Oh the yelling.

At agility trials, there are no professional gate stewards. At horse shows, these are seasoned pros, who in general remain calm, cool and collected and patiently hold rings, walkie talkie other rings and only sometimes freak out. Most competitors and trainers are trained to not freak out at them because bad things can happen in the future if gate stewards do not like you. No one wants to be on the bad side of a gate steward.

At agility trials, there are no pros. Well, there’s Joe the Masters Gate Steward, who almost is-his wife competes, they go to every trial in their motor home and he runs the Master’s Ring like no one else can. So he knows all the dogs and he makes sure things stay in order during conflicty runs. I think he comes from the corporate world-they might be retired lawyers? and I would elect him president of the Masters Ring. He devotes most weekends of his life to traveling around to dog shows his wife runs in and runs that ring for 10 straight hours a day.

Then there’s the rest of us. Everyone is is just taking their turn volunteering. I work as much as I can, which used to be whenever I wasn’t running but is less with the addition of Gustavo and with the conflicts of having Otterpop still in some things in the advanced ring. Even if I have a second, I will just set bars or grab leashes or whatever there is to do. Because an efficient ring ends and all efficient rings end early and then the 2ish hour drive home starts earlier.

Sometimes people mess up. We are talking voluteer workers here who are getting paid in raffle tickets to win things like a dog squeaky toy. Who are probably worried about missing their next run by working. Not a high paid, deadline based job. When you are gate stewarding, there are lots of people who need to be in lots of rings at the same time and the order gets messed up and this screws up the score keepers and there’s just no way to do it easy and fast.

Wow did I hear some freakouts yesterday. From people I know even. The worse one was a lady I know who totally burst an ugly gasket over not getting into the ring when she was supposed to. The gate steward screwed up minorly. More of inconvenience than life threatening emergency. But did she get a dressing down. I thought she stomached it just fine and kind of ignored the freaking out lady, who most of the time is a hard core competitor and has a high end professional job when she’s not at dog shows. A nice calm man sort of talked her out of the tree and she put her gourd back in and ran but wow scarey.

I try to gate the starters ring when I can and be nice and run it all efficient like and not let the beginners get scared and want to quit. Because I think if I saw ladies freaking out like that on a regular basis I might want to crawl in hole and just weep.