Making Repairs

Although we had a great time in Las Vegas. Zio's turns went straight into the toilet over the weekend. In reviewing the videos, I think the root (or at least the seed) of the problem happened during one particular match.

During warm-up box turns, Zio wasn't paying attention and missed the box completely with his rear end and fell to the ground. He didn't act any worse for wear and he's done it before, so I don't think that caused anything. Just something out of the ordinary that I noticed. We had inserted Wisp into the lineup running last and moved Zio up to third, but we didn't do a good job of communicating that to our box loader. When Zio and Wisp went to the box, the balls was on the wrong side. After that, Zio reverted back to stabbing the box and turning the wrong way the majority of the time.

During the tournament, I watched another team slide a gutter across the lane (about five feet from the box) for one particular dog and it clicked for me. When Zio is at full speed, he ends up sliding into the box to stop (much like Meekah). He usually pushes off while turning and it ends up looking like a sloppy three legged turn. The gutter across the lane reminds the dog to jump to the box instead of sliding into it. I've started using this with Zio in the backyard, but it's hard to judge the effectiveness on grass from only 55 feet. I'll hope it goes toward muscle memory until he can run full speed on matting. I may have to try starting him from shorter starting points until I can fix this.