Judging Panels: It’s Not As Easy As It Looks

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168 – August, 2023

By Caroline Coile

“Why didn’t the club assign more breeds to me?” It’s a common lament I often hear from judges who may have fewer than 100 dogs assigned for the day. Often it’s with a small club that doesn’t have money to burn, yet half their panel is way under-assigned. At the same time, the same club may have one or two judges who are overdrawn. It looks like the Show Chair, or whoever was in charge of making breed assignments, fell down on the job. But as a Show Chair who has grappled year after year with the AKC’s Event Management page, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what happened: They didn’t so much fall down on the job as they simply gave up. And I can’t blame them.

The first time I was allowed to watch our club’s judge selection process it seemed easy. The Show Chair opened the Judges Directory book (this was before the computerized version), pointed to a name, called them, got the OK and assigned them one group for Saturday and one group for Sunday. Then they picked another judge who could do two different groups and repeated the process. The assignments were written on a form by hand and mailed to the AKC. They had it done in less than an hour. Sometimes a judge’s one group had as few as 20 or 30 dogs in it, but that was their entire assignment for the day. Not surprisingly, our club did not fare well financially using this technique. But it was easy.

Eventually our club was in deep financial trouble, to the point we were voting on whether to continue having shows. My friend and I (our only experience was as Obedience Chairs!) begged for the chance to try one last show, and this is when I got to try my hand as Show Chair. My friend and I knew we had to economize and get the most out of every judge, but fortunately the AKC now had an online Judge Panel Management program available.

Click here to read the complete article
168 – August, 2023

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Posted by AnthonyA on Aug 16 2023. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.