Traffic Flow in the Ring

August 5th, 2007 | Flyball, Handler Training

Traffic flow is probably the most important aspect of Flyball in the ring. Good traffic flow will go a long way toward keeping you and your dog injury free and it is something that must be practiced. Without good traffic flow, dogs will be running into you or each other.

All dogs must enter the lane from the right side and exit on the left. Unless your dog is running start, you should line your dog up just off to the right side of the lane close to your mark and facing the box. This allows your teammates free access to the lane until it is your turn. When it is your turn, move into the lane and position yourself at your starting mark. After you release your dog you can run up the lane toward the start line and yell to your dog as they hit the box, but then move to the opposite side of the lane when running back. This will insure that you don’t run into a teammate coming up the lane after you. Make sure that you continue to run far enough back off the lane to collect your dog in the run-back away from the other dogs.

When running faster dogs, you may not be able to run up in the lane after you release your dog. You may just have time enough to get up and exit the lane to your right and run back into the run-back area. Between the time the next dog is released and when the proceeding dog hits the box, you only have about 2 seconds, which is not enough time to get out of the lane. If you are running in the lane, you could unintentionally block the view of your teammate and cause a late release.

Practice the traffic flow pattern during practice both with and without a dog to make sure that your team is moving cohesively. If you are aware of where everybody is supposed to be, you won’t have a traffic jam during that important race!

Training Manual Information

This is a series of articles that I will post about Flyball training. I would ask that you please try to keep your comments to the specific topic of the each article, for there will be many others. You can see a high level outline of the topic to be covered in future post by viewing the Training Manual. Keeping the comments specific to each article will help future readers.

Please keep in mind that there are numerous methods in use but these are the ones that I use and they are some that work for me. If you have others that you would like to share, please post your comments.