Canine Sports is the home to the only Cambridgeshire Flyball teams, known as the Colts, the Cadets, the Canons and the Catapults. We are fairly new to the sport, but are already bitten by the bug, so to speak.
We train the competitive dogs fortnightly on a Tuesday evening, starting at 19:30, and we regularly run beginners sessions. If you are interested in joining us, either to start from scratch, or you have a dog that is already able to do flyball, please contact us to discuss your training requirements.

Cambridgeshire Colts

The Colts ran in their first ever starters competition on Saturday 27th October 2007 ... and WON THEIR DIVISION by winning all five of their races - talk about doing it in style!

We set out for the day at about 6am, with the hope of not embarrassing ourselves too much, but the competitive edge took over after winning our first two races 3-0. One problem with competiting in a new sport for the first team, is the lack of knowledge about rules 'n' regs. I think we did very well all things considered, but one problem that did arise, was the use of whistles during the racing. We hadn't even envisged this, and we had a VERY whistle-shy dog in our team, so were very worried about how he was going to take to the whole setup. To say he was a little freaked, is putting it lightly, but he still raced his heart out in 14 or our 18 legs. The other worry that I had, was how Max would take to the environment - the other five dogs are competitive agility dogs and regularly attend competitions with lots of noise and other dogs, but Max just took it all in his stride.

Over lunch the team's tactics changed from aiming at 4th or 5th place, to realistically being able to win the division. However, our remaining three opponent teams were all also doing very well, having notched up similar fastest times to our own. Our third race gave us our first lost leg, but we still went on to win the race 3-1. The fourth race was another 3-0 win and the adrenalin really started to kick in. Unfortunately, even with 4 wins under our belts, the results of the division still lay on our last race. By this time, the dogs were starting to tire, and poor Flynn just couldn't carry on - he had raced in nearly every leg up until that point, which, as a 10 year old was impressive. Pulling both Flynn and Max (due to tiring as well) out in the last race was scary since they are two of our best and most reliable dogs, and everything hung on this race. We went into the final leg 2-2, with a team of dogs that had never run together, since Merlyn and Gypsy are handled by the same person, they rarely run in the same team. Luckily for us, Sam Brown stepped in to run Merlyn, leaving Ellen free to run Gypsy. Unfortunately we lost the final leg, to loose the race .... BUT ... we lost due to the fact that Merlyn stopped halfway home to pick up a ball that had bounced into our lane from the audience, and once the judge had been informed, she requested a re-run - talk about jangling nerves. As it was a re-run, the same four dogs had to be used, and they went out to do ann accurate run in a time of 24.63 (no where near our fastest of the day!) and win the re-run leg. Our apologies go out to our opponents that had won the race, only to have it taken away from them at the last minute.

So, for their first ever outing, the Colts managed to win their division and put in a fastest time of 21.69, of which they are all immensely proud (as is their instructor!). Congrats to Jake, Flynn, Max, Mika, Merlyn, Gypsy, along with their handlers Helen, Stacy, Pam, Estelle, Ellen and not forgetting the most important members of the team, our box loader, Matt and team Captain, Jan - you are all the biggest stars!

Many thanks must go out to our support crew too, without whom I wouldn't have all these fantastic videos to remember the day by, so thanks to Pam and Max's family - we will be booking you all for our next competition!