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Disc Dogging is Too Complicated

The problem with the world of canine disc competitions is that it’s far too complicated.

A friend of mine who is well known within the frisbee community and is the Overall Committee Chair and as such is one of the WFDF Board of Directors. He was attending a board meeting a few months ago and sent me an email asking me if they should bring K9 disc under the WFDF structure. I wrote back and told him that would be tough because right now there are roughly 9 canine disc organizations: Skyhoundz, AWI, UFO, USDDN, UpDog, CDDA, FDDO, Quadruped and PIDC.

This is way too many. In disc golf, we have the PDGA. In ultimate we have a national organization per country (USA Ultimate, Ultimate Canada etc..) but they all fall under WFDF. In Freestyle we have the FPA. In Guts we have the GPA.

If I wanted to know who the top freestyler or DDC player or disc golfer was in the world, it’s easy. I can just go to the appropriate page of rankings and find out. Each disc organization does it a little bit differently but the point is that it’s all under one umbrella.

Who is the top canine disc freestyle team in the world? Depends if you’re talking about within Skyhoundz, USDDN, AWI, etc…

It’s too much. There are too many options. People just want to throw to their dogs. But it’s much more complicated than that.

When I created AgelessGame.com, I did so with the intention to have it be the website to go for a list of all the various disc sports and frisbee games. Canine disc is one of the main disc sports; however, how do I list it? Do I have to list all 10 organizations? How do I easily have a page where new players can get into the sport of canine disc? Right now, with the current state of canine disc, the answer is that there is no easy way. Unless I play favourites, because if I were to list every organization that would make the page look like a dog’s breakfast (no offense to dogs).

There are some people who have talked about having a centralized ranking system for canine disc freestyle teams and I am on board with that and I have even offered my hat to help out with this as I believe it’s in the right direction. If we can have a Canine Freestyle Players Association for example, imagine how much sense that would make. When you train for freestyle, you’d be able to play in any one of the organizations without much tweaking required to what you are doing. Right now, how to you choose which competition to go to? It’s simple for most – you go to the one(s) that are closest to where you live. But some of the organizations give points at each competition so in order to qualify for the final event, you need to attend multiple qualifiers and do well at each one.

You hear it time and time again – that we do it because of our dogs. But the events are run inconsistently, lots of organizations lose money when they run events, there are so many rules that don’t make sense and in the end it just ends up being frustrating for a lot of disc doggers and they choose to play at home in the park rather than traveling to competitions.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It just means that the organizations will have to be willing to work together. To put aside their personal differences for the betterment of the sport.

Until that happens though, I applaud the local disc dog clubs and competitors who are doing it for the love of their dog.