We Kicked Your Ass! Competitiveness in Dog Agility
27 Jan 2024
“We kicked your ass!” A funny and true story I like to tell about competitiveness 1 from back in the day. Though, the exact details are lost in the mists of time. As I recall, I was at one of my first USDAA trials with Milo in Starters. We had finished our run and I went to check my scores. This was back when scoring was done on paper accumulator sheets 2. A bunch of us are standing around the sheet trying to figure out who placed/Q’d etc.
I finally found our score and said something like “Wow, we were in 4th place”. A lady next to me said “4th place? We kicked your ass!” and she takes the sheet off the wall and takes it back to the scoring table. After some discussion, it turned out her score was actually wrong, she was even further down the rankings…
What, makes this even more unusual is we are talking about a local trial and scores in the Starters (Novice) group. While I was excited to have qualified at all with Milo (something we struggled with for his entire career); their actual placement was something that was important to her.
I still see this lady regularly, I like her, and we talk agility handling and training. I think it was just the perceived error of the scoring that got her riled up that day. That, or we all have our bad days from time to time. No harm, no foul; just a funny interaction that shows how people can view the results of a competition differently.
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