March 25, 2026 Wednesday Wrap Up (Pembrook Welsh Corgi Impresses, AKC NAC Results, Scrubs)

Podcast: Pembroke Welsh Corgi Impresses

I’ve seen it all in agility. Show me a great run by a great dog and a great handler, and I’ll nod my head and clap. But these days, I’m rarely impressed.

Then I saw this Corgi run.

I called Sarah over to watch the run. And then I watched it again. For a moment, I felt the kind of energy that reminds you why you fell in love with the sport in the first place. That surge, that excitement, that joy. So when Jennifer suggested we get the handler on the podcast, I was all in.

In this week’s podcast, we’re joined by Peter Wirth, the handler of that amazing Corgi, 8″ National Champion Welly. We talk through that incredible run, what went into it, and what it’s like to win it all for the first time!

We also break down the AKC National Agility Championship from multiple angles. We talk about the unusually low Q rates in both prelims and finals, the number of falls off the dogwalk, and what the course design may have had to do with both. More importantly, we zoom out and ask what this might mean for the future of the event.

Listen to the podcast here: Episode 385: AKC National Agility Championship Wrap-Up with Guest Peter Wirth

AKC NAC Results

Sarah here! This year’s AKC National Agility Championship was, by any measure, a tough one. Conditions, course design, and the pressure of the stage all played a role. Prelims chewed through the field at an unusual rate. Across all jump heights in the regular class, only a small fraction of dogs made it through three rounds without a fault.

The 16″ and 20″ classes were particularly brutal, with fewer than 5% of dogs running clean across all three prelim rounds. Even in the more forgiving heights, we’re looking at roughly 1 in 10 at best. That meant finals were stacked with dogs carrying faults, which is unusual and added a different kind of drama to the final round.

To put those numbers in context, in a typical year, running three clean in prelims is a strong performance but no guarantee of a finals spot. The field is deep enough that clean dogs still get left out. Not this year. In 2026, only one dog that ran three clean in prelims failed to make the finals, a single 12″ dog who just missed the cut. Every other three-clean dog across all five heights made it in. That alone tells you how unusual the conditions were.

The other side of that coin is how many faulted dogs filled the remaining spots. Every height always has one automatic entry, the Challenge Round winner earns their spot regardless of their prelim record. But this year, several heights saw faulted dogs make finals well beyond that one. In 16″, nine of the fourteen finalists had faulted in prelims. In 20″, twelve of the twenty finalists carried faults. In 24″, five of eight. Only the 8″ and 12″ classes saw just the expected single faulted entry.

Add it all up and 23 of the 63 finalists carried prelim faults beyond the automatic Challenge Round entry. That’s 44%. In a normal year, that number would be close to zero.

What this really points to is the difficulty of the prelim courses themselves. When even the best teams in the country are faulting at this rate, it says something about the level of challenge being asked at a national event, and that’s not a bad thing. A National Championship should be hard. These courses demanded something, and the teams that made finals got the job done.

It’s also worth noting that this year’s event brought exceptional heat, and that likely played a role for some teams. Heat affects dogs and handlers differently than cold or mild conditions. It can slow response times, sap focus, and produce uncharacteristic mistakes.

With the path to the title running through multiple one-fault teams, finals became a genuine open question with some very unique seeding.
And as it turned out, running clean in finals was nearly as rare as running clean in prelims.

Another interesting phenomenon was that none of the Challenge Round winners went on to win their class. Because the Challenge Round winner is generally a dog who placed in a prelim round but faulted in another, they are often among the fastest dogs in finals and frequently come away with the win. Not this year.

Also, even though 44% of the finalists made it into finals with a fault, only one was crowned National Champion. The other four champions came from dogs who made it through prelims clean.

If there was one moment that defined the finals course, it was the weave entry. Across all heights, 30 of the 63 finalists faulted at the weaves, nearly half the field. But the distribution across heights was surprising.

The 20″ class had the lowest fault rate at the weaves by a significant margin. The small dog heights told a different story, with 12″ topping out at nearly two thirds of the field faulting there.

Which raises an interesting question. Several people have speculated that white weave poles set against light colored sand may have put the smaller dogs at a disadvantage. A big dog approaches the weaves from a height where the poles stand out against the background. A small dog’s sightline is much closer to the ground, where the contrast between white poles and pale sand essentially disappears. It’s impossible to say for certain, but it’s the kind of environmental factor that’s easy to overlook until the numbers make you look twice.

