Organization
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As
remembered by Craig Peters....
No one
remembers exactly how the Club was formed but, after a few drinks, the
story came out as something like this....
Some time in 1992 Tina Haines, Rob Busch, and Daphne Meisner(now
Tryhuk) decided to form a new team. They had been competing in Flyball
in Winnipeg with Cando Agility Team for awhile but decided they wanted
to go out on their own. Kevin Hughes and Allsorts Dogsports offered to
practice with them to get started. Kevin had also run with Cando until
he formed the Allsorts Club and, of course, they competed against one
another. So, as the story goes, the Flyball Fanatics were a done deal.
The first problem to arise was that there were only 3 of them which
makes it a little difficult to practice if you don’t have balls, a box,
a boxloader etc. I still don’t know where the box or the balls came
from but everything else seem to come from Daphne’s family. Did I
mention that 3 people only means 4 dogs as well? (I’ll come back to
that). Daphne enlisted volunteers from her family – her sister, Pam
Sheills, became the boxloader with help from her boyfriend (now
husband) Bud. Her younger brother, Trevor Sheills, was really keen to
join in but he didn’t have a dog. As luck would have it, Tina’s
boyfriend (now husband) Graham Haines was not running his dog anymore
so Trevor was in. At the same time Rob was bringing his wife’s dog
Misty out to play just in case an extra dog was required.
So life was great! They entered their first tournament in the Fall of
1992 and won the second division in a run off. It was probably around
this point that they realized that they didn’t really have enough dogs
to keep the team going. Blazer, Scout and Merc were doing OK but Misty
and Dixson were getting on in years and weren’t going to last forever.
Right around this time Daphne bought a Border Collie pup and had it
flown in from England.
Early in 1993 is where I (Craig)come into the story. Kevin and Nikki,
from Allsorts, had been giving Flyball classes and told the Fanatics
about us. I don’t think they mentioned that this was the second set of
beginner classes we had our Border Collie rescue, Bull, in but I also
don’t think it would have mattered. The Fanatics didn’t run any kind of
training classes for quite a few years so most of us were rejects from
the classes that Kevin and Nikki had. I should mention that it was my
wife Janet who trained and raced Bull. I was there as often as I could
be but it obviously wasn’t enough because it was well after our first
tournament that I had people still calling me Curt.
In 1994 we had 5 new dogs join the team. Ramie and Jamie (brothers)
joined with their mixed breed littermates BJ and Shadow, Larry with
Border Collie Jasmine, Holly with German Shepherd Cheyenne and Amy with
Border Collie Freckles. This same year Blue had a litter of pups and,
in 1995 Wager, Winder, Sara, and Rewind all joined the team (Winder was
mine). This was a monumental year for the Club because we also picked
up our first height dog – Cassidy the Sheltie. There was much
rejoicing!!!
1996 was a turnaround year for us. We ran our first set of beginner
classes and had 7 new dogs join the Club. Some were from Kevin and
Nikki and some were trained on our own. They were: Diane with her
Sheltie Allie (also known as "Yappy" dog), Pat with Sheltie Tarr, Lorna
with Aussie Machz, Hettie with her 2 Cockers Dudley and Ashley, Holly
with her second German Shepherd Jackson and Sharon with her Aussie
Abby. The rest, as they say, is history.
884 Bradford
Street
Winnipeg, Manitoba
CANADA