interview with a dog trainer: Jean McCollister

Jean is the person that helped a lot the introduction of  the discdog in Slovenia.
She's a certified Level II Judge under the USDDN rules for judging freestyle and Super Pro Toss &Fetch.
A bit of information just to make you understand a little more about Jean:
At the 2008 European Championship, Jean qualified for the USDDN Finals with Lyra in freestyle and with Oli in Super Pro Toss & Fetch.
At the USDDN National Finals, Georgia, USA, October 2008 Jean and Lyra were the highest placed European team in freestyle, finishing 19th of 37 .
So , Jean is a person who has a lot to say about this topic.
You just need to read the interview .Good reading!


first of all some warm up questions
Have you ever tried bungee jumping?
No, and I don’t plan to. I used to enjoy rock climbing, though—I prefer climbing up to jumping down.
Last time you have turned on the radio?(Why)
This morning, to listen to classical music while I drank my coffee. Otherwise, I don’t usually listen to the radio much, except in the car.
Last time you cooked? What?
A few days ago. I made cream of spinach soup and raspberry-mascarpone creams for a potluck meal here with some friends after a long walk with the dogs in the local countryside.


OK. Let's forget the warm-up questions, and pass to the interview...
Could you tell our readers a little about yourself
My name is Jean McCollister, and I currently have three dogs: Lyra, a seven-year-old black and white border collie/Australian shepherd mix who moved with us from America to Slovenia in 2004, Olivia (Open Mind’s Foreign Affair), a blue merle ASCA-registered working line Australian shepherd that my daughter got as a puppy in late 2005 from the Open Mind kennel in Germany, and Bamm Bamm, a five-year-old brown and white border collie who was given to us by Sabine Wolff in March of 2009. They are all wonderful companions and sports partners, and my life is much richer for having them. All three enjoy and excel at agility and frisbee. Oli also has a talent for herding, and would probably enjoy IPO as well, if I could afford to support the additional activities. Bamm Bamm is exceptionally well suited for therapy work.
If I didn’t have dogs, I would likely be actively involved in other sports—mountaineering, cross-country skiing, ultimate frisbee, horseback riding, kayaking, mountain biking, etc.—but since I do, I choose activities we can do together that keep us all happy, healthy, fit, and busy.
We live in a small village in southwestern Slovenia (the Karst region), which offers unlimited opportunities for long walks through the countryside, probably my favorite activity of all. I make a living as a translator, language editor, and teacher of English. I’ve also done some nonfiction writing in the past, and I hope to write more essays and a book or two at some point in the future, when I can afford it. I’m originally from the United States but I’ve spent half of my life living in Europe—first Great Britain, then Slovenia, which at the time I arrived (1985) was still part of Yugoslavia.

How did you get started in dog training?
We always had dogs and other animals when I was growing up, and I spent a lot of time playing with them, going for walks with them, and teaching them some basic obedience. I preferred their company to that of most people. In my teens I was more involved in horse training, and it wasn’t until we acquired Lyra, in August 2003, that I started doing dog training in a more serious, systematic, and informed way. She was more demanding than any pet I’d had in the past. We took her and her littermate Nisa to puppy training classes in Lafayette, Indiana, where I was living at the time, and it was there that I was first introduced to clicker training. When we moved back to Slovenia, I took up agility with Lyra since she needed an outlet for her energy and athleticism. Later we took Olivia to puppy classes with Silvia Trkman, then BBH and agility lessons with Polona Bonač…I feel lucky to live in a country that is not only spectacularly beautiful and offers great walking/hiking, but also has top quality dog trainers that I can learn from. For frisbee I had to look outside Slovenia, and got my start in the sport in 2007 mainly with the help and encouragement of Sabine and Marcus Wolff and some Czech players.


