They made us wait a long time this year, but finally the report for 2010 was posted yesterday.

It wasn’t a surprise to see that my little guy is #1 Parson Russell Terrier for this year, as I couldn’t stand the suspense and started tracking results myself on the AKC website, but it is still nice to have it published as official. We beat #2 by only two points, too!

It was a lot of hard work, as a team only gets ranking points for placements 1-4 and dogs defeated, e.g. if you win a class of 10 dogs, you get 9 points, but if you place 4th in a class of 4 you get none. We have such small entries in Southern CA (about 8 dogs per class average), and some very fierce competition from high-precision teams who also show in obedience a lot, so earning points is difficult.

Just for comparison, the #2 ranked PRT (who is an Obedience Trial Champion and UDX3 – how awesome is that??) earned 55 points from only 3 runs, but defeated 19, 18 and 18 dogs in each, whereas Quigley and I collected points piecemeal, about 2, 3 or 5 at a time, with our very last run of the year adding a 4th place and 10 points – otherwise we wouldn’t have managed our #1 rating position. It was also a little frustrating that in an additional 12 runs we placed 5th, often because we lost the tie for 4th place by time.

I have no idea how I became so competitive, but (and I say this feeling like a broken record!) if AKC finally gave us some higher level rally titles to work on, I’d rather do that instead of focusing on placements and points.

Anyway, to sum it all up, I am immensely proud of my little guy’s accomplishment. I’ve said it before, when we started competing in 2006 I had no idea what was in store for our future. 2010 was our 5th year of competition, and I hope we will have many more.

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