The Junior’s Perspective

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208 – April, 2026

By Jessica Braatz

As someone who aged out of Juniors relatively recently, I’ve found myself drawn to the numbers. While rankings or total entries may first come to mind, my favorite statistic is actually lifetime wins, and even more so, the stories that those wins tell.

When you talk to past great juniors, the majority of them won’t tell you about their wins. They’ll tell you about the fierce competition they faced throughout their entire career–from large entries in the Novice classes, to extremely competitive Open Intermediate and Senior classes, all the way to Best Junior. To place was a good day, and to win was an honor. Those days, the entries of a single class would rival the total entries at a local show today. These previous Juniors have now gone on to campaign dogs at the highest level, and many are assets in the form of breeders, handlers, and assistants. They’ll tell you that they won 10, 20, or even 30 Best Juniors throughout their entire career. For most of them, they won’t come near the inflated numbers of today. Now, I regularly see Junior Handlers approaching “the hundred club,” a term I never would have even considered possible when I first started competing.

Even throughout my own time in Junior Showmanship, I watched as both competition and entries dwindled. I vividly remember watching the Open Senior class and Best Junior Handler at the Manatee Kennel Club show in Brooksville, Florida, when I was a Novice Junior. The juniors I watched battle it out became my icons; I wanted to be just like them. By the time I was their age, there was much less of a draw–and entry as a whole. Had we become the next generation for the youth to aspire to? Or had we all become a little more lax, with priorities shifting and judges becoming less enticing to compete under?

I want to revisit some of the past juniors whom I so admire. When asked about their time in Juniors, they describe it as a time of learning, a time of showing their puppies, new breeds, and a never-ending quest for knowledge. They raised their own dogs and pivoted to new projects when they became comfortable. Junior Showmanship was practice and preparation for careers in dogs. It was not an opportunity for a “junior’s career.”

Click here to read the complete article
208 – April, 2026

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Posted by AnthonyA on Apr 19 2026. 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.