Daisy Peel

In the fall of 2001, there was an issue that came out and it was the USA World Team issue and they had gone to Portugal that year and they'd won gold.

And it was a really weird year because they had all the…and I found all this out later but it was a pretty interesting year because it was…9-11 happened.

And then they went over to Portugal and they won the gold medal, which was pretty tough for the USA to do because we didn't have YouTube.

We couldn't look at the courses from overseas.

We really didn't know what was going on over there.

So the team would go over blind and hope they had the skills to compete with the Europeans.

So that magazine cover came out and it had all these cool pictures of world championships.

And I mean, mind you, I'd gotten my first dog to do agility in 98 and this was 2001.

So by then I had another dog and I saw that magazine.

I was like, that's it.

That's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to be on the world team.

That's me.

So I was pretty serious from the beginning.

The rules, I don't know that it was the rules that were so much different, but the course design was very different.

And yes, the rules were different and they're still pretty different in the sense that in the United States, you can get a championship title without ever winning a class.

And that's true in all the organizations, I think.

I think in USDA, you have to win a couple classes in a couple games.

And in UKI, the same is true.

But in the American Kennel Club, you can get an agility championship without ever winning.