Dear RMC NAVHDA Members,

We are excited to invite you to the RMC NAVHDA Annual Meeting on Saturday, February 8, 2025, at 1:00 PM. The meeting will be held at the Thomas M. McKee Building at the Ranch Events Complex in Loveland, CO.

Potluck and Membership Renewal

As part of the event, we will have a potluck! Please register here.

Additionally, this is a friendly reminder that membership renewal is now open. If you haven’t already renewed for 2025, please do so by visiting our website at https://rmc-navhda.org/join/.

2025 Test Dates and Applications

During the meeting, we will announce the 2025 test dates, and this will be your first opportunity to submit test applications for 2025. Be sure to attend and submit your applications early.

Board Positions Open for Nominations

We are currently seeking nominations for the following board positions:

• President
• Secretary
• Director of Training

If you are interested in any of these positions, please contact Tim Griffin at [email protected] no later than January 31st, 2025.

For detailed descriptions of the responsibilities associated with these roles, please refer to the RMC NAVHDA Bylaws for 2024, which can be found at https://rmc-navhda.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/RMC-bylaws-2024.pdf.

Seeking Members for the Training Committee

We are also looking for members to join the Training Committee for 2025. This is a wonderful opportunity to give back to the chapter and help shape the direction of our training programs. If you’re interested in contributing, please reach out for more information.

2025 Training Season

The 2025 Training Season is just around the corner! We are excited to announce that a new training road map is now available to help you create your training plan for the year. You can find the road map on the RMC NAVHDA website.

Additionally, the 2025 training day dates have been added to the website. For more information on upcoming training dates, and to access the training road map, please visit our Training Page.

We look forward to seeing you at the Annual Meeting for a productive and enjoyable event!

Regards,

Nik Gonzales
RMC NAVHDA Secretary
720-925-8588

Many have asked and this winter we, led by Sara Heesacker, have created a roadmap for creating a Versatile Champion. We hope this helps you create your training plan.

For those with pups who will do the Natural Ability Test, pick a row based on when you will be doing your NA test.

For Utility Test dogs, we suggest spreading the foundational training over two years — a year focused on retrieving and a year focused on steadiness. We recommend starting with the task that is most naturally challenging for the dog. And, we recommend that they have a hunting season under their belt before starting the UT training.

If you then do the Utility Test the following year, we have a plan for whether your test in the Spring or Fall.

We hope you find this useful. If you have questions or feedback, please ask in our FB group or ask the Training Committee.

The chapter has 2 logos currently….the Mountains logo that typically graces the front of any hats or shirts and the Dogs with Altitude logo. We would like to consolidate to 1 logo that tells the story of RMC NAVHDA quickly, easily and in an eye-appealing manner. Adopting a new chapter logo will help with embroidery costs and provide more of an understanding of what RMC NAVHDA is about at first glance.

Guidelines:

Any chapter member/friend of a chapter member/spouse etc can design a logo for submission. Please remember we want logos that are easy to screen print and embroider so limiting the number of colors is helpful! Email your submissions to [email protected] by January 15, 2025. We will compile all logos submitted for a membership wide vote. The person that submits the winning logo will receive some cool merchandise as a thank you!

Questions about the contest? Please email [email protected] and we can provide any clarity needed!

We are excited to announce the 2nd Annual RMC NAVHDA Mark Lance Memorial Shoot to honor our friend and fellow chapter member, Mark Lance, who passed away from cancer in 2022. All of the funds raised at the event will support the conservation-related activities of RMC NAVHDA, a local 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. This event promises to be full of fun! Join us for an opportunity to shoot sporting clays, fellowship with RMC NAVHDA members and other shooters, and most importantly, raise funds for the RMC NAVHDA chapter.

