Why Volunteer for NACSW Events?

Written by Grinner, up and coming nose work instructor and guest blogger Jessica Daggit.

I’ve had the opportunity to volunteer at different difficulty levels and I learned from every single one.

How can you benefit from volunteering?

Volunteering provides multiple opportunities for learning more about Nosework and odor movement. Watching searches gives you a chance to observe other handlers as well as the environment from a neutral perspective. It provides wonderful insights you can use to improve your own skills and knowledge. 

It can help you understand what your own trial can look like. This is beneficial to reduce your own stress (and in turn, your dog’s stress) simply by feeling more prepared for the day. Newcomers in particular can benefit from volunteering to feel more comfortable in a trial environment since there can be unknowns on how it functions. It also helps reinforce that this is a community of people who are all hoping for you to succeed!

Finally, in NACSW, since trials are a random draw from all the entries, once you accumulate 7 full volunteering days, you are able to use those to submit an extra entry into a trial. There is no guarantee you will get in, but you double your chances.

Volunteer Roles

Some of the different volunteer roles I have participated in are timer, steward and score runner. When you volunteer and request, or are given a specific role, your role may change throughout the trial for many number of reasons. 

Timer: you start and stop the clock, give a 30 second warning and inform the judge of the end time. Most of the time you are able to watch the whole search, there might be some tight corners or weird spaces where you will just need to be listening for a finish call.

Steward: you are directing competitors to staging areas while they wait their turn and briefing them on how many hides, the time allotted and whether the search is on or off leash. If I know where the start line is, it is also something I like to include. If there is a parking lot app you may also need to be updating that as well. You will most likely not watch any searches as a steward.

Score runner: your job is to gather the score sheets from the judge/s, make sure everything necessary is filled out and drop them off at the score room. If it’s a big location, or there are not many volunteers, you might be running back and forth without watching any searches. But for the most part you do get to spectate if the judge allows it.

Check out the NACSW trial calendar to find a trial near you that you can volunteer at! No experience is necessary and they are always so grateful for any help you might provide.

What have I learned?

I recently was a timer for an ELT-S, in which the search area was one third of a school gymnasium. There were folded bleachers alongside the entirety of the back wall, some soft mats piled up on the left side and a very large open area underneath two basketball hoops. The single hide was placed in the hanging pole that held the basketball hoop. The search parameters were on or off leash, 1 to 2 hides and 5 minutes time.

I learned a lot that day watching people work their dogs and also being able to ask the judge odor questions in between competitors. The judge was very liberal in his “Yes” after an alert call, as odor was everywhere and pooling heavily along the bleachers and corners of the room, but out of 20 people only 2 accurately called the basketball hoop as source. One of them worked their dog off leash, giving them the freedom to follow odor and the dog made a perfect arc along the floor around the basketball hoop and was going very high at the bleachers when the handler called it. I noticed a lot of the other competitors hugged their dog along the bleachers, not allowing them to search the open floor under the hoops, where they might have gathered a ton of information about the location of source.

During that search, I could tell that the handler’s body position in relation to the dog really matters.  Some dogs wanted to turn back to work an area, but as their handler was right behind them, it kept pushing them forward, not able to check an area they needed to. Being able to see this reinforces being extra aware of the spacing between my dog and I so we can have a more successful search. 

Supporting your Nosework community keeps people having fun and hosts offering trials!