Fenzi Dog Sports Academy - NW325: Purposeful Drills for Progressing Skills

Course Details

You’ve probably heard this before … that training should be done with purpose and not just going through the motions. There is power in purposeful training! When we have purpose, we are energized, invested and focused! If we just go through the motions, we miss a lot of the benefits of a training session.

After the success of my Motivating Drills for Maintaining Skills course, I’m building on this series of ‘Drills and Skills’ to advance our training with purposeful search setups.

It’s time to up the challenge and explore creative ways to set hides and set up our search areas.

Details will be provided for each drill - purpose (why), how to set up, what to expect and some boundaries/rules for each search! Setups will range from straight forward to more challenging! The intent of the drills will be to expose teams to new and different setups so that our dogs learn to work through different scent puzzles and challenges.

Teaching Approach

This class offers written lectures, no verbal lectures, and videos of varying lengths. It is rare that relevant speaking takes place within a video; they are designed to be watched and follow the ideas presented in the lecture. Lecture videos may run from 30s to 3 minutes long, with the average between 1-2 minutes. The lectures are designed to help a student understand the purpose of the drill and how it might vary by dog. Care is taken to keep lectures short. Each week 3 drills are rolled out at the start of the week. This class will work best for students who learn by reading text lectures, watching videos and who like having structured lesson plans.

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.

Instructor: Julie Symons

Julie Symons (she/her) has been involved in dog sports for over 30 years. Starting with her mix, Dreyfus, in flyball, she went on to train and compete in conformation, agility, obedience, herding and tracking with her first Belgian tervuren, Rival. Rival was the first CH OTCH MACH Belgian...(Click here for full bio and to view Julie's upcoming courses)

Syllabus

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*Subject to change

Week 1:

Close hides
Blank drill
Clothing!

Week 2:

Hides in transition
Easy 4 foot elevated hide!
Sorting scent cones

Week 3:

Thinking outside the box (container challenges)
Seeing the start line through a different lens
First search challenge

Week 4:

Triangle of hides
Suspended hides
Working through lingering odor

Week 5:

Hole hides
The unexpected!
Use and effects of barriers

Week 6:

Multiple hides with a twist
Search areas vs. Elements
Handlers choice - what's your favorite drill?

Prerequisites & Supplies

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For teams who are currently trialing and ready to progress to more advanced skills including close hides, inaccessibles, and presenting new and different scenariors to your dog!! Dog must be on at least 2 different odors.

Sample Lecture

Sorting through scent cones:

In areas with any airflow, and especially outside on a windy day, two hides blowing in the same direction can be competing for your dog's sourcing attention! Using vehicles and other "airy" items, it becomes even more challenging. When objects create open air currents, two or more hides will be more challenging for your dog to sort out.

Behaviors you may see when your dog encounters this scent puzzle:

caught between which hide to solve
slows down
goes back to found hides
thinking that solving one solves another
leaving the area (too hard)
misses hides

The more you practice, the better they get at it!

Initial setup

You can start with 2 hides, using 2 different odors placed in the same scent cone direction. Age the hides to enhance the challenge (15 min or more). Here is an example setting hides on the license plates. Up the challenge by placing hides on the passenger side wheels or wheel wells.

- Hides marked by Xs, stars or arrow.

- Wind direction shown with blue arrow.

wind direction on cars crop

Here is a trial video debrief of a similar scenario!

More challenging setup

For a more challenging setup, set 4 hides on each corner of your setup. Offset one in a bit and elevate one upwind so that it will more likely blow over the other hides.

Odors used: Anise, Birch, Clove, Combo

picnic tables 4 hides crop resize

Here is another setup you can use - outside of a farm/hardware store. The 2 hides on the left are both available to Drac after finding the first hide. Also some pooling between the gap when he goes back to the right.

4 TSC trialers

Working indoors

You can also set something like this inside using a fan. Here is a very simple setup using a fan to blow a higher hide across to a lower hide. A benefit we found was that a dog learning to work multiple hides, easily picked up the next scent due to the strong blowing odor.

Testimonials & Reviews

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A sampling of what prior students have said about this course ...

This class was fantastic -- really good descriptions for setups and explanations for why these set ups would help teams progress. This class was exactly what I felt like I was missing with respect to more advanced nosework training and I'm thrilled that it exceeded my (very high!) expectations. Have taken several classes with Julie and she's wonderful - very supportive and constructive in her feedback!

Julie is a fantastic instructor. She has great lesson plans, gives great feedback, and motivates her students. You can take what you learn in this class and apply it to continued work and improvement.

This is the second "Drills" class I've taken with Julie (and my first ever Gold spot) and I couldn't be happier! Before "Drills", we'd built a solid foundation through our work at FDSA, but needed a push to start training higher level skills. Enter Julie Symons! She happily pushed us over the edge, knowing full well that we actually were ready for the challenge. With each of these courses, I can see real progress over the 6 week period. Each drill can be adapted to a team's level, and includes plans to increase the challenge. As I plot our future training sessions, I will return to these exercises often. Our team has been pushed to expand our skill set beyond our comfort zone and the results are amazing! Thank you Julie! That was just what we needed!

Another excellent course from Julie! These drills were pitched just right to challenge the more experienced nosework team. The exercises were very good for teaching concepts to the dog (and handler!) and I felt we made good progress in this course. As always with Julie's drills, there are progressions and regressions to cater for the more/less experienced dog. Thank you Julie for another fantastic course!

I really enjoyed this class. Julie's feedback and way of teaching really suits my style of teaching. I loved how consistent she was at replying to the homework thread. You could just about guarantee getting feedback at certain times of the day. I found this helpful when posting to get the most out of our training and her feedback. Thank you Julie.

Julie has the best teaching style for you to understand the concepts and how to execute them. She is one of your best Nosework instructors for ALL levels of trainers! I keep coming back with my tiny dogs!

Great Class! It got me to think a bit differently about setting up training sessions and motivated me to set up some fun training.

This course definitely helped us focus in on areas that we needed to be challenged by in order to make progress in our training. I feel like nothing is too hard for us-not because we've mastered everything, but because Julie breaks down our search challenges and provides excellent drills for the next level. Now that I have this in our repertoire I know we can tackle and achieve at higher levels. I would take any class Julie offers as she is a phenomenal instructor with strong communication skills. She is rooting for all her teams and provides perfect support to help all ranges of skills. I HIGHLY recommend this to all NW teams!

Registration

Next session starts: June 1, 2025
Registration starts: May 22, 2025
Registration ends: June 15, 2025

Registration opens at 12:00noon Pacific Time.

NW325 Subscriptions

	Gold	Silver	Bronze
Tuition	$ 260.00	$ 130.00	$ 65.00
Enrollment Limits	12	25	Unlimited
Access all course lectures and materials	✔	✔	✔
Access to discussion and homework forums	✔	✔	✔
Read all posted questions and answers	✔	✔	✔
Watch all posted videos	✔	✔	✔
Post general questions to Discussion forum	✔	✔	✖
Submit written assignments	✔	✖	✖
Post dog specific questions	✔	With video only	✖
Post videos	✔	Up to 2	✖
Receive instructor feedback on	Questions All videos	Questions All videos	✖

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