Could you introduce the Flipsi club (where it is, members, results, seminars, ...)?
Flipsi was founded in early 2009 by a group of people who were most active in the sport after I introduced it to Slovenia in 2007. The core membership and governing board came primarily from the team of volunteers that had organized the first seminars in Slovenia, including a two-day seminar in April of 2008 with a group of Czech players at Ajdovščina Kennel Club, as well as Slovenia’s first ever dogfrisbee competition in Vipava the next day. The membership has doubled since its founding, and continues to grow. Many people who are not formally members (yet) have nevertheless benefited from the activities of the club (seminars and courses, public shows, competitions, group purchases of equipment at discounted prices, etc.).
The official address is the home of the current president (me), and we have also held some seminars here on my land, but the club itself does not have its own physical premises. Members come from all over Slovenia. We have good relations and partnerships with a number of kennel clubs and dog schools around the country which have hosted our events, in particular Maribor Kennel Club, where we held both our international freestyle competitions, in 2009 and 2010.
As far as results at competitions, our members who are active competitors have generally done quite well, especially considering that the sport is newer in Slovenia than in some other countries in Europe. However, we encourage a fun, friendly approach to the sport, not a competitive one. We are of course very proud of our members who achieve top results at high-level competitions (provided these are not achieved at the expense of canine welfare), and the club has provided generous subsidies to eligible members who wish to compete internationally. At the same time, we have members and other people who have attended our training classes who play purely recreationally, and will likely never go to a competition, or to just an occasional 4fun toss & fetch event. They are just as important to the healthy functioning and future development of the club, and the sport. Our motto is “Keep it fun, keep it safe”: the goal of our seminars is to teach people to play in a fun and safe way with their dogs, regardless of whether they’re playing toss & fetch in their garden, or competing in Open freestyle at a major championship event.
Flipsi offers regular seminars and courses—about a dozen per year—to anyone interested in learning more about the sport. Some people come out of curiosity just to see what it’s all about, others have ambitions of becoming accomplished freestyle performers, which we help them achieve. Still others show a lot of potential in dogfrisbee, but give priority to other canine activities such as agility and SAR, and due to time constraints play recreationally rather than competitively. All are welcome, and there are many ways of being involved even if you’re not an active competitor. The only condition for membership is that you agree to respect club rules, particularly regarding safety, respect for others, and sportsmanship.

Flipsi is a really young club and Slovenia is a really small country. However, Flipsi members have collected a lot of excellent results.
We have. At the 2010 European Championship, for example, our members finished in 1st and 2nd place in the Advanced freestyle category, 5th place in Open freestyle, Slovenia’s highest ranking to date at the EC, and 3rd place in Women’s Quadruped, also the highest ranking in that discipline to date. And we could collect quite a few more good results if we had sponsorship for our team. The club’s funding comes mainly from the volunteer work and time of its most hardworking members; we don’t have an external sponsor to subsidize travel to competitions abroad. We’ve had sponsors for prizes at the competitions we’ve organized—Hero Disc, CaninSport, Canidae, Husse—for which we’re very grateful, but members are more or less on their own as far as financing participation at international competitions. I’ve been assisted personally by Champion Pet Foods, and Flipsi has provided occasional subsidies for the more important competitions to our members who are eligible, and they have done us proud there. But we could achieve more if we had a larger budget.
At the same time, we have unfortunately seen some players go to a competition, do well, and then become unhealthily obsessed with results. We do not encourage that kind of attitude. It’s not good for the dogs and it’s not good for the sport. It’s not about winning. Good sportsmanship, consideration and respect for others, a friendly rather than competitive atmosphere, and above all concern for canine welfare are all important, and not (just) where a team happens to finish in the rankings at a particular competition. Anyway, there’s a rule in dogfrisbee: “the best frisbee dog is the one having the most fun.” :)

