This course is officially expanded to include agility as well as obedience and rally!
Most handlers spend months or even years teaching their dogs the specific exercises and obstacle performance found in the obedience and agility ring. We heel for months, and then we spend several more months making sure our dogs can perform their heeling with a wide variety of distractions. We teach retrieves, exams, recalls, and stays. We make sure our weave pole entrances and our contact performances are independent and fast. Yet we often fail to teach our dog what to actually expect at a trial. They are thrown into this new, chaotic environment with a stressed handler. It is the first time they see a stranger approaching to take their leash, another person who seems to be in charge other than their human is giving orders, and there is so much novel stuff to look at!
Most dogs immediately disconnect from their handler as they enter through those ring gates at a show. They go from perfect focus outside, to barely acknowledging their human once inside the ring. And many of them do not just get better with repeated exposure. For most dogs, the opposite happens. Because you are limited in what support you can give them in a trial, the dog is left experiencing that stress and realizing that the rules for trials are different than practice.
The solution involves teaching your dog exactly what to expect at each little point in a trial from the moment you arrive to the moment you exit the ring and reward them. Knowing what to expect greatly lowers anxiety for both people and dogs!
For dogs who have already trialed and are stressed, then we will also need to spend time changing that conditioned emotional response to each of these parts!
This class will help prepare you and your dog to enter an obedience, rally, and agility ring with confidence. We will do this by training the dog to understand their role at each little step, reducing ring stress, and systematically preparing for the distractions which could crop up along the way!
What type of teams should take this class?:
Young dogs who have not yet started trialing. Give these dogs a great foundation for the future!
Dogs who are fine in the general show environment but stress and worry once in the ring itself.
Dogs who disconnect and lose focus once in the ring.
*If your dog shuts down at the entire dog show scene, it is recommended you check out Dr. Amy Cook's Class "Dealing with the Bogeyman" first.
Gold students can choose to focus on either obedience or agility (or a bit of both!).
Check out this short informational video:
Teaching Approach
Lectures are released in batches at the start of each week.
The lectures are broken down by each skill. I have written objectives and then written instructions for each step followed by multiple video examples for each step. The videos are usually between 30sec to 2min long and are taken from training sessions of a variety of dogs and breeds. I do not use voiceover or subtitles in the video. At the end of each lecture is usually a homework summary with the steps quickly summarized in order.
There is a lot of "play" involved in this class and many video examples will show the handler moving around with their dog and letting their dog jump up. This play is not a requirement of the class. Whether due to handler limitations or dog preference, this can be toned down and substituted with whatever type of reward style works for each team. The gold students will provide different examples of how I handle a variety of dog's temperaments.
This class will have a Teacher's Assistant (TA) available in the Facebook study group to help the Bronze and Silver students! Directions for joining will be in the classroom after you register.
Laura Waudby (she/they) trains and competes in obedience, rally, and agility. She was halfway to her OTCH with her UDX corgi, Lance, before his uexpected early retirement. She also has championship titles in USDAA and UKI. By day...(Click here for full bio and to view Laura's upcoming courses)
Most of the material will relate to any dog sport where you enter a ring area to be judged. Differences between the sport of obedience, rally, and agility will be specifically mentioned in each lecture and there will be a small amount of lectures specific just to obedience/rally or just to agility.
O=Obedience, R=Rally, A=agility
Week 1:
Creating a Read to Work Cue- Squishing
Teach a Simple Ring Entrance
Exploding Tree: O/R
Leash Removal:
Adding Distance to Ring Entrance
Using Fun Matches/ Run Throughs
Engagement and Acclimation
Week 2:
Adding a Simple Distraction
Delays in Obedience and Teaching a Nose Bridge- O
Conditioning a Ready Cue- O/R/(A)
Drive For Setups and Startlines
Increasing the Value of Distractions
Week 3:
Combine Squish with Ring Entrance
Adding a Human Distraction
Leash Handoffs
Ring entries: opening a gate- A
Setting Up Inside the Ring: O/R
Startline Routines in Agility: A
Week 4:
Transitions Between Exercises: O
Startline Delays: A
Interaction with the Judge: O/R
Performing With Human Distractions: A
Performing with Human Distractions: O/R
Chaining Ring Skills Together
Week 5:
Trial Days: Acclimating & Warming Up Your Dog
Rewards at a Distance: starting Out
Rewards at a Distance: Building Routines
End of Run Sequence: Leash Behaviors
End of run Routines: Approaching the Reward
Looking at the judge DURING exercises and rally signs- O/R
- At least two ring gates OR two poles with yellow tape (select according to the typical trial in YOUR area – what would a ring entrance normally look like for you?). Other options include lattice fencing, snow fencing, baby gates. Any thing that can create a visual threshold for the dog to enter through. Here is an example made by Kate Cowles:
Here is an expandable baby gate found on Walmart that could also work, especially indoors. Not the most solid material, but should work fine for just using them as ring gates!!
