Dog Events Online Now Generates Flyball Entries
19 Aug 2004
Just entered our Flyball team, Black Sheep Squadron, in the River City Flyers hosted Henry, IL tournament tonight. Entering a tournament isn’t that big a deal except this time I discovered that Dog Events Online website now creates Flyball entries too.
I use DEO’s website for every Agility entry that I can. The site generates PDF forms filled out just like the official AKC forms. It takes the drudgery and potential for error out of entering a trial. DEO is really providing a wonderful service. Now I just need to remember to send in the entries…
So when I saw that DEO offered entry forms for this upcoming Flyball tournament I had to try it out. There were only a few steps:
- I chose to create a new account for use by our whole team
- Fill out team contact information
- Add all the dog's NAFA information
- Define any number of teams by choosing dogs by name
- Set the team captain, box loader, and seed times
At that point if you use the same teams/seed times at all tournaments the setup is done.
I then chose the RCF tournament and selected the two teams I just created. Just downloaded the PDF files (one for each team for each day), printed them, and emailed copies to RCF and my teammates. Couldn’t be easier.
There were only a couple things that would be nice to add. It would be helpful if they could automatically import the dog information from the NAFA website. We only have a dozen active dogs so it only took a few minutes to cut and paste the data from the NAFA web page. I would hope NAFA would allow them to scrape the data directly; since it means NAFA need not develop this functionality. I took a look at the NAFA team pages and they are pretty straightforward to parse.
Once created, I didn’t see a way to delete a team once you created it. It might also be useful if the teams were associated with the tournament instead being defined at the club level. That would allow you to define different teams for each tournament and keep track of the teams entered for each tournament. If you tried to do that with the current layout all the team permutations would be listed at the club level. In any event, this is really not a big deal as you can easily edit everything about the teams for each tournament.
On my wishlist would be adding generation of the “C2” form used to track which dogs ran in each heat of each race. Host clubs use these to track points during the tournament and our club uses them to track which dogs ran to calculate points earned per dog.
DEO has come up with another really useful web service that I’ll use to enter every Flyball tournament I can. They are doing the performance dog world a great service. Thanks DEO.
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