How The GMHTA Started
Around 2004 John Blackbird was seeing a number of the Minnesota clubs struggling with the similar challenges. The same challenges many clubs continue to face today. And as the summer hunt test season went on, John was visiting with folks from different clubs and we all had similar things to say. So one Saturday evening as a group of us sat on the porch after a day of running our dogs, John suggested we get everyone together one day over the winter and see if we could help each other out and exchange some ideas for solving our shared challenges. So in the winter of 2005 representatives from a number of retriever clubs in Minnesota met for the first time. We gathered to talked about the lack of communication between clubs, the lack of judges’ seminars one year and the overabundance the next year, what could we do as a collective group to help a club that was struggling finding enough workers in the field or quality judges, and simply getting the word out that they had a test coming up. The group had a lot of good discussions. We had sat down and communicated with each other in a cooperative spirit and we found some solutions. That following season we saw some things changing and we decided we needed to meet again and see if we could get a few more clubs to attend. And we decided it didn’t need to include only the AKC clubs, but let’s invite the NAHRA and HRC clubs to join us too. After all, there was a certain amount of “cross-pollination” happening in the retriever games and they had a stock in this too.
What The GMHTA has Accomplished?
From our humble, informal beginnings in the winter of 2005 we have grown dramatically. The Greater Minnesota Hunt Test Association was incorporated as a non-profit in 2007 with duly elected officers, by-laws and a treasury. As of 2020 the GMHTA now has as member clubs nearly every retriever hunt test club in the state of Minnesota as well as a clubs from Wisconsin and Iowa that lie within 50 miles of the border for a total of 19 member clubs! We include all of the HRC clubs and the only NAHRA club in the state as members. The GMHTA has an annual meeting of delegates from every member club the first week of January. We sponsor and support a number of different events and activities throughout the year, some are annual events while others are more opportunistic.
AKC Judges’/Handlers’ Seminars
When we began it was required that all AKC Hunt Test judges took the basic seminar every 3 years, regardless of how many years you may have been judging, how many points you had, how many titled dogs you had trained. Given that, it usually wasn’t too difficult to assemble plenty of folks to attend a seminar, but sometimes it was hard to find a seminar. Some clubs routinely held a seminar every 3 years just to keep their own club members current, but there were often years where no seminars were held.
One of the first things we did was set up a rotation that included most of the clubs taking a turn hosting a seminar, and in the beginning, we made sure there were two seminars held in the state each year, one in the north and one in the south. We agreed to offer these seminars in the winter when we weren’t running events and tried to keep the seminars scheduled far enough apart so if a person couldn’t make it to one seminar, they had a good opportunity to work it into their schedule on the other date.
Now the seminar requirements have changed and there doesn’t always seem to be as great a demand, especially in the northern part of our state. Our seminar rotation schedule has adapted. We now divide our clubs into three regions, North, Central and South. In the North, the 4 clubs up there work in teams of two hosting seminars. On the even numbered years we have a seminar in the North and a seminar in the South. On the odd numbered years we host one seminar in the Central region. This way we do our best to offer an opportunity for anyone that needs or wants to attend a seminar can get it done at a location that is convenient for them.
And we have also worked out a way of financially supporting these judges’ seminars in the event a club has to pay extra fees to have the AKC representative to come out for fewer than 20 attendees, as is the AKC policy. So if a club hosts a seminar but has fewer than 20 participants, the GMHTA will cover the AKC required fee. We don’t expect any club to go into the red for hosting a seminar that all of our clubs benefit from.
Furthermore, clubs in our state have hosted two of the AKC Advanced two-day retriever judging seminars to great success.
In 2018 we held our first Retriever Judges’ Dialogue that gathered together judges from all venues to discuss the art of bird placement, managing the logistics of a test, what does a “Good” mark look like, what does a “poor” blind look like, etc. It’s our effort to bring experienced and respected judges together with more novice judges to allow for a “dialogue” to better prepare everyone to go out and judge with more confidence, and that the tests you are setting up meet similar rigor and standards. We are making an effort to establish some uniform parameters within in our region and to arrive at some conformity. It’s a one-day event, not licensed or sanctioned by any one entity, the point doesn’t count for anything, and it’s “non-denominational.” It’s just a bunch of retriever folks getting together and trying to decide what looks like some good tests and why they are good tests and why did we score the way we scored it.
The GMHTA Calendar
Remember back when Entry Express would send out a postcard to all of the folks that had entered your hunt test last year to let them know the dates of your events this year? Yep, it cost about 85 cents per postcard to send those little reminders out to the same clientele you saw last year. You weren’t really spreading your message very far.
For nearly our entire existence the GMHTA has produced a tri-fold flyer that includes the dates or every licensed retriever hunt test hosted by a GMHTA member club. We include the date of the event, the stakes offered, the location of the event and how to enter the event, whether it be Entry Express or some other method or service. We are exposing all of those AKC entrants to the dates of the HRC events in our state, and all of the NAHRA folks are getting the dates for the AKC events. It’s one stop shopping to plan your dog’s summer campaign. On one page you find nearly every AKC, HRC, or NAHRA retriever event in our state. Hang it on the refrigerator in the garage next to the kennel. Of course, with the advent of 21st century technology, we send that calendar out via email to all of our member clubs, which in turn gets forwarded out to each individual club member. That number is certainly in the hundreds of retriever club members.
We also work together when a new club is looking to find an open weekend or when a club is trying to get the word out about adding an event, either a new weekend event or a midweek event. Since the GMHTA began over ten years ago, we have seen 9 new clubs/events hosted in Minnesota. Some are entirely new AKC or HRC clubs while others are long-standing field trial clubs who are welcoming members of their club to host hunt tests as well. When a club is looking for an open weekend, our GMHTA calendar is a source to determine when that new event might be able to take place.
Within the confines of the GMHTA member clubs, one can run a licensed hunt test nearly every weekend from the 3rd week of April through the 3rd week of September, sometimes two or three events on any given weekend, especially if you consider that there may be an HRC and AKC event on the same weekend at completely different sites within the state. And if you factor in the field trial calendar as well, there may 3 or 4 events happening with over 500 retriever entries in Minnesota on some weekends