The Agility Committee currently has a survey open to find out what people like and don’t like about NZDACs (if you haven’t filled it in yet, here’s the link). This is something I’ve thought about a lot over recent years, as I’m not a big fan of the format of the current NZDAC.
Here are a few of the things I’ve been reflecting on and some possible solutions – I’d love to see a big bold reinvention of our national agility event! I’m aware that I contradict myself in places – that’s because I’m still thinking these ideas through, and because there are inevitably tradeoffs that need to be made in order to create a viable event that works for most people.
Timing and Weather
This is topical due to the weather being ghastly last weekend, pretty much everywhere. On the other hand it’s been pretty nice for the last two NZDACs. It’s difficult to find a time of year when the weather is consistently nice but not too hot. February in Hawkes Bay could mean a 30-degree day or Cyclone Gabrielle, or anything in between. And then there’s climate change to consider – if we shift the event to March to try to get the best weather, will that be too hot in another couple of decades’ time?
The ideal solution would be to hold the event indoors. Unfortunately we just don’t have enough suitable venues for this in New Zealand. Manfeild is the only one as far as I know (yes, the surface could have been better in 2018, but there have been more successful events there in the past), and even that is barely large enough to fit such a large event. While we have NZDACs that require 3+ rings to fit in all the events that are crammed into the weekend, we’re stuck with the great outdoors.
Aside from the weather, a late spring date is not ideal for an event which requires dogs and handlers to be in peak fitness, and which has increasingly become a marathon. It would be nice to see the NZDAC as the culmination of a season of agility, rather than being awkwardly tacked on near the start. It would also be nice not to have all three DogsNZ national events – the National Dog Show (breed showing), the NDTA (obedience) and the NZDAC (agility) – crammed into the same month. There has been discussion of moving it to Easter in the past, which is not ideal due to the date moving around and other large events that might compete with the NZDAC for venues (e.g. Warbirds over Wanaka).
Possible solutions:
- Move it to Easter. Down side: movable date, competition from other events, potentially difficult to get accommodation.
- Move it to a set weekend in the late summer/early autumn period. Down side: not on a public holiday any more, but given NZDAC has now swallowed up Friday as well perhaps that’s not really an issue.
- Give NZDAC committees flexibility to choose their own date, e.g. change the regs to state it must be held between 15 October and 30 April each year, and let each zone choose a date that works for them. Up side: able to use venues that might be booked out for Labour Weekend/Easter, able to choose weekend with best chance of good weather for the particular location. Down side: movable date will require some rejigging of the show calendar each year.
A Four-Day Marathon
The NZDAC has become an extreme endurance event. This year each dog could be entered in up to 10 standard agility and jumpers classes. If a dog was also on the zone team, and also made all three finals it was eligible for, that would bring it up to 14 runs. If that dog was also an Agility and Jumpers Champion it could potentially have 16 runs over 4 days. It is getting to the point where I wonder whether it is in the best interests of our dogs, particularly when the weather is on the warm side.
I’ll admit I’m not the fittest competitor out there, but by the end of four days of agility I’m pretty happy to put my feet up for a bit. I remember the Monday of the 2016 NZDAC – I’d just changed out of my agility shoes into my nice comfy sneakers when I found out I’d made the finals, and it took me a few minutes to feel happy about having won the chance to do more agility! By Monday afternoon most people seem a bit tired and crabby if we’re honest, and the early starts and long days also mean the evening social function has been dying a slow death over recent years.
Possible solutions:
- Limit the number of events on offer. At my first NDOA in 1997 there were just two sets of agility on offer, plus the interzone teams – 5 runs max. Do we really need to have triple agility and triple jumpers as well as all the special NZDAC classes? Trimming the schedule a bit might also mean fewer rings are required.
- Count finals results towards top dog trophies. This might encourage people who’ve already qualified for the finals to scratch from some of their runs and save their dogs for the finals.
- Reimagine the format entirely – stay tuned for my Part 2 post…
Who’s the Best?
To me the point of an NZ Dog Agility Championship is to crown a champion. One of our sponsors at the 2019 Cromwell NZDAC wanted to give a prize to the overall champion – but who is that? The Agility or Jumpers Champ of Champ winner? The Top Dog trophy winner? The Senior or Jumpers A final winner?
I’m a bit torn here. I love that there are lots of opportunities for people to get up onto the podium and win a souvenir to take home, but I also feel like this scattershot approach dilutes the prestige of each of the major events that are held over NZDAC weekend. Back in the day when it was just a few sets of standard classes and a teams event, there was one dog and handler that walked away with the Top Dog trophy, and they were The Best.
Possible solutions:
- Remove the Champ of Champ events. I do like these as a way to put names to faces for up-and-coming competitors from other parts of the country, but personally I’ve never felt they were particularly important. It’s difficult to get the course at the right level – hard enough to showcase the best skills of the best dogs in the country, but achievable enough that there will be plenty of clear rounds to build suspense. I ran it once or twice when I was eligible but I didn’t particularly see the point of it so I stopped entering it.
- Remove the Top Dog trophies, and reduce the prizes on offer for the standard classes. These are effectively “heats” for the big event, the finals. I’m torn about this one too. I’m so proud of all of the top 3 placings I’ve had in large classes at NZDAC over the years . In general I love that our agility system in NZ has lots of different ways for people to succeed against their own goals – but I’m not sure that a national championship needs to be all things to all people.
- Reimagine the format entirely…
To Qualify or Not To Qualify?
This is a dirty word that pops up in NZDAC discussion every few years.
