UpAndOver is the club Mark and I formed when we lived in Andover. We had previously been travelling miles to get training and decided it would be easier to be closer to home.
Easier may not have been the word. We never regretted it for a moment. Our aim was to train to be able to afford a decent venue with good up to date equipment and people to a standard to compete with. Well we certainly did that and a lot more. The people we trained helped us to be better and together we all achieved agility success and developed great friendships too.
All that is another story - or probably book :)
Today I am thinking of the strangeness of having had to plan out the afternoon for "my" groups.
Week on week I had plans and knew exactly what we all needed working on. In the later part I was lucky enough to have a great team of instructors to help but mostly in my mind I knew what was needing work on.
It is important to me as an instructor to ensure I help everyone get what they need from my training, and everyone is different. In a group you get to know how different and it is easy to cater for all.
Suddenly I am expecting myself to deliver this same specialised service to a group that I mostly know with a few additions, that will have progressed and developed past what I remember. No pressure :)
Usually we plan a workshop around a subject and people interested in that will come to the workshop. We write a brief of what will be covered and check we cover all we advertised.
One to Ones are all individually planned around each individual partnerships.
Keen to give of our best as usual on our visit back to UpAndOver we asked everybody to tell us what they would like to concentrate on. Just counted and that is 35 individual lesson plans! It seemed a good idea at the time. We love a challenge :)
With years of experience and love of agility training I'm sure I'll be able to help with everyones hopes and at the least I know we will all work hard and have a great time.
Most of all so looking forward to seeing all their lovely, lovely dogs - just thinking of how I can justify spending half the lessons on fussing over them all - restrained recalls anyone?
