http://www.flyball.com/ruffnecks/ Lone Star Ruffnecks flyball racing teams are made up of companion dogs and their owners. We race to win, to have fun and to have an outlet to do things with our canine best buddies. Based in Houston, we race tournaments within our area but also love a good road trip. Our club promotes good canine citizenship, promotes rescuing as a way to help with pet overpopulation, and uses each and every outing as an opportunity to educate the general public about the responsibilities of pet ownership. Please visit our site and learn about our canine buddies and their human counterparts. Click on our links to find paths to rescue sites where puppies are waiting for good homes. Stop in and say "Hi" to us in person at any meet locally and we'll show you the ropes of flyball and share helpful ideas about how you too can get the most out of the human / canine relationship. Great racing, Great Canines, and Great friends all come together under the banner of Lone Star Ruffnecks. http://members.tripod.com/peopleandcanines/id33.htm Flyball is a relay racing sport involving a team of four dogs and handlers. The dogs take turns racing over four hurdles, ten feet apart in distance from each other, to a spring-loaded box which shoots out a tennis ball when the dog triggers the box with it's feet. The dog then grabs the tennis ball (right outta the air!) and races back across all four hurdles, passing the next dog in line at full speed, to return to it's handler and receive a treat or reward for doing a good job. Each of the four dogs has to execute their runs flawlessly...no passing each other early before the start line, no skipping hurdles, no chasing the dog in the other lane, no dropping the ball, the box must be correctly triggered, etc. If a mistake is made during the run, the dog is made to run it all over again - which hurts timing and placement, and usually ends in a heat loss. "Heat"? Yeah...in a tournament, a heat is when all four dogs on a team complete a single run. A race is a series of heats run back-to-back to determine a winner, as in best three heats out of five. Sound confusing? It's really not... (LEFT: Two dogs execute an ideal pass during racing - the dog with the ball in it's mouth is returning, the dog it is passing is going to retreive a ball. The line below them is the start line, and the upright standards to either side of them are the sensors for the Electronic Judging System. These two dogs race on Lone Star Ruffnecks in Houston, TX.) The dog teams are timed with an EJS, or Electronic Judging System. A single dog's "split" time (the time it takes to pass the start line, go over the hurdles, trigger the box, grab the ball, return over the hurdles, and pass the start line again) can be as fast as four seconds for the fastest dogs. An entire team of four dogs can execute the entire race in as fast as under twenty seconds...Top Dog Racers of Dallas, Texas, set a new record on March 31, 2001 of 16.11 seconds. Rocket Relay, from Canada, broke the 16-second time barrier by running a race in 15.88 seconds on August 19, 2001. *wow* (To see a listing of World Rankings click here) Of course, these teams that are breaking records worked very, very hard to get to that point and are examples of the fastest teams in the world. BELOW: A typical tournament two-lane set up. Memphis, Tennessee At a tournament, flyball teams are separated into groups, or Divisions, that allow the teams to race others of their same experience/speed level. Division 1 consists of the fastest teams in the region for that tournament, Division 2 (you might say) are the next fastest group, and so on...there can be as many as ten Divisions or more at any given tournament. (RIGHT: Tournaments usually have themes, and it can be a lot of fun to get into the spirit of the tournament theme. Here, a team enjoys having a "sit in" demonstration during Hippie Hounds 2001.) Teams are placed into Divisions based on a "seed time" that the captain of each team submits to the tournament director several weeks prior to the tournament. The seed time is a time that is supposed to be representative of the best time a team's racing line-up can perform on average. Every Division except Division 1 has something called a "break-out time". A break-out time is a time set for that division that the teams within CANNOT run faster than. If a break-out time for a certain division is set at 22.75 seconds, and a team within that division runs a heat in 22.5 seconds, they've just "broken out" - or shown that they perhaps should have been placed in a higher division. A team is allowed to break out twice in one tournament. If it breaks out three times, it is no longer allowed to run for tournament points or compete in the tournament. This is how the racing is kept fair. The break-out time is usually set one second faster than a Division's fastest team's seed time. Confused again? Head spinning? Good - we're on the right track, then. A head judge oversees the activities of a tournament, and makes the final call on everything. He or she can't see everything all by themselves, though - so there are people assigned box judging and line judging duties. Box judges and line judges watch just those items during racing - and if they see a discrepency in the racing at the station they are monitoring, they raise a flag so that the head judge can spot where a mistake may have just occured. (RIGHT: A very