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Joanne Kileen with Rocky and Fancy I have to personally associate a lot of this. My granddaughter was born
May 18, 1990. I was planning to drive to Kansas City to be there for
the event, but delayed leaving here until Mother's Day weekend to participate in
that first trial on Saturday, then took off to KC on Sunday. The baby
conveniently waited until I got there. We were still issuing "Qualifying Certificates" for the Sept. 1991
NCDA trial, and my first dog acquired her AG I title in Feb. 1992, so I'd say
the titling program started that year. Everyone had to maintain their own
records of legs, and get the judge to sign for each Q, then mail the form to Bud
Kramer, kind of like USDAA's height measurement cards. -- My first introduction to agility was in 1989. My daughter Kathryn Major was living in Kansas City, where she had moved in 1985 for graduate school, and was a member of the Greater Kansas City Dog Training Club. NCDA was becoming active in that area with Bud Kramer, of Manhattan, KS, and Kathryn was building equipment and training her sheltie, Thisbe, a puppy I bred and gave her for her birthday in 1985. In early 1989, Kathryn sent me instructions for building agility obstacles, and in July she came to Florida and gave 40 handlers and dogs a weekend crash agility training seminar sponsored by the Dog Training Club of St. Petersburg. The following month, she and Thisbe went to the USDAA Nationals in Houston and won the Mini-Dogs Gambler’s class. Our first agility equipment, by today’s standards, would
probably appear amusingly simple. The
A-frame was built of two 7’ hollow-core doors, about 4’6” high.
The Dog Walk was 8’ boards, similar to today’s.
The Teeter was an 8’ board with a pivot point
about 16” high. The
A-frame and Dog Walk contact zones were 48”, half the Dog Walk planks and more
than half the A-frame height. Our first weave poles were 24” high 2” diameter PVC,
and each pole was on a separate base, an 8” square of wood with a PVC cap
bolted onto it. Obviously, dogs
were not encouraged to do the weave poles fast, as brushing against them
would knock them over! The predecessor of the tire jump at that time was the Hoop
Jump, in which a 3’ diameter hoop was suspended in a frame.
The opening was larger than the Tire, but the hoop itself was only about
the width of a garden hose. Another early NCDA piece was called Weave Hoops, and later
evolved into what UKC now uses as the Hoop Tunnel. The early Weave Hoops were raised a couple of inches off the
ground and were not in a straight line, but slightly staggered, so the dog had
to negotiate them in a slightly weaving motion. The early spread jumps were PVC bars balanced on
freestanding uprights made of 3” wide PVC with V’s cut into the tops to hold
the bars. Like a tower of dominoes
or children’s blocks, the slightest touch would bring the whole thing down in
a tumble! It was eventually
replaced with a base similar to today’s triple jump, which was less
time-consuming to reset. There was no pause table at that time.
The Pause Box was the NCDA equivalent. One short-lived obstacle was the Slippery Slide.
It was essentially a children’s slide, but with steps to the top at a
45-degree angle so the dogs could climb it and slide down.
One local club built one and brought it out a few times to try, but it
was never used on a course. The
general consensus was that dogs might fall off too easily, and it was eventually
abandoned. If they’d had the plastic tube slides at that time, I think
it might have caught on. Through 1989 and early 1990, DTCSP members continued to
train our own dogs as best we could. No
one had any experience, so the instructors ended up being the people who were
willing to forego training their own dogs.
They mainly directed traffic around the equipment while the others
practiced. We held Florida’s (and perhaps the whole east coast’s)
first agility trial on Saturday, May 12, 1990.
My daughter was expecting a baby, and I was planning to drive to Kansas
City to be there for the event, but I delayed leaving Florida until Sunday
(Mother's Day) so that I could participate in that first trial.
(Even then, agility was controlling the other events in my life!)
The baby conveniently waited until Grandmother arrived. Two of my shelties, Rocky and Fancy, participated in the trial of about 19 dogs, and both qualified. There were no titles offered by NCDA, but the qualifiers received a Certificate of Merit. At the bottom of the certificates were the names of the offering organizations: Off Lead (an obedience training publication which no longer exists); Front & Finish (which does still exist); and Cascade Press (which published Bud Kramer’s agility magazine, The Contact Zone, for several years). On March 2, 1991, a second Florida club, Imperial-Polk Obedience Club of Lakeland (IPOC), offered its first NCDA trial. My most significant memory of that trial is the weave poles which, please recall, were on individual bases. The judge, Margaret Gardiner, arranged the weave poles in a spiral, since there was no rule requiring them to be in a straight line. To the best of my knowledge, that was Mrs. Gardiner’s one and only time in an agility ring. She never showed a dog, and certainly never judged again! My club’s second agility trial was in September 1991. I judged that one, having just become Florida’s first
“certified” agility judge. The following week I went with my daughter and
her Sheltie Thisbe to Orlando to film an episode of "That's My Dog",
where Thisbe won a year’s supply of Iams dog food and a set of bedroom
furniture by her agility performance, including a leap over a wall through a
spray of water. In 1992, NCDA added what are now its unique UKC obstacles,
divided its program into Agility I and Agility II, and began offering titles.
Fancy earned her AG I title on 2/22/92 and AG II on 1/9/93.
DTCSP and IPOC were the only clubs giving trials in Florida at this time,
and we shared weekends two or three times a year. About this time Beth Ann Canner, from our club, and Barbara Craig, from IPOC, had also become certified to judge. The three of us earned titles more slowly than other exhibitors because we shared the judging chores for all the trials. (It was in 1992 that the first USDAA trial came to Florida also, in Orlando with Dog On It Agility Club.) A large, successful trial in 1992 had 40-60 entries. None of us ever thought of charging a fee for judging! We just wanted to do agility, and obviously someone had to judge. Some of the last NCDA trials in Florida were presented in
July 1994 as an exhibition at an AKC breed show at the Tampa Fairgrounds.
(Indoors!) AKC was then in
the planning stages of its new agility program.
I'd been concerned about the effective date of the AKC agility program,
anticipating that AKC wouldn't permit an NCDA trial once their own program
started. But AKC agility didn't go into effect until August 1994, so we were
able to get in that July NCDA trial without incident.
Three clubs participated, DTCSP, IPOC and the Dog Training Club of Tampa. We pooled our equipment and ran three trials in two days. DTCSP and IPOC held NCDA trials in January and March 1995.
In April the first Florida AKC trials were presented.
By summer, NCDA had been absorbed by UKC, and my club held its first
official UKC agility trial on August 27, 1995.
The NCDA titles and legs were grandfathered in by UKC, on condition that
the dogs not already UKC-registered would be registered within the first year.
The NCDA judges were also grandfathered into the UKC judging pool. The National Club for Dog Agility was born, lived, and died within a 7-year period, but it was highly influential in creating the AKC program we know today.
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