To Pach or to Mach?
That is the Question
Olive is my agility Novice A dog. I only learned what that meant about 6-months ago. It means that I hadn’t earned any agility titles with other dogs before she and I started competing. We’ve now been doing trials for two years and a month and are having some pretty amazing success.
Olive is a very small Border Collie, measuring just 18.5 inches tall – dogs over 18 inches are required to jump the 20-inch jump height to be regulation in AKC. At our first trial she was just 15 months old. That, and some input I got from other competitors led me to jump Olive at the 16-inch “preferred” jump height rather than the regulation height of 20 inches.
This past May we earned our Preferred Agility Championship (PACH) title and that left me with a bit of a dilemma. Though she’s relatively short, Olive is a naturally gifted jumper and was jumping over 20 inches even with the jumps set lower. Since I’m hoping to play agility with her for a long time, I wanted to have a lower jump height to drop down to once she started to age. And so, I decided to bump us up to the regulation 20-inch jump height and start working toward our Masters Agility Championship (MACH) title.
Most teams do exactly the opposite and start out at regulation and then drop down to preferred jump height. However, I think our reverse strategy has worked well for us. Olive and I were both complete novices and the preferred height enabled us to gain confidence as she gained full physical maturity.
In AKC, if you go from regulation to preferred height you don’t have to start over at the novice level, but if you go from preferred to regulation you do have to go all the way back to novice and earn novice, open and excellent level titles before getting back into masters level.
Olive and I had already qualified for the 2025 AKC National Agility Championships at the preferred jump height but if we moved up to regulation height, we would forfeit our qualification. I decided to do so anyway.
In order to requalify for the 2025 national championships at the 20-inch height we needed to get 7 Double Qs and 550 time points by the end of November. We made it back to masters level and got our first 20-inch Double Q in August. I knew the time points were going to be harder because the standard course times are faster at the regulation height and 550 points is no small feat.
At our trial in Klamath Falls this past weekend Livvy and I earned our 6th and 7th Double Qs and 118 time points. We now need just 158 more points to requalify. That seems pretty doable over the next six weeks.
Because this sort-of reverse strategy seems to have worked so well for us, in the seemingly likely event that I get a second agility dog in the future, it will be interesting to face the “To MACH or to PACH” question.
In the meantime, Olive and I play on toward the 2025 AKC Nationals and our first ever MACH title. This weekend we’re doing two days of trialing in Ridgefield WA. I get a fun feeling in my stomach just thinking about it!
Here are a couple of my favorite runs from the last trial in Klamath Falls.
· Our Masters Standard run was solid and smooth and she earned third. Livvy was still overcoming a bit of teeter trepidation from our previous trial that had an overly hard surface and therefore loud and concussive teeters but she stayed brave. Happy to report she was flying over the teeter the rest of the runs.
· We took second in this Masters Jumpers with Weaves. This course was designed by judge Tracy Mazur and was more spread out than most AKC courses. The handler had to really book it to get along the back of this course and cue the jumps past the tunnel. Loved this course!
· This Jumpers with Weaves Premier run was our 15th and final run over three days. I ran this run differently than other handlers all of whom wrapped the second jump to the dog’s left. I felt it was a better line to jump 3 if we wrapped jump 2 to the right. I think it was a good strategy because even though tired and a little slower at that point, Livvy took first place.
It’s fun having big goals and I am so grateful to have my amazing, tough, awesome partner Livvy Lane to play this agility game with.