Watson's Flyball Team

07/06/2026

Please join us in wishing Tilly a very happy 2nd Birthday 🎁 🥳

03/06/2026

03/06/2026

01/06/2026

Our final group race saw us against the top seeds Tails We Win! We have had many a good race against Tails so we knew this was going to be fun and loud at the very least.

We both knew we had lost the opportunity to win the group and were instead racing for 2nd and 3rd place so there was a lot riding on the results.

With each race getting progressively harder and needing a faster line up we had followed our ‘master plan’ even if we didn’t execute it very well in the last race but this also meant that there was extra pressure for this race where we not only needed to take wins/points but also to get a fast time!
As soon as we saw our group we knew the race for times would be this one and likely our only one!

Stepping out as a team for the first time over 11” we saw Chess, Optic, Epyc and Ultra in legs 1&2 with Autumn replacing Chess for leg 3. With Christina now handling Optic for the first time and needing to practice a pass it also meant we didn’t have our usual warm up which looking at the times saw Ultra dropping her turn and posting 0.1-0.15 slower than any other race across the three days - vital lesson learned here too!!

Leg 1 we had a clean win with a clock time of 15.16, which turned out to be our fastest time of the event. The net dog times for this leg was also the fastest leg of the weekend which saw a possible 14.67 had we got our passes nailed!

Leg 2 saw us post a 15.17 and loosing on times to tails with a clean 14.92. Although we had dog times of 14.85 this was easily our slickest race on passes.

Leg 3 saw Autumn replace Chess and despite running 11” and easily the oldest in the line up she threw out 3.7. With us completing a clean run we took the win with a 15.24 on the clock and again dog times much faster at 14.75!

01/06/2026

Race 3 of the group stages saw us drawn against Belgium team Running Borders.
As another international line up we had only seen their initial races but we knew they looked slick and had already taken two legs off the group top seed. We had our work cut out!

Continuing on our game plan we again moved to a faster line up which saw Optic, Epyc, Ultra and Tigger lining up together for the first time.

A false start cost the first leg but we did see a net time of 15.23 so we knew the speed was there.
Leg two we lost on passes. A final clock time of 16.01 for us versus 15.76 for our opponents. We had nearly a second between the start/passes with dog times at 15.09 the handlers definitely let the side down on this one!
Leg three, with the opposition having a light this should have been a point clawed back but again with no ball in the box for Tigger we were then unable to win the battle of the resends and lost the final leg too.

This 3-0 loss turned out to be a complete disaster and ultimately cost us the group top spot and a possible space in Div 1.

01/06/2026

Our second group stage race was against Runami Flyball team from the Czech Republic. As a team we have never raced before we had little information to go on except their first group race.

Although we knew the times we had from our first race should be good enough we know not to underestimate the opposition so chose to run a slightly quicker line up but keeping in the ever valuable Tigger to keep the jumps at 10”. This did of course introduce a possible spit risk with Optic but we need not have worried, the big lad came to play on the world stage!

Chess, Optic, Ultra, Tigger gave us net times of 15.38 and 15.42 with an unfortunate no time in leg two as there wasn’t a ball in the box.
Importantly we also used this race to ensure optic got a practice start ready for our next race where he also dropped back into 3.5s and continued to do so.

Dropping just one leg this continued our streak taking us to a total of 10 points.