are also very creative, I might mention. They're a lot of fun. And then competition starts September 16th. And like I said, in the morning of September 16th, the course maps are released for round one, and there's six rounds. We also do have a policy for extensions, because we do have a lot of people who run outdoors, and if you have bad weather, you apply to us for an extension and you can run that round later. Things happen, so we do have that policy. Or if you say, "Gosh, this week everybody's out of town," you can get an extension and you just double up and run that round later in the season, as long as you complete all six rounds as a team by the end of the season.

Sarah: Got it.

Penny: And I did want to mention, too, I just wanted to mention that for schools out there, instructors, a lot of them have actually turned league into a class. For one thing, it gives you a course map every week. And we don't mind also if clubs and schools use our courses for other purposes. We say use them for run-throughs, use them for classes, make do of this. You've got a course to set up, use it however you want. But a lot of people have made it into a class. So first week you practice the course, you analyze it, you talk about how to run it, and then the next week you get timed and you run for score, with coaching, of course, along the way. Because one thing we allow are reruns, you're only limited for reruns by time if you have a time limit. But you can practice the course before you run, you can rerun. This is for training.

And the other thing I wanted to mention that I forgot is that this was something we didn't really think about when we were creating the program, but now we get a lot of feedback from people who tell us their dogs really can't go to trials or don't trial well. And this has given them a whole outlet. And that makes us feel great, because we really didn't even think about that, although there's dogs like that. But we get people who say, "My dog is really fearful of traveling, but they run great at my home turf here or my home school, and thank you, because my dog competes, they get ranked, they win a ribbon at the end of the season, and that is really great for us."

Also, we have a veterans class. It is for dogs 10 and older, but they can jump up to two heights lower than their regular height, and they get two seconds off. So whatever their course time is, we take two seconds off. And we've had people tell us also their dogs have come out of retirement to run in the veterans class for fun at their home school or turf. So I just wanted to also mention those two things.

Sarah: Yeah, that was one of the things that I was thinking about, is dogs that, for whatever reason, just do not do well in the trial environment. And I think this is a wonderful outlet, because honestly, a great run in practice feels fantastic. It feels really good. It feels connected with your dog. There is a lot of pride in your skills. And so I think that sometimes people, I guess maybe almost overvalue the trial experience relative to what you can get out of the sport even if you don't compete at the trialing level. And this is a great kind of window into that or another opportunity for people.

Esteban: Right. I almost asked about it at the beginning. We've got a pair of dogs, our COVID dogs, we call them, right? They didn't have quite the socialization and world experiences that our other generations of dogs had. And I don't think trialing is in the cards for those kinds of dogs. We're not the only people with dogs like that. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that, having had these dogs now for these few years, and thinking about the sport in general and all the changes that have happened, all the evolution in coursework and training techniques and how we're very much global, but that there's always kind of a little bit of a division between, I guess, levels of competition and competitors where you have people who are like, "Well, I need my competitions to be like competitions, so I expect other dogs to be very well-behaved, able to do very basic things." And then we can all go back 30 years, and you had mentioned, Penny, that you started before there was even AKC agility, right? It's just a very different time.

And I feel like the league is almost bridging that gap, what the sport has evolved to. And we kind of got away from some things. And this is kind of filling that in, because there are so many great dogs out there, and each of those great dogs represents a great and special relationship with an owner. And just because they can't get out to a trial or be in certain environments doesn't mean that they can't enjoy the sport. As Sarah said, that you can still have that great thrill and rush of excitement. I think about it when you say league, and I love that the idea came up from a tennis player, because I love playing basketball. When Sarah and I, we used to live in Austin at some point before we came to Houston, she was in a volleyball league with adults, right?

Sarah: Right. Oh, yeah.

Esteban: It's something that you did and it was social and it was fun and it was a little athletic. It was not incredibly cutthroat. It was a very positive experience. And I think when you think about the worst aspects of agility, this, I feel like, really balances that. It kind of counters that, and so I really like how it fits in. It almost feels like a piece that we've been missing as a community, and this is kind of doing that for us.

Sarah: Right. And I know it's a little tangential, but I just find it so interesting that we've kind of concurrently developed these two programs within the AKC, the ISC program and the Agility League, and really just providing for everybody to enjoy the sport in the way that they most enjoy the sport. And not really putting restrictions and saying there's only one way, there's only one goal, there's only one ultimate agility. There's all different ways and levels and levels of competition and levels of just, I guess almost seriousness, levels of seriousness. And different people gravitate to different ones and enjoy different ones. And providing for that, I think, is really, really great. One thing that I was curious about is, who is designing these courses? I think you mentioned Ashley Deacon doing the PhD courses. Do you have a set number of judges that are putting together the courses for each season?

Penny: Yes. Right now we have three judges that are on contract with AKC. And as you mentioned, Ashley does the ISC style courses, which a lot of people have really loved because it's great prep work. But we have Debby Wheeler of California. She does our regulation courses. That's the regulation size would be what you find on any given weekend at an AKC trial. She does our senior, sophomore, and freshman, and now elementary for that field size. And then our limited designer is Ronda Bermke of Wisconsin, and she is also an AKC judge. And that is what we say, it's shorter courses for smaller spaces, our limited division, and that as well has the senior, sophomore, freshman, and now this season, the elementary. And also, I really need to say that we have the great help of Scott Stock, who is an AKC Agility field rep. He is our course reviewer. So I do want everyone to know that all the courses are reviewed. We have somebody looking at them with safety in mind. If he sees anything, they go through a review process before we release them to our competitors in the league.

Sarah: And then in terms of judging the actual performance, essentially, do we assume that each team has somebody knowledgeable enough to judge what's a refusal and what's not and things like that?