Event Details:

• Date: August 25, 2024
• Time: Check in 9 am, Shoot begins at 10 am
• Venue: Great Guns Sporting, 16126 County Road 96, Nunn, CO 80648
• Activities: 100 clay Sporting Clay Course with opportunities to use mulligans and shoot Game Clays for additional raffle tickets. After the event, we will hold Cash Prize Trap Games for additional fun.
• Extras: Raffle items include a Yeti Cooler, On-X Elite Membership and so much more! 
• REGISTER NOW as an Individual or a Team of 4 Shooters.
• Every shooter gets a T-shirt, lunch ticket and a raffle ticket for attending the shoot!
• Fun event for the whole family as non-shooters can enjoy lunch and get a t-shirt as well!

Sponsorship Opportunities: 

Small Business? Breeder? Individual? We invite you to partner with us as a sponsor for the Mark Lance Memorial Shoot!

Sponsoring the Mark Lance Memorial Shoot provides your organization with an opportunity to provide a donation to a 501c3 organization as well as the following benefits:

For detailed information on sponsorship packages and benefits, please contact Sara Heesacker directly.

More details about the shoot can be found on the Mark Lance Memorial Shoot website page or feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions or require further details.

Can’t wait to see you on the range! 

Hello Rocky Mountain NAVHDA Chapter!

As the training committee has always done, we have asked for more people to come to the committee meeting, be a part of giving input, or become a committee member. We had our meeting and had over a dozen members attend. We feel we were very productive and have a great plan this year.

We had some positive feedback about the stations and drills. Some of the not so positive feedback was that people felt confused about which station was the next station. The answer to that question is…. the station(s) that you feel your dog needs to visit before going on to the next progression or out into the field.

The Committee also did some self-evaluation, and with the new folks in the room, it helped us confirm what we were feeling. We felt we failed people by not giving you a better foundation, progressions, and goals. Even worse, we felt we let you down by not doing what was best for your dog by letting you go on to your next progression or into the field to shoot over your dog when your dog wasn’t ready. I get it, everyone wants to see birds shot over their dogs. Is shooting the birds you bought the best use of those birds for your dog? Should you take them home and work live bird drills in the backyard? Should you run your dog in the dry fire field? Should you be using launchers, check cords, etc? Should you dispatch them, freeze them, and use them for the next 30 days? If this is currently your only venue for getting your dog on birds or shooting birds over your dog, consider reaching out to members/non-members w/ pigeons/chukar that may be training in the next 4 weeks. Join Facebook training groups and, most of all, work your dog for 15 min every day. Your dog will learn more from a little training 15 minutes a day than they will from a full day’s training 4 weeks apart. Andy Leslie showed me a great quote the other day “Beginning trainers want to work on intermediate drills, Intermediate trainers want to work on advanced drills, and advanced trainers work on the basics”. This is what we call foundation, and once you develop a good foundation, you can take this NAVHDA thing as far as you would like to progress or reach any goal you set outside of NAVHDA.

This year we are taking the training sessions to the next level, Checklists! What are checklists?

Checklist are to:

• Help you evaluate your dog
• Set goals and track them
• Help you w/ your progressions
• Show you what your dog needs to work on and what your next station should be…lol
• Remind you where you left off w/ notes on what went well and not so well
• Show whether your dog should go into the field or not
• Will your dog work in a cooperative range?
• Will your dog recall?
• Will your dog stay steady to the shot?
• Will your dog retrieve a shot bird? To hand?

I have to get checked off to shoot birds over my dog? Yes, to run your dog in the live-fire field, you will need to check off the green sections of the checklist. The reasons for this change is if your dog cannot do the above 4 things to a high level, you are

• Putting your dog in an unsafe situation
• Putting our gunners in an undesirable position if your dog can’t stay steady
• Not setting your dog up to be successful and it can even set back your progression.
• Taking up more than your fair share of field time when you should have really been working your dog on the drills

There will be mainly 2 sets of checklists: a Daily version for a training day, and a Full version for the season. The Daily will be simple so people can get the most out of a training day and get checked off for the field. The Full training checklist will be similar criteria to a judges card for you to judge his progression in most areas.

I also created two videos explaining the checklists — one for NA handlers, and one for UT handlers.

I hope you are excited about the upcoming training season and not apprehensive. See you at the end of the month!

Pete Corso