A dog races down a course, hops the jumps, grabs a tennis ball, and races back to where he started. Fun? Definitely! Exciting? Oh yes. This is the sport called Flyball!
Flyball comes from southern California, where a group of dog trainers combined hurdle racing with fetch. The earliest version of the game had a person at the far end of the course, tossing a tennis ball to the racing dogs after they finished the jump line. A trainer named Herbert Wagner is credited with developing the Flyball box, which releases the ball after the dog triggers it. Wagner showed off the Flyball box on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, introducing the sport to North America.
The very first flyball tournament was held in 1983; the next year, the North American Flyball Association was formed. Originally, NAFA had only twelve teams based in the Detroit, Michigan and Toronto, Canada areas. These days, more than seven hundred clubs are registered with NAFA — that means more than sixteen thousand registered canine members!
So how does an actual Flyball race work? Two teams of four dogs each race side-by-side through a fifty-one foot course. The course has four jumps. The height of the jumps is determined by the shoulder height of the shortest dog on the team, also known as the “height dog”. Each dog runs through the course — jumping the jumps — and triggers the flyball box at the end. The dog grabs the ball and runs back, again taking all four jumps. Once a dog has crossed the start/finish line, the next dog on the team is released. The first team that has all four dogs finish the course (without error) wins!
Flyball is judged using an Electronic Judging System that measures individual dogs’ times to the thousandth of a second. The NAFA World Record is currently under sixteen seconds. That’s sixteen seconds for a team of four dogs to run the Flyball course. Many teams can run all four dogs through a course in less than twenty seconds.
Interested in trying Flyball with your dog? Start with NAFA — you can search for a Flyball club in your area. All dogs are eligible to compete and earn titles in NAFA tournaments.