Another unusual moment (actually, three of them) was the number of dogs that fell off the dogwalk in finals. Three dogs fell or jumped off the contact. That’s 4.8% of the finals field. In at least two of the three cases, it was pretty clear on rewatch. A large camera on a boom was moving toward the dog as it was running the dogwalk, a complicated, elevated obstacle that requires focus.

Some competitors questioned the dogwalk entrance and course design as contributing factors, and that’s a fair thing to examine. But after rewatching the finals, that doesn’t appear to be the primary issue.

One agility competitor put it directly in an email to the AKC: “I implore you to work with ESPN to move the camera on the large boom to any place other than the dog walk.” It’s a reasonable ask, and one we hope gets serious consideration before next year.

None of that takes anything away from the teams who navigated all of it and still came out on top. Difficult courses, unusual conditions, and the added chaos of a live TV production, and these dogs and handlers delivered anyway. Congratulations to the dogs who ran the gauntlet and came out on top.

2026 AKC National Agility Championship Regular Class Winners

• 8″ — Welly, Pembroke Welsh Corgi, handled by Peter Wirth
• 12″ — Skye, Poodle, handled by Han Yu
• 16″ — Luke, Icelandic Sheepdog, handled by Leslie Ems-Walker
• 20″ — Brink, Border Collie, handled by Kaitlyn Rohr
• 24″ — Cosmo, Vizsla, handled by Sam Chew

Two of this year’s champions made history for their breeds. Luke became the first Icelandic Sheepdog to win a national agility title, and Cosmo did the same for the Vizsla.

While we didn’t run the full statistics for the Preferred class, which draws a smaller, distinct competitive population, the winners deserve the same recognition for making it through these demanding courses and coming out on top.
2026 AKC National Agility Championship Preferred Class Winners

• 4″ — Kailani, American Eskimo Dog, handled by Jennifer Crisman
• 8″ — Bet, Shetland Sheepdog, handled by Marco Giavoni
• 12″ — Dazzle, Australian Cattle Dog, handled by Michele Smith
• 16″ — Ego, Border Collie, handled by Sydney Ryan
• 20″ — Howie, Border Collie, handled by Amber McCune

Scrubs Is Back

The new season of Scrubs is out, and for anyone wondering, this isn’t a reboot. It’s a true sequel. Same universe, same characters, just many years later. The original run ended around 2010, so we’re looking at about a 15 year gap, and the show leans into that very well.

I really enjoyed the original series, especially the first few seasons. It ran from 2001 to 2008, which lined up almost exactly with my time in medical school (2002 to 2007), but by the time the later seasons came around, I was an intern and didn’t have time for TV. Going back now and watching it again has been interesting.

I’ve often mentioned to people that Scrubs was the most realistic show about medicine out there, accurately capturing the feel of an academic hospital. There’s the transition from one year to the next, the responsibility of training a new class of interns, the divide between surgery and medicine, and the constant tension between patient care and the business of healthcare. They got the vibe right.

Many of the original characters are back, and the show slowly reveals what’s happened in the years between. There’s a clear changing of the guard, with the older generation recognizing both what they got right and what they didn’t, and passing things along. That part has been especially well done, and there’s an episode built around that idea that I think many of you will really like.

I tried getting my kids to watch the original series, but my daughter, who just turned 16, wasn’t having it. The show was too old, she said. Interestingly, she found the new version more watchable, but had issues with how the younger interns are portrayed. The jokes didn’t land for her and felt off. It’s funny how that works. Just like Gen X bristles at jokes about aging, younger viewers push back on what they feel are lazy takes on their generation.

Rewatching the original, one thing that really jumps out is how much of the humor leaned on sexual innuendo and male-centered jokes. A lot of that simply doesn’t land today, even with me, which means I must have changed. To the show’s credit, the new season doesn’t ignore that. It actually acknowledges it. There are moments where the characters reflect on how things used to be, and you can feel that shift in awareness without it being heavy-handed.

Five episodes in, and I’m looking forward to the next one. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Scrubs, especially if you’re familiar with the original seasons.

What did you think about AKC NAC this year? Let us know at team@baddogagility.com.

Happy Training,