The competition abroad with the Flipsi club that you liked most?
To be honest, there haven’t been very many competitions where we have had a strong club presence, because as I’ve said it’s so expensive to compete abroad. So on several occasions in the last year and a half since Flipsi’s founding I have been the sole competitor from Slovenia at a particular competition, including some very high level ones (for example, the USDDN qualifier at Nymburk in June and the UFO Butch Cassidy Cup in Karlsruhe in August). On other occasions when some other members went I had to stay home because I couldn’t afford the travel. I can only afford to go to a few competitions a year, and the ones I select may or may not be the ones that other members prefer, for a variety of reasons.
Of those that I have been able to go to together with other Flipsi members since the club’s founding, I would say the 2010 European Championship in the Netherlands was the best experience. We had excellent results, as noted above, and the atmosphere was friendly and relaxed. Although players there do represent particular countries and/or clubs, pretty much everybody roots for everybody else, regardless of origin. That’s one of the things I like about the sport—the supportive atmosphere for all players, and not just those on your own team. I have frisbee-playing friends from Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic …I enjoy meeting them, watching them, and seeing them do well, even if they aren’t from the same country or club as me.
I do wish that the representation from Slovenia had been greater at the last EC…We had hoped to go with a larger team from Flipsi, but unfortunately several promising players ended up staying home. Because of the distance involved, a couple of people couldn’t afford to make the trip even with club assistance, and one of our best young dogs was having some health problems at the time and had to cancel. Otherwise we would have had competitors in every category except Bonsai.

Before Flipsi you have participated in many important competitions. The most beautiful and the worst race ever made?
In terms of my own results, the best was at the 2008 European Championship, where I finished in 6th place in Open freestyle (of 44 competitors), after barely a year in the sport, and qualified for the USDDN Finals in the USA. Lyra’s second freestyle round there was probably among our best ever. We were lucky—she felt good, I felt good, she was catching well that day (which is not always the case), it was a little drizzly but not windy, and the canine judge liked her—he gave her the second highest canine score in her class.
The worst was probably at Abony in Hungary in early 2008. It was an indoor competition, on carpet, and Lyra was hysterical, leaping wildly, skidding all over the place, and not catching anything. I also had a very bad day—I was exhausted, stressed, and my throwing was way off. But in terms of the results of my students, it was fantastic. Three people from Slovenia besides myself and my daughter participated. They had been to one of my earliest seminars in the fall of 2007, and we had also trained together at my place before the competition. It was the first competition for all of them, and in freestyle they finished in 2nd (Manca Mikec and Bode), 3rd (Maja Kokalj and Bri), and 4th (Eva Pirc and Sky) places, in a class of 22, whereas I was in the middle with Lyra. So as a competitor I had a pretty bad day, but as an instructor it was one of my best moments.


In percentage, what would be your contribution / merit for the Flipsi club results? (If you ask me, I would say 70%)
Somewhere between 1% and 50%. ;-) I help people get started in the sport, and I have coached players at length for no pay, taught them a variety of throws and freestyle moves, accompanied them to competitions, and helped them achieve truly outstanding results. In a couple of those cases, however, I received very little thanks or credit from the individuals in question, so I guess they would say my role was minimal—they did it all themselves.
I think I prefer to answer the question of who is responsible for my own involvement and accomplishments in the sport. Anyone who learned from me also has those individuals to thank. Most of my skills I learned initially from Sabine and Marcus Wolff. They are world-class players and dog trainers, very good instructors, and have done a lot to develop the sport in the CEE region—Poland, Czech Republic, and (through their influence on me) Slovenia. I’ve also been to seminars with former world champion Melissa Heeter, where I learned a lot about both judging and playing. Not only that, she showed me and all of the international players tremendous hospitality at the USDDN Finals, helping with transportation, accommodation, and meals as well as handling the organization of the event itself.
Players from the Czech Republic have had a major influence on Slovenian players, since they have been here twice to give seminars, and we’ve gone to a lot of their competitions. They are too numerous to mention by name (nine came in 2008 and five in 2010), but the one who stands out most would be Jakub Stybr, who led the first seminar here and who has played a central role in developing the sport in that country. Jakub has also been supportive to me personally and to our club in myriad ways, including through the supply of discs at rock bottom prices before they were available for purchase in Slovenia.
And of course the learning is an ongoing process, so the list of people to credit is really endless…the useful notes, comments and videos posted by Ron Watson at Pawsitive Vybe, anyone we’ve looked to for ideas and inspiration on YouTube, watching and talking to others at competitions… Silvia Trkman is very influential in Slovenia (and internationally) for general principles regarding dog training, especially puppies… I also learn a lot from my students and their dogs, because each one presents me with a new puzzle, a particular problem or behavior or style of playing that requires me to think, analyze, and respond appropriately.
And probably the person most responsible for bringing dogfrisbee to Slovenia is not even involved in the sport. That would be the woman who happened to mention a hotel and training center in Germany (Hundesporthotel Wolf in Oberammergau) on a Slovenian forum, which is how I learned about and enrolled in my first discdog seminar…who knows, if it hadn’t been for that chance mention perhaps even today we wouldn’t have dogfrisbee in Slovenia. And the forums themselves-- http://www.agility-slo.net/, http://www.pesjanar.si/forum/ -- have played a critical role in the development of the sport here: much of the communication among the early enthusiasts took place on these sites.
In short, it’s been a collective effort, it’s hard to single out particular individuals or organizations, there’s always the risk of overlooking someone important.
Last but not least, I have my dogs to thank. It was their interest and athleticism that led me to take up and train seriously in the sport, because they love it and excel at it. I learn a lot every time I play with them, especially working with three, because each is unique, with his/her own style of play and learning, each requiring a different approach from me.

