Agility Trial Recap: NADAC Northeast Regionals 2019

Over the 4th of July holiday weekend we competed in the 2019 NADAC Northeast Regionals event.  Regional events are hosted once per year in the various regions (as designated by NADAC) of the country.  Each year clubs that wish to host the event are put into a random draw, so every year within the region the event is held in a different location hosted by a different club.  This is the first year the Northeast Regional has been within easy distance for us, so the first time we have attended.

The way Regionals works is the event is run as a regular trial weekend, with the exception that for Elite and Open teams the 4 regular runs are scored using Championships scoring for the purpose of regionals and each run has an additional chances challenge that if the team successfully completes the regionals score gains an additional 10 points.  At the end of the competition the scores for all 4 regular runs are combined to declare the winner of each division and height.  The 1st place winner of each height/division is awarded qualification to enter the yearly national Championships event (held this fall in Ohio) and an automatic entry into Championship Finals.

So….drum roll please… Zora and I won our division!!  Elite Standard Miniature Northeast Regionals Champion!  Alas we have decided not to go to Championships this year in October, but I’m pretty excited we did as well as we did at Regionals!

Our Mini division was rather competitive for a Mini division (really there aren’t a lot of short dogs running agility!  Short dog means under 11″ at the withers/shoulder).  So to have a competitive class was great fun!  Zora and my saving grace to pull off our 1st place win was the chances line challenges.  We were the only team to successfully complete all 4 chances line challenges in the regular class (amongst ALL the teams running, not just our division).  This fact is hands down why we earned the win since Z is definitely not faster than the other small dogs in the competition class with us but she is not 10 seconds slower than them, so the added 10 points of the distance bonus negated our slower time.  Example: say Zora ran a run in 48 seconds, and another dog in our division ran it at 40 seconds.  Because Zora got the added 10 pt distance bonus, our regionals score for that run would then be 38 (48-10), and the other dogs would still be 40.  So our score would be then 2 points better than the other faster dog that didn’t get the distance points.  Make sense?

I’m really glad I decided to enter us in regionals and really thrilled we did as well as we did.   AND super stoked for all of my students and friends that did amazing at regionals too!!  It was a fantastic group of people and dogs at the event!  Congrats to everyone!