-A working area of approximately 20x20 is ideal. Many exercises can be started in the living room, but you will want room enough to do a few feet of walking before getting to a "ring" and room enough to comfortably play inside.
- A few household items including folding chairs, and a card table (or large cardboard box to make a pretend table).
- A jump or tunnel for those relating this to agility.
- A recording of the "Go" button is also useful for agility.
For obedience/rally students a few cones, rally signs, or obedience jumps could be added later in the process but is not required.
A second person will be suggested for some activities. so to get full benefit out of the class, you may wish to have a helper available to you, for some of the more advanced exercises.
Prerequisites:
A few feet of attention walking or heeling without a visible cookie/toy. This does not need to be a precision based behavior, but the dog should understand how to focus on their handler for short periods of time with mild distractions.
An understanding of personal/social play (play or engagement without the use of food or toys) will be beneficial but it is not a requirement. Dogs who get too frantic with social play or who are uninterested will still have other options!
A dog who will readily take food OR toy rewards.
Dogs do not need to be trialing or even close to being ready to enter a trial! Working on these exercises well before your dog starts trialing is ideal, but it's not too late to start fixing trial issues either!
For those who have access to matches/run throughs please take advantage of them as often as possible! BUT, the focus of them should be very little about the exercises themselves until your dog has mastered the exercises we have done in this class. Especially if your dog has already been trialing and was showing signs of ring stress, you will need to continue working very hard to override that prior learning. Trial like environments need to be seen as stress free as possible for the dog!
Getting "experience" for the pure sake of getting experience is a plan that usually leads to problems. Testing to see where the dog is should be done rarely and the handler should be ready to switch over into training mode the first sign that the dog is struggling or not ready. I will repeat myself in saying that trial-like environments need to be seen as stress free as possible for the dog!
Instead, use your time in the ring to reinforce the three main goals of this class
The ring is a happy place to be.
Keep focus even with distractions
The ring prep routine we are working on training at home is the same in this "new" environment!
That often means breaking things way down and starting at a level you are 100% sure your dog can win at.
For many dogs when you first start going to run throughs it will simply be seeing if the dog can give you good focus and energy outside of the ring before you enter and immediately party. You will stay at this step until you see your dog visibly excited to enter the ring!
At most run throughs you have a set time and as long as you let the workers know, they are ok with you entering and leaving multiple times to do as you wish. Sometimes you will not be able to reward your dog with a food or toy in the actual ring so in that case you can set your reward on the stewards table or just outside the ring and exit as often as you need to in order to reward.
This may feel hard to do. Especially if you are the only one doing it! I promise you that not as many people are staring at you as you think. And many people will see this and think it's a great idea to try too!
Starting Point:
Do ring entrances to a straight party over and over until you see your dog is excited to get into that ring AND focuses on you well for your party.
Then you can add ONE more step to the chain before rewarding, then exiting the ring to tray again. For obedience that will likely look like this:
Ring entrance to setup. Then leash removal. Then transitions. And finally back to a setup with a person in the ring. And so forth and so forth.
For agility that might look like ring entrance- leash removal-move to setup spot- (practice delay in the ring? practice leash runner? 1 jump?)
Remember to leave the ring, if possible, between each new rep so that you can work the entrance piece again!!
Having the "rule" of a reward ending that rep is another great way to help us slow down and not add in too many pieces before the dog is ready! If we know that the beginning is really tough for the dog, we will find ways to break it down and repeat it vs powering through and trying to get to the next piece!
Do not rush the process and jump to the next step if your dog is showing signs of either loss of attitude or loss of focus!
At some point you will want to "test" your dog and see what they can handle on that very first rep at a new fun mach. Great! But be prepared to abort at any point in the sequence to reward your dog for doing extra well or to support them if they start to flounder. Again testing should be done sparingly.
