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Sunday, October 24, 2010

UFO World Cup Finals!!!

San Diego hosted the 2010 UFO World Cup Finals and we were well prepared and super excited to compete in this event. We had competitors from Germany and Netherlands as well as all over the U.S. It ran from Friday into Sunday and there seemed to be round after round after round of competition. I think about 10 total rounds. Enzo and I were both exhausted at the end of the day Sunday. There were ups and downs for Enzo and I as a team, but my best buddy managed to pull out a solid round every time he needed to.

Friday was an open qualifier that Enzo needed to do well to get points for the season championship. Enzo was AWESOME! I was so proud of him. He did great in both freestyle and toss/fetch. Our best freestyle round is the first video below with one of the top scores for the day. His toss/fetch round was the 6th best out of over 50 teams! So much for toss/fetch being his weakeness! That is long behind us. Now he's solid on both. He finished 5th overall and gained lots of points. He moved from #25 in the world to #12 after the day was over.

Saturday and Sunday were the World Cup Finals. Only competitors who qualified with a minimum number of points from the entire season can compete. About 50 teams qualified in the world and a total of 21 showed up. Most of the people in the top 20 came to compete. Scores from Saturday carry over into Sunday and after 1 round Sunday, the top 10 move on to the last rounds as the finalists. I felt it was going to be very difficult to make the top 10, but that was our goal. We would have to beat half of the best competitors around. Our placement moved around a lot during the rounds. Our placement from the 1st round to last (before the top 10) went as follows: 11 (yes, we are in it) 19 (uh oh) 12 (back in it) 10 (JUST made it!!!). We made 10th place by 0.1 points. With total score on the order of 100+, it was as close as it gets! After we made the cut, it felt good to be a finalist. In the top 10 round, we had a good freestyle and toss/fetch round and moved up 2 more places and finished in 8th!!!

The scores from the weekend are added to our point total for the entire season and we finished at #8 in the UFO World Cup standings! Click here to see our name in the final rankings!!!

Videos can be watched HD up to 1080p!

Here's videos of our two best rounds. 2nd video has us in our Halloween attire.





Here are the remaining freestyle rounds:





Monday, October 18, 2010

MACH2 Enzo - 10/16/2010- plus some other musings.

Enzo got his 40th double Q this past Saturday for his MACH2. He's such an awesome little boy. Unfortunately I didn't think to bring my video camera. He had a fast and smooth jumpers run where we had to go through some scary boxes (our old weakness) and a nice standard run with a small bobble when I had to call him off of the off course aframe.

Last weekend we went to one day of an ASCA trial. He needed one more Regular leg for his Open title. At our last ASCA trial I entered him in Open and we didn't Q in either of our regular runs so I decided to just enter him in Elite for this trial. We didn't Q in Elite Gamblers but he Q'd in both Elite Regular runs with the fastest time of all heights and also Q'd and got 1st in Elite Jumpers. So he finished his RS-O and got an Elite Regular and Elite Jumpers leg. Now we're ready to try for the 2012 ASCA Agility finals in Bakersfield. Hopefully they'll have some more ASCA trials than they normally do around here.

Then there are my frustrations with USDAA. We did a USDAA trial a couple weeks, 9 runs and only two Q's. He had a bar in almost every run and was also having problems making his contacts with the higher aframe and the shorter dogwalk contact. His only Q's were in Masters Pairs and Snookers. He could have gotten a Super Q if not for the knocked #6 jump in Snoookers. Not sure if I should do performance with him instead. That would at least take care of the bars and the higher aframe but the dogwalk would still be an issue. I really would like him to run in championship for a little while though since i think he's actually fast enough to be competitive if we could just be consistent.