About the techniques...Throwing is the most important part of discdog. Can a bad throw can lead to a nasty dog fall? Do you have some examples of typical injuries?
Good throwing is very important, and we really stress that at our seminars. At least half the time is spent practicing throwing without the dog. So discdog is not the right sport for you if you don’t enjoy throwing for its own sake and don’t like doing anything that doesn’t involve direct interaction with your dog. For every time that I throw a disc to a dog, I throw probably 10 times without one. And I have three dogs: two are resting while I play with one. If I only had one dog, the ratio would be more like 30:1. Or to put it another way—I might play 2-3 minutes with a dog, then spend 10-15 minutes practicing throws and moves without one. You try to perfect the throwing BEFORE you try something new with your dog.
And yes, a bad throw can lead to a fall, a crash, or an ugly contortion and bad landing. If this happens during a freestyle performance, it can result in a penalty from the judges or even a disqualification. I would say the most common crashes occur because people are throwing too late and too low for vaults. The dog will literally dive rather than leap for the disc, and crash head-first or even somersault on landing. I’ve seen it happen a couple of times while judging. It looked terrible, and the players were penalized, but fortunately the dogs were unhurt.
Sometimes people see a photo of a dog achieving great height in a flip or vault, and express concern that this is bad for the dog. I understand this concern, and extreme height or even doing vaults at all is not necessary for a winning performance. However, I think that if the disc is well-placed and well-timed, the dog is a natural high leaper with good landings, and such moves are not repeated too often, there is little cause for concern. Of course you shouldn’t overdo it, but I think the greater danger comes from low, late, or wild throws, or trying to do something without setting up the dog properly first, giving them a clear target and command for what you want.
Regarding injuries, my impression is that they’re not very common. I know quite a few older dogs who have been playing frisbee for years, with no negative effects. They’re still going strong, even at age 9, 10, 11…As far as action injuries go (i.e. ones that occur while training disc), you might see a torn toenail, a broken toe, an occasional and temporary limp due to impact against the player or an awkward landing, and, a common but not serious one, the dog biting his tongue while catching discs. If your dog does sustain any sort of injury, whether playing frisbee or anything else, you should allow them sufficient time to heal and then regain their fitness level before you start training again, let alone competing. Some people get impatient because of some important competition or something, but the health and welfare of the dog should always be more important than the player’s personal ambition.
The risk of injury can be minimized if you follow basic safety guidelines: in addition to setting your dog up properly and striving for good, safe throws, you should play on a suitable surface (level, well-cushioned terrain, with no holes, ruts, or rocks), play in a sufficiently large open space, play with just one dog at a time, and above all STOP play BEFORE the dog gets too tired. Your dog should be in good condition—reasonably fit and not overweight—when you take up the sport. But even a very fit dog should not play for too long at a stretch. High-drive dogs will play until they drop; it’s the handler’s responsibility to end the session well before they reach the point of exhaustion. A tired dog is more injury-prone.
It’s also important not to repeat the same move over and over in a training session, like doing lots and lots of flips, especially in the same direction. There’s a strong temptation to do that, especially among beginners, because they’re trying hard to perfect a particular skill. They want to keep practicing it until they get it right. That’s fine if you’re throwing on your own, but once your dog is involved, you need to keep your sessions varied and short.
As with any activity, you can’t completely eliminate the risk of injury, but in my view the health benefits of training and competing in a sport (or multiple sports) far outweigh the risks, for both humans and dogs.

