Jennifer Crank says:

I agree that the front cross after #4 resulted in some wide turns and off courses, but I feel it was the execution/training of the skill, not the strategy. There were 2 factors with that FC; first, MANY MANY handlers lacked the DW independence to make that FC happen in a timely manner. If you could not leave your dog laterally on the DW or outrun them, you were going to be late. A late front cross was going to cause all sorts off problems. I set this section of the course up at a my arena and even in training students lacked the independence to get downstream. If you don’t trust your DW contact in training, you certainly aren’t going to trust it at a NAC. Secondly, it is more of a forward motion front cross and anything else. a FMFC is a specific type of FC that a built more on a foundation of trained cues vs natural cues. For many FCs we use deceleration or lateral motion to cue the turn. In this case, you couldn’t do either of those things and had to have forward motion. The turn was then cued primarily with a shoulder rotation, outside arm, eye contact, and possible verbal. My foundation for this skills comes from teaching a collection recall. I find many teams lack the understanding and knowledge of aa FMFC and therefor, the dog doesn’t have that skill very strong, if at all. In that case, all the forward motion to get the FC done will push the dog wide or to the off course.

It was certainly a tricky section of the course! I wonder if even the judge knew how hard it was a going to be.