Questions to Consider Before Building a Disc Dog Routine

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What Are Your Skills and Strengths?

What skills do you bring to the table in your game? Are you an athlete? A thrower? An Entertainer? Dog trainer? A bit of a clown?

Highlighting your skills is key to putting together a solid routine. It does you no good to place focus and time on skills and behaviors you are poorly suited for.

Identify your skills and strengths and play to them.

What Are Your Dog’s Skills and Strengths?

The skills of the handler are not always a great fit with the skills of the dog. If the skills of the dog and the handler don’t jibe, the team is not going to function all that well.

Identify your dog’s strengths and skills and use your skills and strengths to build sequences and tricks that highlight the dog. Disc dog freestyle is a team sport, and although the judging does get separated into dog, handler, and team – the performance of the team sets the tone and creates the vibe upon which each element is scored.

This might mean that your unicorn trick or holy grail sequence might not be the killer app you think it will be from the judge’s and crowd perspective. It might be that a simplified version will be better for the team or that something easier for you to perform will be the move to make,.

You might find that you need to step up, let the dog take the lead, or dump the killer app and do something else entirely.

Handler skills and dog skills matter, but it is what the team puts forth that defines a performance.

What Is Your Style?

*excerpt from the Art of K9Disc

Technician

The TechnicianThe Technician is a player archetype defined by perfection. They might not throw the craziest stuff out there, and they might not have all that flash and flourish, but the Technician goes out... More is a player that is focused on execution. Technicians may not be the flashiest, the fastest, the prettiest, or have the most difficulty or creativity, but they more than make up for it with their perfect execution of technical tricks and sequences.

Steady, even performance at an elite level is what the Technician is working towards. Get awesome stuff, get it working, and then perfect it. That’s how the Technician rolls.

“The Dog”

You know that dog that jumps head high for everything, or the dog with so much personality that you can’t do anything but grin? That is the Dog.

The DogThe Dog is a player archetype defined by The Dog. There are always a few canine athletes that really separate themselves from the pack. Many great disc dog teams have relied a great... More is a bonafide player archetype. The handler may not be the greatest player or showman, and he or she might not have the technical expertise of a Technician, but jeez louise, that Dog…

The Dog is not an excuse though. Nothing is more painful than watching someone go out there and screw around with a super talented dog. The handler still has a strong supporting role to play on the field and at the drawing board in order to ensure that the Dog gets the opportunity to look good. The Dog might be awesome but he can’t play freestyle on his own.

Maestro

The MaestroThe Maestro is a player archetype defined by the handler’s poise, skill, and presentation of the game. The Maestro doesn’t play the game, she orchestrates it. Team Movement and Flow are the featured... More is focused on creativity. Like a creative genius, or a prodigy, the Maestro makes the easy stuff look hard and the hard stuff easy.

Maestros do interesting and creative things in interesting and creative ways. They don’t play their game so much as they orchestrate it.

Intricate tricks and intricate patterns with perfect flow, or elegant simplicity with jaw dropping performance, the Maestro is a creative force with a dog and a disc.

Mad Scientist

Mad Scientists are crazy. Who knows what kind of weird science they are going to put together on that field.

Handlers that throw the kitchen sink at their dogs, teams that are focused on wicked tricks, freaky team movement, and freaky human athlete’s all can be considered Mad Scientists.

Mad Scientists tend to break the conventions of performance and play by their own set of rules and metrics.

Showman

The ShowmanThe Showman is a player archetype that is defined by this crowd and this performance. The show aspect of disc dog freestyle is the Showman’s focus. Superb choreography, hamming it up with the... More is an entertainer. They live to perform and their performances on the disc dog field are more like a show or a vibe than an athletic performance.

The Showman makes people smile and feel things. Creating drama with strategic pauses, hitting tricks on specific beats, and interacting with the crowd are some of the hallmarks of great Showman.

What Is Your Goal?

Not everyone is out to win the contest, and you, as a handler should not always be out there to win. This might be a temporary routine. You may have a young or older dog. The team might be rusty.

If you are trying to win, then you might want to pay attention to the rules of the organization you’re competing in – sometimes, if the goal really is to win, you might want to structure your entire game directly to the rules.

Sometimes you want to simply develop your game with your dog or have a solid showing. Maybe you want to just go out and jam and have a good time. You might even just want to go out and not look foolish, which is not an ambitious goal, but is often the cold, hard reality of the situation.

If you know what you want to do before starting to build your routine, you’ll be better off. It will be easier to make the tough decisions of what to cut and what to focus on during pre-contest prep.