community | awesome-paws-agility

Helping & supporting the agility Community

Besides the training aspect of agility, Geraldine & Katie have played a large part in the Victorian Agility community from Geraldine being on the National Agility Committee in 2008. They have contributed in various committee roles over the years and continue to today, from general committee to president, vice president, secretary on various committees from State Vic Committees with Katie for 6years (full-term) to Geraldine's 4yrs term.

A founding member of K9 Agility Club Inc. Geraldine was on the committee for countless years while Katie still continues to contribute to K9 Agility Club committee as club president. They have been heavily involved in running countless trials and still very active in roles from local clubs trials to State Agility Trials. Geraldine was involved in introducing the first games run at club at CDODC (Croydon Dog Club) of Snooker.

They helped introduce electric timing gates and transported the two sets to all trials that hired them for over 8yrs. They taught clubs and individuals how to set them up, use them, and maintained them for many years and still doing today (this was not an easy task at the time). This has now grown into the state having around 8 sets of timing gates are transported by various people.

They have been fundamental in the role of upgrading equipment to the safer equipment we see today used all over the country. They helped introduce the wet 'n' pour method of TPV & EPDM rubber granules on contact equipment (from the old sand and paint surface we once had). It was a slow and gentle process to win the community over and took a lot of blood sweat & tears, as change does not come easy when it is a whole community. Eventually, we got there and clubs pulled together to help one another to achieve a goal we dreamed of "To never see another sand/paint-covered contact again"

While not only helping clubs, like K9 Agility Club, various times, Action Dog Agility, Vic state Agility, also individuals with the application and weights, measurements etc. They ran a rubber covering demonstration at Awesome Paws on 4th Dec 2011 where everyone was invited to see how it is applied and ask questions.

They helped introduce Poly wing jumps to the state, by firstly importing Doggy Jumps from the UK the first Poly wing jumps used in classes at Awesome Paws back in October 2013.

From there they helped K9 Agility Club introduced wing jumps being the first ANKC club in the state to use and hire out Poly wings. They jumped on board with Jahzzy Agility to store and dispatch at first DoggyJump and later moved to Jahzzy Jumps from Croydon Vic, to save clubs and individuals on freight costs from Qld. As well as disturbing the first grip tunnels being Sure-Grip tunnel from O/S. We also successfully persuaded for K9 Agility Club while on committee to introduce NFC runs in ANKC trials.

FUNDRAISING for the Community

On 21st January 2017 Geraldine & Katie ran a full-day seminar teaching handlers as a fundraiser to raise money to purchase Wing jump for the Vic State Agility trailer so the entire community had access have Safe Poly wing jumps for all clubs to hire and use at trails. They raised a total of $2,480.00 (all of which went to buying new wing jumps that are all still used today)