So 2009 begins! Happy New Year everyone and every dog.  Thunder Paws is headed off to our first flyball tournament of this year, this weekend.

We are headed to Hurricane Utah. We will have two full teams, though our alternates are a bit light.  Hopefully we won’t need them.  I think they are not doing variety again… which is a bummer. We can usually get a nice variety team going.

Our Seed times are fair… our 21 second team, Thunder Paws Lightening Tails, however, has a breakout of 20 seconds, so we are going to be cutting that pretty close.

Our faster team, Thunder Paws Don’t Blink, has a seed time of 18.5 seconds… which is the slowest in that division (S2) with a breakout time of 16 seconds.  So that’ll be fun!

We are excited and looking forward to winning some races!

Thanks to the good weather we have been having as of late, we are still able to hold practice each Sunday.

The weather is cool, but the dogs love it. Us humans have been bundling up with our winter coats… but it’s been between 45 and 55 degrees for the last couple of weekends and that’s not too bad at all.

This first picture is of Ky, he’s an aussie mix on the team and he is still considered new.  Though he’s been to a few tournaments now and he’s doing very well. He’s a social boy and likes to go visit the other dogs.. while racing sometimes! But he’s getting better each day, learning his job, and having fun doing it.

Chase has been having a great time at practice, too. He was out last week because he has a tooth removed. So he wasn’t allowed to play tug for a while. And he so loves tug.  But he’s healing up quite well and having fun running and practicing. Chase has an agility trial next week… we wish him good luck! Chase wishes some of his flyball team mates would come do agility, too!  Chase is also learning obedience, though being a border collie, he wants to check everything out and not just stare at his Mom!

Marley came to the practice to cheer the racing dogs on. And the young dogs, too. However we are not taking any more new dogs until spring. We’ve had an influx of new people and dogs lately, which is great! But with the weather about to turn we’ve decided to close new dogs until spring comes around and we can seriously practice with the new dogs on a regular basis. And the new people too, as coming to practice helps, but if you want to do flyball you must train at home too!

A few of us took a trip to see some very cute puppies recently!  These puppies are border collies and I’m not going to go into detail about the kennel or breeding, as I don’t know if the breeder or our teammate wants me to. So let’s just see how darn cute these pups are!

This is Kayden, one of our up and coming handlers. He runs Arrow sometimes on our team in tournaments, and at practice. He’s learning to be a great handler! And he was so very gentle and sweet with these puppies.

And here he is again holding the two black and white puppies in the litter. The litter has two black and white border collies, two females. And two blue merle puppies… one female and one male. I, personally, love blue merles. I have three smooth blue collies. However I realize that picking a dog on color is the absolute wrong thing to do!

The question is, do you get a puppy that is going to be fairly high energy, and try to train and focus that energy… as the black and white girl that is available may be? Or what about the blue merle boy who might be a bit low energy, and do you try to bring his energy level up? As a flyball dog, this puppy will have an awesome life. Not only will s/he be a flyball dog, s/he will also be a member of Dazzle Dogs!

So whichever one of these super cute puppies gets to come and be with us for the rest of his or her life, our whole team is excited. It’s like we get to have a puppy to play with at practice and at events, and we don’t have to bother with the house training and teething! Though I wouldn’t mind having a puppy again myself. I love puppies, and it’s been years and years since I’ve had a puppy in my house. I’ll get one again, someday. I’m sure of it.

Until then, these cute border collie puppies will get lots of love from me!

We are going to be doing a flyball demo tomorrow, Saturday, September 20 at 10:00 am at the Salem Pet Fair. So if you want to see some flyball, come and watch!

We should be starting around 10am. We’ll be there earlier than that, though, setting up. If you are interested here is the address:

200 W 300 S
Salem, UT

The fair is between 10am and 3pm. They will have Adoptions, a Vaccination Clinic, Classes, Games, and fun for the whole family! Especially with flyball!

We are back from the Nothing To It tournament in Hurricane, Utah, hosted by the Stampede flyball club! We had a great time and we did quite well, too. We had a few bad races, in the beginning, as we were working out passing times and such. But after that we did good. On Saturday we got a first place in Division three with our fastest team, and a third place in division four with our slower team. We also had a variety team… but dangit, now I can’t remember where that one placed! We also had a pickup team with Stampede, so we were basically running four teams, it was a crazy day!

We will have to keep better results.. most of the sheets are with Laurie, our flyball captain, who is off galavanting doing Jack Russel things for the next couple of weeks in California. But I can post an update!

From the U-FLI website we have some results from our two Sunday teams. Here is our Division Three team, Don’t Blink, times, and results:

And here are our results from our Division Four team, Claws N Paws:

We are off to a tournament in St. George Utah (at least some of us are anyway!).

We will be competing this weekend in a U-FLI tournament that will be hosted by Stampede.

Best of luck to all the Thunder Paws Dogs and People! Run clean and fast. Most importantly -have fun!!

Well… it’s time to get started on this blog! I’ve been recovering from a server crash and been spending a lot of time restoring. And so this has been on hold. But now things are better and who better to talk about here than one of our amazing flyball dogs!

This is Keno! Keno is a flyball Dachshund. She is also a rescue. She was rescued from a shelter in Las Vegas, Nevada (correct me if I’m wrong Laurie..) and was named Keno. She is a sweet girl who loves her ball.

Keno owns our flyball captain, Laurie.  She is almost as ball obsessed as a border collie.

She is about four years old?  Hrm… I better some more information on Keno! You can see her, in these pictures, on our new flyball box some of our team members recently built.  It’s sweet!

Where did that ball go?  Keno missed the ball a couple times, now I’m not sure why.

These last three show her catching that ball, she’s a good catch!

Keno will be running on one of our teams at the U-FLI tornament in Hurricane, Utah, this coming weekend!

Well, this is the first post for the Thunder Paws Flyball Blog.  Since the host recently lost a hard drive and died, I am spending time rebuilding sites and things, so this site may not have many updates for a while.

But we’ll see… welcome, and check it out!