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Is
there still daylight out there ?
Then pass this chapter !!! and get out there practicing
your throws, because this part is reading for late dark
nights when the dogs are warming your wife’s feet.
The first references to Frisbee are dated end of the 19th
century where in Connecticut (USA) William Russel Frisbie
baptised his bakery ‘The Frisbie Company’.
He specialised in production of pies, sold in a typical
round tins (see picture on the left). Although
those moulds were supposed to be returned, people started
playing with the discs and discovered the rare flying ability
of the pie moulds.
However, the first people with the brilliant idea to produce
those discs in plastic, were Fred Morrison and Warren Francioni,
who produced their first disc in 1948.
In 1955 they sold their idea to the “Wham-O
Manufacturing Company” in California, that
applied the Trademark “Frisbee”
for a patent in 1959. During the Sixties the Frisbee
evolved from a toy to a plain sports item, with an ever
growing number of followers. Meanwhile the company
Wham-O was taken over by the largest Toy manufacturer in
the world ‘Mattel’ that is ever since the official
owner of the Trademark “Frisbee®” (for more
info read “Where
the Frisbee first flew”).
Dogfrisbee
grew even more successful in the early Seventies.
Alex Stein, generally considered as the “father”
of Dogfrisbee, won the hearts and minds of the American
population with his whippet Ashley.
Ashley was so agile with a Frisbee that Alex tried on several
occasions to show this to a wide audience.
One day, in 1974, during a break of a national baseball-game,
he ran on the field and gave on national television a spectacular
show between the 7th and the 8th inning.
The story made it to the media in such a way that Dogfrisbee
was totally launched into the USA.
Ashley and Stein became celebrities, and propagated Dogfrisbee
as real ambassadors. After the United States, Japan
turned also quickly to this fantastic dog sport, but it
took until the Nineties before this discipline was exposed
to Europe.
Jochen
Schleicher, a German known in the world of Human Freestyle
and skateboarding, was looking for a nice occupation for
his dog Butch.
He discovered dogfrisbee and headed for the USA, where he
learned the tricks of the dogfrisbee-trade.
When he returned he propagated the discipline all over Germany.
Butch is passed away now, but is each year remembered in
one of the top European tournaments ‘The Butch Cassidy
Cup’.
A couple of years later in the Netherlands Frans
and Renate Van Roij started the promotion of dogfrisbee,
which quickly boomed in Holland.
The last years, there are a lot of Frisbee teams all over
Holland, where you can play Dogfrisbee.
In Belgium, the pioneer was Anne
Degraef.
Around the turn of the century she discovered the new sport
and started practicing with her collie Evy.
As renowned instructor obedience she studied the new discipline
thoroughly and became a USDDN-jury
and wrote a teacher syllabus.
This course over several days was organized three times,
in cooperation with the well known dog trainer Geert
Debolster.
Anne Degraef held also some workshops with dogfrisbee pioneers
such as Jochen
Schleicher.
On October the 24th 2004, Anne Degraeff organized the 3rd
European Championships of Dogfrisbee in Boom near Antwerp.
Actually, in Belgium there are only a couple of clubs where
you can play dogfrisbee. Probably the largest club
is the BelgianK9DiscHeroes
in Olen, where Peter Wouters and Hilde Van Durme founded
in 2005 their dogfrisbee-team.
With their Malinois Acira they have already won their spurs
on the international Skyhoundz-scene and organized several
interesting workshops and courses with a.o. Peter Bloeme,
world champion dogfrisbee in 1984.
In 2007 Kelly Briers and Kris Maes started their new team
the Fame'ous
Freestylers , which is steadily growing. After
one year they were already organizing practices on three
different locations : Alken (Limburg), Puurs (Antwerp) and
Drongen (Ghent).
Since 2008 some new teams started and as from august 2008
Toscanzahoeve in Hulshout will also start with dogfrisbee-lessons.
For more information on the different teams, you might check
our links page.
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