Penny: Well, we hope so. We ask that you have someone at a master's level to be the judge. Of course, if you have a judge or an ACT evaluator in your midst, they are already qualified. But that is what we hope that you have. But some teams have applied for exceptions, because they really wanted to be part of league and they didn't have a master's level person. If they have equivalent in another venue, we are likely to approve them. And if not, we will help give a little coaching and help along the way. we want everybody to be able to participate. We don't want to turn anyone away.

So if you don't, you contact us, we'll work with you, we'll try to help you get a judge developed or find one. I've had a lot of people say they learned a lot. They've learned a lot about course building and measuring courses. Some people said, "I've never measured a course. I've learned how to measure a course," which we have a video online that they can watch that was put together by a judge for us. And so we've had people who said they've learned a lot of other aspects that they never really thought about before because they had to do it for their league team.

Sarah: Right. Yeah, I think that's super important for people to have those kind of-

Esteban: Is that link available for course building, available to the general public? If you give us that link, then we can add it to the show notes.

Penny: It's for measuring, it's not for course building.

Esteban: Oh, sorry for measuring.

Penny: But it's measuring. Yes, I will. Yes, it's on our league webpage.

Esteban: Okay.

Penny: And it was done by Dee Lulik, who is in Chicago. She is an AKC judge, but also a league captain. And she did it specific for how we asked them to measure in league, which we asked them to measure one time for the path of a 20-inch dog. And then we add on the height handicaps depending on the height of the dog. So they measure one time. But yes, it's on our webpage, and I'm happy to send you the link.

Sarah: Perfect. And then Jen, I just wanted to, as we wrap up, I know that Bea competed in the Nationals because people had mentioned seeing her on TV, but you were not the handler. So tell us a little bit about Bea's League experience.

Jennifer: As most people know, Bea is co-owned with myself and Jean LaValley. And down in her area, they have a couple league teams. And somebody approached her, and at first they started and asked if she would be on the team with her young dog, Bea's little sister Ladybug, because Ladybug lives with Jean a hundred percent of the time. And there was a little bit of like, "Well, it'd be nice to have Bea, her experience, her mileage." But she does travel back and forth between Ohio and Tennessee so that I can do the training to get her ready for some of the bigger events and the ISC courses. And we basically, at the beginning of the league, sat down and looked at the calendar, and we're like, "We think we can make work." It was something that we don't have at my facility currently, but Jean wanted to do, and she didn't think it would...

We discussed it, and we didn't think it would interfere with her training. So we made it work. And it started, Jean kind of fell into exactly everything, Penny, that you're describing. It started as like, "Okay, I'll run some courses. It'll be good mileage and training, especially for Ladybug." And then she had a lot of fun and she would get together with her friends, and then they talked her into the League Nationals. And she's like, "If you had asked me a couple of years ago if I was ever going to the League Nationals, I would tell you no." But she went and she actually competed in St. Louis on Thursday and Friday, and from League Nationals drove straight to my house in Ohio. So I got to spend the whole weekend on Saturday and Sunday talking to her about it. And she's like, "I'm so glad I went. It was a really, really good time. And it's not the pressure of a big national event, but it's a big event, it's a national event, it's just a enough pressure."

And she, she being Jean, really likes team events. So it was fun because I kind of got to do league sort of vicariously through Bea. Every time she would have a league run, I of course got the video because we share training videos, and I got to watch her at the league event, and I know Jean had a great time. Their team was first going into finals and ended up third, and then Bea ended up being the top 16-inch dog individually for her division. And then Jean's young dog actually was the top 12-inch dog. So she had a great time and definitely plans to continue it.

And kind of being able to share that through Bea is making me more tempted to want to venture into the league myself and offer it for my students. I mean, I don't know that... For me, as I said, the hesitancy on my end is just already having so much to do, but I think it would be absolutely wonderful for my students. So the more we record this podcast, I'm sitting here thinking, "Man, this really is a great idea." Maybe from the business end, it should be something I could consider because we have the lesson plan when the courses are assigned, you get them for two weeks. So Penny, I think you've sold me on it.

Penny: Oh, that would be great. Now, I don't know if other league competitors want you in the league. But Jean, I saw Jean at the Nationals. She actually came up to me and told me that story about how they begged her to be part of the team and she reluctantly joined and what a great time she was having, which made me feel great. And like I said, we have people of all levels of competitors, we have world team members, and we have people who've never really even been to a trial in their local area and just came to Nationals with their team. But yes, Jean looked great with the two Shelties, and I got to see some of the runs. They were fantastic. And one time Ladybug ran and someone said, "That dog was so fast, I couldn't even tell what breed it was."

Sarah: That's awesome. All right, well, I think that we have covered this event thoroughly, and I hope that there are a lot of listeners out there that if they have been thinking about League, or maybe even if they'd never heard of it before, based on this, will take a look and consider joining either in the fall or in the winter. As a reminder, the next session closes, you have to be registered by September 11th, and it starts on September 16th. But if you miss that one, there will be one later on as well, three times a year. So thank you so much for joining the podcast, Penny.

Penny: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And anybody who has a question, the email's very easy, agilityleague@AKC.org. Just send us an email, we're very quick to get back to you.

Sarah: Perfect. And that's it for this week's podcast. We'd like to thank our sponsors, Saint Rocco's, Treats and hititboard.com. Check out the Teeter "Teach It!" only at hititboard.com. The Teeter "Teach It!" is an easy to use tool that controls the amount of tip on your teeter, so you can introduce motion to your dog in a gradual way. Go to hititboard.com for the new Teeter "Teach It!" and other training tools and toys. Use discount code BDA10 to get 10% off your order. That's hititboard.com. Happy training.

Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Bad Dog Agility. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. For more information, updates, and links to all our socials, just check out our website, www.baddogagility.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.