Saturday was the Skyhoundz World Championships Qualifier. I competed in the Open (freestyle) and Distance / Accuracy (toss and fetch) divisions with Enzo, Slayte and Muse. Jenn played with Tooney in the Masters D/A division. As Tooney is getting older, I want Jenn to get some play time with her and I want to save Tooney for the UFO finals at the end of the year.

Enzo made the cut in freestyle, but I don’t know his final placement. Jenn and Ellie did a pairs freestyle routine and got 2nd place! Jenn also won the Masters D/A division with Tooney. Slayte was awesome for me and I think he only missed 1 disc in freestyle! We finally think we have him figured out for Frisbee and the basic rule is we need to stay as close as possible to him and run as much as possible with him. In toss and fetch, we need to run out to about the 20 yard line and run back with him. It’s a ton of work, but it does the trick and it’s actually fun!

Muse, on the other hand, was quite exceptional. She placed 3rd in the Open division and won the Distance / Accuracy division (38.5 points!), qualifying for the World Championships in both divisions! The Skyhoundz regional is the most difficult qualifier for SoCal competitors because only the top three qualify, the competition here is very strong and without traveling a significant distance, we only have one shot at qualifying. Enzo has never qualified for the Skyhoundz World Championships…. It’s almost beyond my comprehension that a 9 month old puppy can accomplish something like this when my 7 year old superstar has never been able to, despite qualifying for the championships in all the other major organizations year after year. I am not going out with Muse having any intention of winning… it’s just happening and I am honestly not even sure how to feel about it. It’s a very strange (but incredibly awesome) situation for me!

Muse deserves to go to Chattanooga for the Skyhoundz finals, but I can’t justify going. She is only 9 months old right now! I can’t bring myself to get serious with her training like I would with a more mature dog to prepare ourselves for the finals. She is only doing a puppy freestyle routine and I am not going to do much beyond that the rest of the year. I have a number of difficult and trick throws that helps our score, along with Muse catching virtually everything I throw. We already made a big east coast trip this year and we have plans to go to the UFO finals where all the dogs get to compete (they are all qualified for UFO finals). She would have a chance at a reasonably high placement in the Open division since she is averaging right around 20 points per D/A round this year! I believe at the 2012 finals, only one team had over 20 points in the Open division and that was by the awesome Pennie and Psych. Of course I don’t know exactly what the conditions were for that competition but those kinds of numbers are what push a team way up in the standings and those are the numbers Muse puts up consistently. In the Distance / Accuracy division she’d clearly have a chance at winning that outright when she’s putting up 20’s regularly. Her lowest D/A score in Skyhoundz so far has been a 19. I hope I don’t regret not going, but it just doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.

Sunday was a Discdogathon which is a less-serious competition with four different disc games. I want to say my favorite result from Sunday was that Slayte played with both Jenn and I (8 events!) and he was awesome the whole time… but Enzo outshined him with a rock star performance along with my rock star partner, Kirby, by winning the team Distance and Accuracy event with a huge score of 22!

Muse got 2nd place in the Bullseye event which is a perfect event for her style. You stand in the middle of 3 progressively larger circles and throw to the outmost ring. You have two discs and Muse gets a great flow with it as she runs back and forth catching one disc, then the other. She only missed one throw and I got 14 throws off in a minute!

Here is a picture of Muse with her awards.

This is Muse showing what she can do in freestyle. My throw at 0:45 is pretty awesome, by the way 🙂