Once you've gone through the process and have a dog who can enter the ring happily, stays focused with the leash removal, and sets up nicely even with people in the ring, then you can start slowly adding actual work to the process. More than likely this won't be done in your first fun match or even your 2nd or 3rd if your dog has trialed previously. It takes time to build their new routine.
But when you see that your dog is ready, go ahead and add in that tiny bit of work. For obedience and rally it will likely be heeling, but it doesn't have to be! If your dog loves their perch, you can setup and pivot on the perch! Or bring their dumbbell and do a retrieve!
For agility, do a single tunnel or a few jumps before rewarding.
Over time you will start to add helpers to the work as well. Have your judge follow you on the heeling. Or having a ring steward sitting in a chair by the jumps, a judge standing near the weaves, etc. If your dog seems unsure, abort and either add more distance from your distraction or go back to simpler behaviors. !
For many dogs, you will want to keep up these games for your dog's entire trialing career. Setting up in the ring should always lead to the possibility of a game or the value you have created will start to slide.
And remember that your squish is a trained behavior. Your dog will stop exploding out of it with focus and enthusiasm if you stop practicing it!
Example Videos
The example videos below will show dogs at different stages and more advanced than we've discussed so far at week 1!! Please don't jump ahead to adding "more" than you've practiced. It's super important that the dog knows what to expect and has rehearsed that over and over again before doing it in a different environment!!
If you jump past what you've trained, you risk reinforcing the idea that the routine you're developing at home is very different from what will happen in a trial. It strengthens the belief that trials are different!
Here is Grace's very first run through. She doesn't quite do the ring entrance to party concept (she hadn't yet taken my ring confidence class!), but I do coach her on working just entering the ring, setting up and giving cookies, and then cuing to leave again! You can see her focus isn't 100% but it gets better with each ring entrance until one towards the end where I have her owner reset!
On her 2nd time slot that evening, her owner again starts with enter the ring-feed- and then leave. They do this several times before I start filming at a point where she wants to try going to the next sign. You can see the huge increase in focus here!
Note: Her owner fed her at this 1st sign and didn't leave the ring but proceeded to the next sign. I recommend having the reward be the end of that rep and at minimum feed with a cookie toss and mini party before setting back up, OR leave the ring to get it all in flow!!
While technically Grace's progression isn't quite what I would do, (I would add more play, and possibly some "transition" practice even on a rally setup), it was still a great first run through and set up the dog for success!! This team wasn't yet introduced to a lot of the concepts we'll be talking about in this class, and it was a great way to structure them to have a positive experience.
Here is an example of Ginny's first agility runthrough! I work on removing the collar once she looks at me, moving to the first jump, and I do add a few agility obstacles. The rewards are off my body and I add in leash on to exit the ring to reward before coming back in to try again. You can see that this is right at the maximum difficulty level I'm comfortable with as she had brief moments of disconnect
And now an example of Ginny's first run through for rally/obedience! This did not go as well as I planned. I thought she would be ready for enter-leash-pause-reward, and then slowly adding in some work on subsequent reps. She struggles with the activity and then really struggled with a dog who was stress barking/whining. I do a lot of cookie scatters and some movement breaks. On the positive side, you can tell we've practice ring entrances aton as she was able to do that even when stressed. What she was not able to do was leash removal! This might be because it needs more practice to be able to done under pressure, or it might be that stationary work is just harder for her to do when stressed vs movement based work (that's good to know about your dog!!) This is her entire first turn.
Loot's first run through was a bit different. He had great focus on me and I pushed a bit more on precision at the start. I also work with the toy off my body. He can't quite do everything and I feel I was a bit greedy. But overall a successful experience on entering the ring, leash removal, and adding a tiny bit of work before the reward at a distance:
Here is Ginny practicing an agility routine at class. Not officially a run-through, but it mimic what I'd do at one!
And another example of Ginny at obedience open ring time. No helpers were available, so I started with some easy ring entrances to a reward as she had never been to this location before. The first rep goes great, so I add a set up and leash removal to rep #2. Then rep #3 I continue to progress by adding in a tiny bit of heeling and transitions to set up in different places. Rep#4 I decide to add in more work and bring her dumbbell. I still skip the formality of the full exercise, and practice transitioning to a new setup and then reward. You can see how my work is super super short in all of these!
