How do you know if flyball is right for your dog?

A

Ania

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Hi everyone,
I have a couple of questions. One, how old or rather young do you start a dog with flyball? and Two, how do you know if he would be good at it? The reason I ask, is today while at the off the leash park, I met up with a lady and her 5 border collies. She is on a flyball team and is looking for a height dog and thinks my Chinook would be good. He's only 5 1/2 months right now, and is around 13 1/2 inches at the shoulder. He plays with toys, and will go after things I throw for him, but only at home, with no distractions. At the park, all he cares about is other dogs and not playing with a ball or anything, so I am not sure if he'd be good at flyball, or will his interest in balls come with age?
 
The best way to find out is to give it a try. In general, Shelties will excel at anything you put in front of them. So if you are willing to put in the work and have a team that is familiar with training Shelties, then chances are he will enjoy the sport and do well.

While flyball does hinge around working with a ball, ball drive isn't a necessity. It can be trained in just as another aspect of the sport. In fact, hard ball drive often hinders a dog's performance as they are too driven to get the ball and tend to be sloppy on other aspects of the game.

At 5.5 months, you can start some groundwork training for flyball, but ONLY with a team that is familiar with training puppies! There should be no jumps over 2-3 inches, NO box-work, and only VERY light training-chute work. There is a lot of flat work that can be done, recall training, drive training, attention and focus, retrievals, etc. that won't injure a young dog's joints. Keep training sessions short and frequent, don't try to push him to work for a full hour class yet.

If the team is recruiting height dogs, then they will likely be interested in working with you for whatever you need. They should be aware of how to go about training for a young dog, and provide you with practice times geared towards puppy training.

Both of my guys are titled in flyball. Gio was born to play flyball, it is his "calling". :lol: But unfortunately his poorly bred health caught up to him and I had to retire him early. He would still go and play if I let him, but I had to make the call. Romeo has a few beginner titles in flyball, but his "calling" is agility, so we are taking a break from flyball for the time being and focussing on other sports.
 
This is interesting because I suspect that Bailey would love flyball.

She has a huge ball drive. She will fetch tennis balls until she drops. Numerous times, we've counted 100 throws in a row... I have to put tennis balls in the house away; once she jumped into bed at 5:30 a.m. and dropped a tennis ball on my head, wagging her tail with a happy "Come on Mom, let's play ball!" look on her face.

When we have guests, she will bring them a tennis ball in the hopes that they'll throw it for her.

Any ball or things remotely ball shaped are game. She goes beserk when the boys are playing basketball. Size doesn't matter! She will bark at the basketball, put her front paws on it and push it so that it moves!

Because she gets really excited fetching, I've begun to train her to sit/stay after the ball is thrown and wait until I give the "OK" command to retrieve it. I reward her with a treat for staying and another treat when she brings the ball back. She's catching on pretty quickly.

I guess I need to find a local group to see what the procedure is. Any tips?
 
There are two main organizations that hold flyball tournaments in North America. Both have club locators on their websites.

North American Flyball Association (NAFA)
http://www.flyball.org

U-FLI
http://www.u-fli.com

NAFA is the most common organization, though U-FLI is gaining in popularity.
 
My male had no ball drive and my female is a ball nutter - yet my male has turned into the better flyball dog. My female would rather chase a ball (or chase anything) whereas in flyball they dont get to chase the ball and we arent even allowed to throw a ball in the arena during comps to rev up the dogs. I found the hardest thing is to teach a Sheltie to run away from me (to the box) so if you can teach the dog to run and pick something up and bring it back to you (not something you throw) then thats a good start.

GeeRomes right about being careful with training the dog at that age. We have so many injuries at flyball because the dogs hit that box really hard.

Flyball is the most social dog sport so if your pup likes socialising he would love flyball.
 
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