UFO Local - Arcadia, CA

This was probably one of the worst disc dogging competitions of my experience in the sport. Not because of the people, nor the venue, nor the weather. It was the worst, because afterwords, I did not know if Bailey and I could ever compete in disc dogging again.

I first noticed that there might be a problem when I was warming up with Bailey and trying to get a few pictures of him jumping over me. He kept running around me instead of jumping, and when he did jump, he was angling to jump over my legs only. I thought he might just be giving me a hard time and didn't take it too seriously at that point. We then walked onto the field for our routine. Bailey was barking and jumping like a crazed hound, his normal pre-routine behavior, as we prepared to begin. But from the very first backflip you could tell something wasn't quite right. I made a few tosses and he was just jogging around with no intensity on getting to the discs. His tail was straight down. I attempted one more setup, but he just bounced up and down in front of me making no attempt to start running, that's when I knew something was significantly wrong. I stopped the routine at that point and we walked off the field. The weird thing was that he really showed no other sign of discomfort. He walked fine, and when we tested all his parts, he showed no discomfort. But the display in freestyle made things very clear, there would be no more competition that day for my boy. And so we just watched the rest of the UFO Local from the sidelines.

The weather was great, and the field superb for a disc dogging competition. The turnout was a little light, but there were plenty of talented teams to make for a spirited competition.

Al Erikson (32.2), Bruce Brantley (31.1), and Chris Cabral (31.4) threw down the best freestyle routines of the day. Newcomer Cheryl Kamikubo also served notice that she was a team to be reckoned with with a solid 30.5 freestyle round. But Ron Cole came to the competition with a secret weapon, Arrow and his arm. Ron Cole posted a monster 18 points in his Toss & Fetch round to grab 1st place and 20 UFO World Cup points. Jeff Hill & Enzo also used a strong Toss and Fetch round of 15.5 to move up the leaderboard into 2nd place. Al Erikson hung on with both his dogs (George & Gracie) to snatch 3rd and 4th place.

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