tiny height dog: Prissy, from Just Say Go!.) Each team of dogs *ideally* will consist of six dogs, although only four race at a time. This team will have speed dogs (chosen for how fast they are) and height dogs (chosen for how small they are). The hurdles a team jumps to race are set based on the height of the shortest dog on the team - that is racing at that time. The shorter the hurdles, the faster the speed dogs. Of the six dogs on the team, again ideally, four will be speed dogs, and two will be height dogs. That way, during a tournament, dogs can be switched out in case of accident or to rest a tired racer and replace him/her with a fresh one. (LEFT: A Jack Russell on Texas Heat in Dallas, shows a really nice box-turn at practice, over an orange cone thingy. Observe the knees of the boxloader.) A team would not be complete without the boxloader - this is the person that knows the team dogs well enough that he/she can load the proper sized ball in the box during the races (yeah - they come in sizes), which hole on the box the ball goes into for which dog, and all the dogs' names - to urge the dogs to "COME GET THE BALL!" as fast as they can. The boxloader has to be both fast and patient, as well as very, very observant...sometimes team dogs are switched around during a race and the team may forget to inform the boxloader (waaay down at the end of the track), who must divine by observation during a split-second glance who is racing next, which ball they use, and what hole the ball loads into. If a ball is loaded into a hole the dog is not accustomed to retreiving from, it can mess up the whole heat. The boxloader must also know the correct rules for behaviour during a race, as in what to do when the box malfunctions, or when a dog decides to not do it's job. Mistakes by the boxloader can cost his/her team a heat. Incredible people, those boxloaders. They even win ribbons just as the team dogs do! http://www.flyball.org/aboutflyball.html (NAFA website) About Flyball: What is Flyball? Flyball Training Forum Rulebook Titles & Awards Regions Find a team Find flyball equipment Flyball desktop wallpaper Flyball got its start in the late 1960's and early 1970's, when a group of dog trainers in Southern California created scent discrimination hurdle racing, then put a guy at the end to throw tennis balls to the dogs when they finished the jump line. It didn't take long for the group to decide to build some sort of tennis ball-launching apparatus, and the first flyball box was born. Herbert Wagner is credited with developing the first flyball box, and apparently he did a flyball demo on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson that got a lot of peoples attention. Subsequently, the new dog sport for dog enthusiasts was introduced in the Toronto-Detroit area by several dog training clubs. After a few small tournaments were held in conjunction with dog shows, the first ever flyball tournament was held in 1983. In November, 1984, twelve teams from the Toronto-Detroit area formed the North American Flyball Association (NAFA). Mike Randall wrote the first NAFA rulebook in 1985, and was also the first NAFA Executive Director. The first head judge was Dave Samuels. Flyball races match two teams of four dogs each, racing side-by-side over a 51 foot long course. Each dog must run in relay fashion down the jumps, trigger a flyball box, releasing the ball, retrieve the ball, and return over the jumps. The next dog is released to run the course but can't cross the start/finish line until the previous dog has returned over all 4 jumps and reached the start/finish line. The first team to have all 4 dogs finish the course without error wins the heat. Jump height is determined by the smallest dog on the team – this dog, called the "height dog", is measured at the withers, then that number is rounded down to the nearest inch and another 4" is subtracted to get the jump height (with the minimum jump height being 7"). So a 13 1/4" dog would round down to 13", minus 4", would jump 9". Maximum jump height is 14". In the early days of flyball, there were no start lights and no passing lights. All of the starts and passes were called by the line judges, who also used hand-held stopwatches to time the races. The race was started by the head judge; the judge would do a basic "ready, set, go" and blow the whistle on the "go". Minimum jump heights were 10", and were determined by measuring the smallest dog on the team at the withers and rounding up or down to the nearest inch (so a 13 1/2" dog would jump 13", while a 13 3/4" dog would jump 14"). With the onset of the Electronic Judging System (EJS), which uses lights and infrared timing sensors, competitors were suddenly able to track their starts, passes, finishes, and individual dogs' times to the thousandth of a second. It's hard to imagine racing without an EJS in this day and age. Many teams run all 4 dogs through the course in less than 20 seconds. The NAFA World Record is now under 16.0 seconds (and closing in on 15.0). NAFA tournaments are divided into divisions so that teams compete against other teams of equal abilities. All dogs including mixed breeds are eligible to compete and earn titles in NAFA sanctioned tournaments. Titles are earned via a point system based on the time it takes a dog's team to complete each heat race. NAFA currently has over 700 registered clubs with more than 16,000 registered dogs.