So after trying it out what did you think?
Tell us more!!
ABTLH
I will give it the whole weekend, but...right now, it's not really my cup of tea. I know I'm biased because I started in NACSW. And I also know that not every AKC trial is run the same.
But...it's just, weird, I guess. It's hard for me to adjust, and part of it is simply my personality type. Since there are multiple classes to enter and not everyone enters all the classes, it's a lot more chaotic. In NACSW, you might have something like 35 dogs entered, and all the dogs are going to do all the searches. So you have a run order, and there is a big standard with numbers being flipped, and you go to the staging area when it's your number. I've never been to a trial where you have more than maybe 2 or 3 "staging areas" for waiting. It's pretty efficient.
At this trial, the gate steward said "anyone in novice who wants to run exteriors go ahead." And I was like, "um, what?" So there were about 10 Novice A dogs and about the same number of Novice B, and even though there was a run order, it wasn't followed for either interiors/buried (which was one run - you skipped one or the other if you weren't entered in both), nor was it followed for exteriors. Super chaotic. For containors they did follow the order. It just also was...I don't know. Odd.
The staging was incredibly long. Partly due to the trial site, but also I think just partly the way the trial was run. I think part of our issue in containers was simply the insanely long wait time - Sypha's boredom was off the charts. We had probably 10-12 staging areas, beyond simply waiting in the line at the steward's area. By the time we even got to the search area ...she was out of her mind with boredom.
There's also the issue with the level of scent AKC uses verses NACSW. AKC uses a drop of oil per q-tip which is way, way stronger than NACSW. That's actually strong enough for a human to smell in the search areas...can be weird for our dogs who are trained on much lower levels of odor.
Also far far more expensive than NACSW!