UpDog Competition - May 2016
WHOOP WHOOP! Cedar and I just had our first comp of the disc season! We had a ton of fun, seeing our disc friends, meeting new people, seeing new teams, and spending time outside playing our favorite dog sport!
UpDog is a great disc format. It's fun, creative, and difficult. The games we played were Four-Way Play and Frizgility.
Four-Way Play is pretty straight forward, there are five equal size rectangular zones laid out like the #5 on a dice and you stand and throw from the middle. The remaining 4 zones are numbered 1-4 and are worth those points. You have to get a catch in each zone which is called a "quad". You only have one minute to get as many points as possible. We've practiced this game a couple times, even competed once last year where we cleared one quad in one round, 10 points, and only achieved 2 points in the second round.
Cedar and I cleared one quad and almost cleared another in our first round, ending with 16 points! She was so ready to play that she trounced around carrying one of her discs like a little show off! Unfortunately, in the second round we only scored 5 points, I think she was a little excited to be out in front of the crowd since she did more prancing with the disc!
Frizgility is a mix of frisbee and agility. The pup makes a jump, then runs through a tunnel, then over another jump, then runs to catch a disc. The obstacles are worth 5 points, catches vary depending on distance.
This game is very new to Cedar and is our first time competing. She has done it on a very small scale indoors and did relatively well. She was able to clear the first jump every time, but missed the tunnel and second jump. She made some great catches but she wasn't dropping the disc again, prancing around some more. We scored 35 points in each round.
It was such a great day! The weather was chilly but we bundled up, Jess even went to Target and bought some blankets to protect against the wind. There were several cattle dogs there and a surprising amount of dobermans as well.
Little Birch Monster even got to play some games! He's still a pup so we didn't do any jumping, but Jess took him out to do some Four-Way Play and got him to chase a couple rollers before he bounded off into the sea of interesting audience members!
We're really looking forward to this season, upping our UpDog skills and improving on our freestyle routine. Miss Cedar has come a long way from last season and I know she has the potential to continue improving!