Seminars

Improving our dog’s understanding of jumping mechanics will help them run more confidently and efficiently, resulting in faster runs, reduced dropped bars and less risk of injury. This class will focus on building jumping strength and grid work drills to educate your dog on how best to navigate their way around the jumps on course. This workshop is appropriate if you have a dog who could improve their jumping skills or a young dog getting ready to raise their bars, or you want to develop a good jumping maintenance plan to keep your dog in good shape and avoid potential injury.

Masters Level Handling: Train on high level courses with an emphasis on the skills needed to master current course challenges. 

Westminster Prep: Not Just For Westminster Entrants! Learn how to tackle courses to produce clean, fast runs! Dogs must be competing at the Masters/Senior/Champ level.

WHERE you look on and HOW you look at your dog on course can make a world of difference on lines and turns. Learn how to master the 5 CONNECTION techniques to streamline how you communicate with your dog, and bring out your dog’s best on course! Novice/Open: Dogs must be competing at the Novice/Open level

WHERE you look on and HOW you look at your dog on course can make a world of difference on lines and turns. Learn how to master the 5 CONNECTION techniques to streamline how you communicate with your dog, and bring out your dog’s best on course! Masters: Dogs must be competing at the Masters/Senior/Champ level

Focus Forward: learn a series of motivating games to help your young dogs learn to drive lines! This is a puppy/young dog seminar so the games will be primarily flatwork, wings, bumps, and tunnels. No jumping is involved.

Engagement Games For puppies/young dogs: learn how to teach your pup/young dog to happily engage with you, in any environment! Note: We will NOT be addressing aggression, anxiety, or reactivity issues in this session.

This workshop is an advanced offering that will challenge students to sequence using blind crosses in a variety of applications and sequences. Forced blind crosses, back to back blind crosses and collection turn blind crosses will be included.

Come learn a variety of games all geared towards developing the ability to listen and problem solve while on the agility course! We all know that every agility course is different and our dogs need to be able to adapt and change and listen when presented with similar but different pictures. These games require minimal equipment and are suitable for puppies 6 months and older as well as seasoned agility dogs looking to improve in these areas. Melanie will explain both the games as well as how to troubleshoot when things don’t go as planned and how to keep your pup’s success rate and fun factor high!

Coursework to push our dogs and handlers out of their comfort zones and identify the best handling strategies for each team, plus Melanie will be sure to give you a list of homework items for your team!

This workshop is suitable for dogs that struggle with trial environments by either needing more focus, more motivation and drive, or needing to channel the drive that they have. If you find that your dog’s performance at a trial varies widely from what you see in training, this workshop is for you! This is a fun workshop to audit as you get to see Melanie problem solve many challenges as well as share some of her games designed to help a dog transition seamlessly from training to trialing. This is one NOT TO MISS!!

Build your dog’s confidence and body awareness while simultaneously building a fun working relationship using tricks! This trick training workshop will include agility and fitness foundation, confidence building behaviors, lots of ways to build your relationship and communication with your canine partner, and of course lots of cute tricks for photo ops! Perfect for puppies but suitable for all ages and levels.

This workshop is super for building the commitment of skills when the direction of your motion differs from the directions the dog is to go. Whether you’re wanting to build the skills or need proofing, Melanie will review her favorite ways of teaching and maintaining these skills with her favorite games!

This requested workshop will focus on how to teach directional verbal’s, as well as appropriate timing for verbal’s on the course. Tight turn verbal’s, turns in extension and backside verbal’s will be addressed. This workshop is appropriate for young dogs looking to teach verbal cues, as well as more experienced dogs that would like to strengthen/challenge these skills.

Listen to Melanie Miller in this powerful workshop to teach you the art of defining goals for you and your dog that both inspire and motivate you to get better! Once the goal process is laid out, then we will drill down into how to create training plans that complement your goals so that you can see measurable progress in your training, all while making sure to keep fun a priority for you and your dog!

Self Study materials from Melanie's 4/29/2020 seminar. Have you ever left a trial feeling like you didn't perform to the best of your abilities? Sign up for JAG's self study to listen to some idea from Melanie Miller to optimize the trial experience for your dog and yourself, and to set your team up for success!!! When you register for this self study, you receive access to the replay of the 90 minute seminar, a copy of the presentation and a published article with the same name.

Self study version of Soshana's video seminar! Are you stuck at home with a puppy or young dog? Lucky you!!!! Join Soshana Dos to learn fun games you can play to build some of the basic skills your pup will need to become a well-mannered pup with terrific impulse control, body awareness, high drive and motivation all through playing fun games you can do inside!!! You will receive the presentation from this session and the replay link.

Join Bridget Thomas for a live seminar filled with tips, tricks and fun games to bring out the best in your new pup (or future pup)! Bridget’s goal with a new pup is always to build confidence, joy, the desire to play with her, and the love of running really fast! This seminar will look at the first bunch of “skills” that Bridget teaches a new puppy, and look at what’s really happening in those first few months together.