BFA Regional Champs

BFA Regional Champs 23-24 April 2022

This coming weekend the BFA will showcase the inaugural Regional Championships where we will find out who the best flyball teams are in each of the BFA regions. We will be trialling an innovative new scoring format that will measure how good a team is at flyball and allow teams to compete with other teams up and down the country racing on the same weekend but at different venues!! You might just have to go with us on this one and enjoy the the ride, this is just out of the box thinking about how to recognise and reward good flyball without the bias towards speed, but whilst keeping a truly competitive edge. The fastest teams get recognised with flyball team of the year, and faster teams can beat slower teams in a normal division often without even trying to race if they are quick enough. The BFA 100 Challenge takes speed out of the equation, it levels the playing field completely, gives everybody something to race for on the day, and for the first time it puts the spaniels, terriers and gun dogs on an even par with the border-whippets and border collies, allowing the best flyballing team to win not necessarily the quickest.

Teams will still compete in their normal division on the day of the competition they are entered in and no effort is required for the BFA 100 Challenge as all teams will be ranked on their Round Robin results on the day by our independent adjudicators. Full details are laid out on the document below, but essentially each team will be ranked by their times on the day and how close they can get to their own seed time, and that score is then modified by how clean they race. Hit your seed time every leg and get no lights then the team score will be the perfect 100 - but we know that's not going to happen lol! It's all about trying to get as close to the perfect score of 100 as possible by racing as fast and hard as you can and racing clean, not an easy balance to get right, which is why the ultimate winners can genuinely call themselves the best flyball team in their region even if they are not the fastest.

It's just a concept at the moment, but we hope it will add a little bit of spice to your racing over the weekend and we hope it gives us a format to recognise and reward good flyball racing agnostic of speed and allow teams to compete with other teams racing elsewhere in the country, or even the world! regardless of format or racing surface. This weekend all teams entered at the BFA Committee event at Bath, the Molten Magnets show and the Carnegie Canines fun event in Scotland will be competing together. We are excited to see how it works and we hope you have fun with it - and the winning teams will each gain a free team entry into a BFA Championship event of their choice as well as bragging rights and a little trophy for the cabinet, so what's not to be loved?