Author Jeanne Joy Hartnagle-Taylor had a little package waiting for me after a particularly tough day . . . I opened it up and was super pleased to see something she’d told me about but I’d forgotten about – her title tracker book!
This little guy is 39 pages of charts and what not designed to let the trialer keep a record of how they’re progressing in the stockdog program.
My first thought upon seeing this was: this is something ASCA should have done themselves.
Here’s why. This little thing is exactly what a new trialer needs. It’s laid out clearly and in such a way that it’s incredibly motivating. I love checking off boxes and seeing progress – and how titles work now, it’s less concrete than that. This is literally a funnel to trialing success. I can’t just get this little workbook and check off “started” and be satisfied.
The book is designed to be used for two dogs.
I think the biggest room for improvement is just the organization of it – while it’s attractively laid out and color coded for ease once you’re familiar with it – I think breaking the pages down for readability even if producing more pages would have been a good choice. The breakup is a little awkward and I think it could be made more compact. I like the size of the book and the heft of the cover – it should survive quite well through trips to stockdog trials if kept in the truck or what not.
As with her “compendium” – This is going to be best utilized by a total newb, with in person supplementation. I can see this being handed to every single visitor to an ASCA trial entered in their first started classes, with a friendly club representative explaining everything in it. Especially page 39, which is some kind of calendar but I’m not sure how Hartnagle-Taylor intended it to be used.
I’d actually brought up the idea with Amy (my WAS compatriot) to do an app that does essentially the same thing, including tracking trainings, inspired by her systems in the compendium. But here’s the thing – the more I learn about culture building and selling things, the more I think little booklets like this hook people more than an app would. The gesture and conversation that it would generate alone could do more for the ASCA stockdog program than any current outreach that I know of.
Honestly, it’s so exciting, I think there should be one for every ASCA program. You could do booklets like this for mentoring breeders, too. I love that the Hartnagle family is so devoted to the breed, the success of ASCA, and its programs that even when ASCA’s not doing things like this, they are.
I highly recommend breeders with pups going to new trial homes pick this up for review, and trialing clubs consider giving it out for started awards.
Available on Amazon for $9.99
She also has a multivenue tracker (AKC, AHBA, ASCA, etc), but I think the simplicity of this and how it can be used for ASCA is what makes it a winner.