And another obedience video of Loot at an obedience "party". This time I have access to helpers! I push Loot a bit on this as he had a lot of trial prep experience already (not trialing!) and it's the people pressure I want to work on:
Overview
This class has just begun so we haven't gotten to most of the steps mentioned yet. But anytime you have the chance to go to a run through take advantage of it! Stick to the steps your dog knows or just plain ring=party.
With agility, remember the concepts are the same! How will you enter the ring, remove the leash, setup? And gradually adding more pieces that we'll get to in the lectures with a delay at the start line, a helper coming to grab your leash and getting too close to you, etc!
If at all possible, leave the ring between each new rep so that you can work the entrance piece again!!
If you can't do that, reward and move back towards the entrance area after each party.
Having the "rule" of a reward ending that rep is another great way to help us slow down and not add in too many pieces before the dog is ready! If we know that the beginning is really tough for the dog, we will find ways to break it down and repeat it vs powering through and trying to get to the next piece!
A sampling of what prior students have said about this course...
This is The. Best. Fenzi course I have ever done (sincere apologies to the other instructors!). The class content was exactly what we needed after my girl earlier in the year had a huge scare at a show and froze in the ring (in the middle of doing our heel work routine) when she saw the dog that had attacked her, arrive at the show. This course helped us more than I can say, and I think we are well on our way to having the happy, confident dog again who has won obedience classes in the past. I'm battling to find enough superlatives - all I can say is THANK YOU LAURA for making a huge difference. The course content was perfect; loved the way it was delivered; loved the comments in the forums - simply loved it, full stop. This course IMHO should be compulsory for anyone intending to compete.
There is still hope for us to get that last CDX leg! I just need to keep it fun for both of us! We will keep practicing and applying what we've learned in our training sessions. I think Mack's favorite thing we learned was "squishing!" Thank you Laura you did a great job! Looking forward to another online class! Robyn M. & Mack
My dog is very stressed by the pressure of the judge and ring stewards. I have had incidents of him bolting and running around barking at the judge. After completing the Ring Confidence Course, I finally feel I have some tools to work with to help him deal with his stress. It's such a wonderful feeling to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I have pretty much stopped training skills with him for now and started working with the elements Laura taught in the course. We still have a long way to go but I was able to use some of the things I learned in this course at a trail this weekend and we got our first leg in Open B! Best of all, I feel the stress slipping away in my training and my dog and I are having fun.
Laura was able to extrapolate the course content to my needs in areas of competition other than obedience (as well as obedience), and at least one other member wrote that the course content carried over to other areas. That made the course all the more helpful. It was challenging to keep up with the class but the library ensures I can go back to the material and move at my own pace. If anything I learned about tailoring what do to my dogs' needs.
I'd recommend this course to anyone who is struggling with their confidence in the ring. The exercises and video clips are pitched just right and make so much sense. You feel the instructor has genuinely dealt with these issues herself which is a huge help. You will be inspired! Clare W
This class isn't just about the dog's ring confidence. It's very much about the human side of this team too (I'm speaking about myself of course), and Laura has great empathy for both. Her critiques are not only detailed, but they also reflect the thought and care she puts into her feedback to suit that specific team
Laura was great! She was always encouraging and supportive but at the same time able to provide constructive criticism. Loved her calm, practical attitude and her willingness to talk about some of the struggles she has with her own dogs.
Thank you so much, Laura for a fantastic class! I learned a lot, even though I only took the class at bronze. Going forward, I will definitely be able to make good use of all the information supplied in this class. Already we are squishing, practicing ring entrances, implementing exploding tree and drives to set up. As our heeling improves we will work through the rest. I am so happy to have this class in my library now, as I will be referring back to the materials often.
Thanks-- very helpful! This class along with Sarah Stremel's made possible (even though I haven't quite finished the lectures yet) a perfect (100) performance in Rally Advanced in a match 2 weeks ago-- we'll see what happens in the only show I'll be able to go to this summer-- but it gave me and my dog what we needed to get going in the ring with focus and joy-- the rest has been in place, but if you can't get in there ready to go, that doesn't help much-- so again, thanks!
Registration
Next session starts: August 1, 2025Registration starts: July 22, 2025Registration ends: August 15, 2025
Instructor: Laura Waudby