At what age should a dog begin training with you?
Any age, but there is no hurry. It’s fine to introduce your puppy to a frisbee as one among many toys but in my opinion there is absolutely nothing to be gained from working intensively and exclusively on disc-specific skills with a very young dog. There is so much more that is more important to the puppy’s development that you could, and should, be doing during this time. Play, socialization, off leash running, recall, attention, basic obedience, tricks, working on your relationship and communication…I take puppies at seminars and courses, they are welcome to attend, in large part because it’s never too early for the handler to work on their throwing skills—in fact, the sooner the better. But when it’s the puppy’s turn, we keep the sessions very short and very low-key. Some tugging with a cloth frisbee, chasing some rollers, working on retrieval and assessing/building prey drive—which can of course also be done with any toy, it doesn’t have to be a frisbee—and flatwork, i.e. cuing the dog so as to place him in a particular position with respect to your body. For somewhat older puppies that have the aptitude for it and with handlers that can reliably throw well we might do a few low throws at short to medium distances, maybe even a low over the body move. But to be doing flips, high overs, vaults, throws that require the dog to sprint to the disc and catch it in the air, with a 4-5 month-old puppy is just crazy, in my opinion. And especially if you’re using a hard plastic disc at a time when they’re teething and their gums are sore.


How much time you devote to training during the week?
I assume you mean frisbee training? It varies greatly. I don’t usually do much at all in winter. If we happen to get a nice day weatherwise, maybe a couple of sets of 40-50 meter toss & fetch throws, for fun and exercise, sometimes a bit of freestyle to brush up our skills and work particular groups of muscles that they don’t use doing other things. In contrast, during the week or two before a competition, I might train every day, polishing, practicing, and memorizing a freestyle routine. With some dogs you have to be careful, they get stale and lose interest if you play too often, but my dogs can’t seem to get enough, they’re frisbee maniacs, so I can train daily with them if and when it’s warranted. But I strongly advise against that for some dogs, it takes all the fun out of it for them and they’re just not motivated anymore. Better to do frisbee one day, agility the next, something completely different on the third… In any case, however frequently or infrequently I train, the sessions only last for a few minutes with each dog, though I might do a couple of sessions a day if indicated, with rests and other activities in between. I might spend an hour or more on throwing without the dogs, if I’m working on something new, or trying to improve my distance and accuracy. On average, I’d say I get the frisbees out to play with maybe two to three times a week. But I cross-train: we do agility as well, and of course take lots of long walks all year round, and go swimming in the summer. On our walks around here I’ll usually take a couple of toys (ball, tug, wubba), and play with the dogs whenever we come to an open field. They get in a lot of free running. We also practice down stays, heeling, recall…it’s important to keep those skills sharp. I probably should devote more time to teaching tricks, many of which could be incorporated into our freestyle routines, but I confess I’m a bit lazy that way.


