Saturday September 9th 2006 - team practice (TTH)

(Backfilled in October 2009 due to impending closure of Geocities)

Gave Walter last week off so that Lucy would have my full attention at the new venue, so today was Walter's first practice at TTH. For the first time, I tried running with him rather than just trying to send him ahead over a jump which hasn't been interesting him. This really worked! I ran with him from three jumps back, have to run with him almost all the way to the box for now, then we run back over the three jumps. He stayed interested and excited for all of it. That is, until we brought the ball out and put it on the ledge. He nudged it with his nose once, but then on subsequent tries he would have nothing to do with the ball. I tried charging it up and throwing it to the boxloader, throwing it away from the box, handing it to him, nothing worked to get him interested in the ball which is strange because outside of flyball he likes balls. So my job is to get him excited about playing with the ball in various different environments. Later, we did more "runs" without the ball but this time with Sammy doing runs in the other lane (gate dividing the lanes). Except for the first try in which he bypassed the box and wandered into Sammy's lane (due to the wing being on the wrong side), the exercise went well.