2024 Phideaux Award Recipient
It is the club's special privilege and honor to recognize the 2024 Phideaux Award Recipient.
The Phideaux Award is awarded to a Spokane Dog Training Club member for his/her outstanding service to Spokane Dog Training Club, keeping in mind that one of the original purposes of Phideaux award was to recognize people that have made contributions of their time other than being a club officer or board member.
This years recipient of the Phideaux award has assisted in several different class venues, been a ring steward at events, helped with event set up and tear down, laid tracks for our tracking trials and has always been willing to help when asked. This person has always demonstrated good sportsmanship and has been encouraging and complementary to others, both members and students in our classes.
In the past, our 2024 Phideaux recipient served on our board, was an obedience committee chair, helped install the slats in the fence by the agility field and made prizes for our obedience and rally trials. This person has been an exceptional trainer, whether the dog on the end of the leash was big or small. In years past our club used to do obedience and agility demos at the Spokane Interstate Fair; this year's recipient always actively participated in those demos.
This person is also very humble so rarely takes credit for all the things that were done behind the scenes; our recipient sewed tracking flags, sandbags for agility jumps and bags for our scent work panels as a gift to the club. At a garage sale one day this person saw some nice chairs that would work outside for the agility classes, purchased them and donated them; we are still using them. When we purchased the land at our current location the first thing we did was level and plant the grassed area to allow us to have agility classes and trials. A couple of members, including our Phideaux recipient, hauled their own lawn mowers to the club for 2 years to keep the lawn mowed so we could give those classes and hold USDAA trials (At this time this was the only agility being done.
Our 2024 Phideaux recipient also has a great sense of humor. Years ago when designer dogs were first coming on the scene Spokane had an indoor football team called the Shock. This person and another member joked that maybe they should breed their two breeds together and call them Shockers (sheltie/cocker crosses) enabling them to sell them for big bucks. It was never acted on but it was a good story.