Will we ever see a big discdog event in Slovenia?
Of course. In the coming year, as it happens. Flipsi and Maribor Kennel Club are hosting a qualifier for the Ashley Whippet Invitational, on July 3rd. The top five teams will be invited to compete at the AWI World Championship in October in the USA. We’re expecting teams from all over Europe as well as Slovenia. In 2012, perhaps we’ll hold a USDDN qualifier. And in 2013, who knows, maybe even the European Championship.
And while I don’t think it will necessarily be in Slovenia, I do hope that sometime in the next few years one of the World Championships will be in Europe instead of always in the United States. European teams are looking really good, some of them are right up there with the best of the Americans and the Japanese. But it’s not easy for us to make the trip across the ocean. There’s the cost involved, and there are also some dogs who simply wouldn’t handle the trip well. I qualified with two of my dogs in 2010, but even if I had had the money I wouldn’t subject either one to a transatlantic flight—it’s just too stressful. Lyra handled it okay in 2008, but I wouldn’t do it again, she’s had some health issues in the meantime (not related to frisbee) and she’s not as resilient as she was. Oli is fit, healthy, my youngest and probably my most talented frisbee dog (she was the one who finished 5th at the EC in 2010), but she would totally freak out stuck in a crate for 12 hours in a noisy, unfamiliar environment in the cargo hold of a plane, handled by strangers at either end. I play for my dogs’ enjoyment. And they can play just as happily here at home. In fact, more so.

What new projects are you working on?
For the frisbee club? A competition series (4 to 5 events, including the AWI qualifier, in the coming season at various locations around the country), developing some ideas for a Flipsi freestyle team to perform in public, planning seminars and courses. And adding some new things to my own freestyle routines with my three for the coming season.
In other dog stuff, I’m about to undergo training with the non-profit organization Tačke pomagačke so that Bamm Bamm and I can volunteer as a therapy team in various settings (hospitals, nursing homes, day centers for the disabled and so on). Oli is eligible to compete in agility at the highest level, and I hope to train more seriously with her in the coming months and go to some competitions. In fact with all three: Bamm Bamm in A1, Lyra in A2, and Oli in A3.
And in non-dog stuff, I’m developing my translation business, creating a personal and professional web page, fixing up my house and garden. Nothing so new about the last project, but it’s has been on hold for the past few years, since so much of my time and money has been devoted to the sport of frisbee. I guess it’s about time to take care of some other things now.
What are your expectations for the Flipsi team in 2011?
I think that if we can find sponsorship to help members travel to competitions abroad, we will see some very impressive results, including from some newer teams that at present are inexperienced and relatively unknown but show great promise. I expect several teams from Flipsi will be good enough to qualify for international championships (USDDN, AWI, UFO, Skyhoundz), if only we can find the funding to help get them there.

Where do you see yourself in 2014?
Ask me in three years. ;-) Probably I’ll be doing some completely new activity that I don’t even know about myself yet. If you had asked me in early 2007 where I saw myself in 2010, I doubt I would have mentioned dogfrisbee. And yet it dominated my life for the next three years.
Maybe I’ll have horses then as well as dogs. Maybe I’ll be a grandmother. Maybe I’ll have written a book. But whatever else I may be doing, assuming I still have a working pair of legs, an alert mind, and an internet connection, I expect I’ll also be doing the same things I’ve been doing for years: going for long walks locally, and staying informed about and involved in what’s happening globally. That’s pretty much characterized the whole of my life, I don’t expect it to change.
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview! Do you have anything else you would like to add?
Just a word of thanks, again, to all the people who helped me and Lyra go to the USDDN Finals in the USA in 2008. It was Slovenia’s first representation at a dogfrisbee world championship, and a thrilling experience for us. The support and generosity we were shown, both practical and moral, was simply overwhelming, and it’s due largely to that experience that I’ve been motivated to work as hard as I have for the club and the sport here in Slovenia.


Please , visits these links
www.flipsi.net
flipsi-dogfrisbee.blogspot.com


all photo ara a courtesy of Jean McCollister
Pavel Humpolec fotohacko.cz
Maja Rokavec www.photo.majchy.com


video
Jean McCollister @ Lyra - Dogfrisbee EC 2008
by DiscDogCZ