UK Agility Instructor - Jonathon Watts

We’ve had a ripper time with Jon Watts – a youthful UK agility instructor who has been like a much needed kick in the pants and breath of fresh air injected into what was a “starting to smell stagnant view of how agility should be conducted.” He didn’t muck around, didn’t sugar coat anything and made it his personal mission to ensure that absolutely everyone got something out of the sessions.




Jon is an up front guy when it comes to being in this sport – he believes that everyone, no matter how new they are to the sport or what kind of dog they have, likes to win and so he focuses on you personally – what do you do in your handling that you can do better. He’d watch us run through a course or a sequence – ask us what we thought of it and then give detailed and individualised suggestions about where we could improve.



There were no blanket statements like “You all need to push into that turn” it was specific ie I had to work the turn to get it a bit tighter coming out the tunnel, another person needed to be more certain, firm and loud with their weave commands. He also got across and brought home the importance on not training/handling around our problems but rather training through your problems (ie if your dog doesn’t like you working in close to them you train to overcome this, if your dog needs you right next to them to hit their contact then train them to nail contacts with you at a distance, if your dog can’t keep their bars up if you are making a noise train them to understand that they keep their bars up regardless of the noise you are making) We often handler "around" our problems instead of trying to train through them - you often hear during course walking people saying "Well my dog does this when I do that so I'll have to run it like this". Sure run it like that but don't give up on trying to change that behaviour. Note it down and work on it so that next time you have more options available to you when running a course.

All in all a very successful few days and a great inspiration to keep working hard to attain our goals in agility whether it be a rock solid start line, fast and furious weaves or tighter turns. There are some pics below of our "Jon Watts" experience.