I love the fact that a handler can bring their brand new, barely 18-month-old dog along to NZDAC and go home with some loot. I love that I’ve been able to compete in 26 consecutive NZDACs, even though some years I haven’t had dogs that were massively competitive. One of my best agility moments was winning two Novice classes at the 2010 NDTA in Taupo with Spring, who almost certainly wouldn’t have qualified since she scarcely went clear twice a year.
I would hate to see the NZDAC become completely invitation-only or have a strict qualification criteria which sees people missing out. On the other hand, it’s a massive event and it takes a huge amount of space and human resources to get through nearly 6000 runs.
Possible solutions:
- Be strict about training in the ring. If you want to redo your dogwalk, fine, redo it – but then expect to leave straight away. Ditto for reattempting a sequence where the dog went off course. Ditto for dogs that rack up lots of refusals, or miss their weaves multiple times. I skipped part of one of my runs after my dog had 3 refusals at one jump that was apparently invisible – and really I should have moved on after 2.
- D and out. Personally I don’t like this and I feel like it takes it a wee bit too far. It’s also not great for the person following you if you get D’d at #2 and they thought they still had another 30 seconds to play their warmup games with their dog. I think it’s fine to keep going as long as you aren’t taking significantly longer than the competitors who are going clear.
- Some sort of pre-qualification, e.g. requiring dogs to have achieved a clear round in order to enter NZDAC. With the closing date being two months out from the show and not a lot of shows over winter, this would mean a lot of promising young dogs have to sit it out on the sideline. And if the criteria is a bit stricter, e.g. needing to have a clear round in the class you’re entering, then a dog that wins out of Novice at the last show before closing date will have no chance to qualify to enter Senior.
- Run a qualification round at NZDAC for dogs that don’t pre-qualify. This could be a Friday morning thing, while most people are busy setting up their campsites and catching up with old friends. It’s still a rough deal for somebody who’s travelling a long way to potentially only have half a day of NZDAC, but my hunch is most who don’t qualify will be more quite local competitors, or experienced handlers who will have other dogs entered as well. It also requires some thought about how the dogs that qualify can be slotted into the running order for the main event without creating too much work for the show sec.
Bringing Back the Vibe
The Sunday night social used to be one of the really fun parts of NZDAC – when the show was over before 4pm. This was the perfect amount of time to go back to the motel for a nana nap and a shower, get changed into your fancy dress, and pop into the bottle shop on the way to the function. The less formal things on Friday afternoon/evening have been more variable – I can recall one in a rugby club where I had a great time meeting out-of-towners – but the trend has been generally downhill as the number of classes scheduled for Friday has increased.
There’s less time for socialising on the sidelines during the day too. I used to come home from an NZDAC feeling like I’d caught up with all my friends, seen everyone’s new dog in action, and witnessed at least a handful of the winning runs. With six rings on the go people have less time for socialising, and unless you have the most perfectly central day tent site it’s hard to see what’s going on beyond the ring you’re hanging out next to.
The Interzone used to be a really fiercely fought-out event with most of the best names in the country battling it out alongside some talented newcomers in the lower classes. These days it seems like quite a few handlers either don’t trial or use the trials as a training opportunity, perhaps because they have so many runs at DAC already that they don’t really want another one.
And then there’s prizegiving, which now takes well over an hour, with the applause getting less and less enthusiastic as it drags on. I look at some other sports where the prizes are presented over dinner in the evening and wish we could have something like that – but given the sheer number of prizes the food would be getting pretty cold by the time they’d all been dished out. 5756 entries at NZDAC this year means 575 prizes to give out – if each one takes 30 seconds that is 4h45m of prizegiving time!
Possible solutions
- Reimagine the format of the event. Fewer rings or fewer runs means more time for hanging out and socialising.
- Bring the social stuff to the show venue. The best social I can remember going to lately was a pub quiz under a marquee at the venue, at Cambridge in 2017 maybe? The dressup aspect was a bit lacking but I got to move round the tables and catch up with people, plus my team won the quiz. I think Zone 5 did well at Cromwell in 2019 too, using a function room at the venue to host the dinner, although as show sec the 5am starts caught up on me and I didn’t last the distance.
- Encourage mixing and mingling during the day. I liked the tables set up near the food trucks at the Rakaia in 2016, and they encouraged people to sit and eat together with others they didn’t know or hadn’t seen in a while, rather than scurrying back to their day tents with their food. Spot prizes could also be a way to encourage more mixing and mingling, e.g. “find somebody whose dog shares your birthday”, “find somebody who used to live in your zone but doesn’t any more”.
- Revert the interzone to the geographic zones only. Being on a zone team is a great chance of a newcomer to share an experience alongside some of their idols, pick up a few training tips from them, and feel like an important part of their local agility community. JDT camp is a huge opportunity each year to bring all the junior handlers together and build connections in that community. I think the interzone should be about local ties, and about young handlers feel part of their local agility scene, not setting them apart from it.
- Let zones choose their own methods to select teams. I was opposed to the standardisation of team trials when it happened back in 2011, because I felt that different zones had already found different methods that worked well for them, so why mess with it? For Zone 5 (which is pretty spread out) I feel it was better to consider results from regular shows rather than holding a dedicated weekend of trials that requires another weekend of travel – and it might make me more likely to trial, if I had a dog that was up to standard.
- Reduce the number of prizes on offer. I suspect this is not going to a popular idea, but hear me out. I think it’s great to have lots of prizes on offer at local shows so that most people have a chance of winning one now and again, and there’s nothing like a ribbon to get a newbie hooked on the sport. But at a national event there needs to be a balance between encouraging participation and rewarding truly exceptional performance – and at a national event that has grown to the point where prizegivings take over an hour a day, I don’t think that balance is quite right.
Coming up in the next post – my idea for a very different NZDAC!
