Mark Muir and his dog Gipper visit with Falcons head coach Mike Smith last year.
Disc dogs to perform halftime show
Pike County’s most popular border collies will be part of the halftime show for the Atlanta Falcons last home game Jan. 2. Their owner and renowned dog trainer Mark Muir will take the dogs from their Concord home to the dome early in the morning on the day of the game.
“We have to arrive at 9 a.m. on game day and we get to park under the dome. We have a dressing room next to both teams,” Muir said. “The players and coaches are all around us. At approximately 10 a.m. we have the field all to ourselves to practice. It is pretty cool because a lot of the players and coaches come out there and stretch and they love playing with the dogs also.”
The Georgia Irish Disc Dogs have won four World Championships and were runners up three times. The halftime show for the last regular season game was selected by a fan vote. Muir and his disc dogs will perform for fans of a playoff-bound team as the Falcons battle the Carolina Panthers.
For more on this story, read the Dec. 29 print/e-edition of the Pike County Journal Reporter.
To subscribe, click here.
The Georgia Irish Disc Dogs have won four World Championships and were runners up three times. The halftime show for the last regular season game was selected by a fan vote. Muir and his disc dogs will perform for fans of a playoff-bound team as the Falcons battle the Carolina Panthers.
For more on this story, read the Dec. 29 print/e-edition of the Pike County Journal Reporter.
To subscribe, click here.
Thank you for the very nice article. My wife and I moved to Pike County appx 20 months ago and have loved it bigtime. The people of Pike County have been so nice to us. We decided to move down here when I knew I needed a little more property to train the dogs and we had always heard so many great things about Pike and so here we are.
Hopefully in the future we will be able to do some more local shows with the dogs. In 2011 We are headed to Spain,Italy,Argentina,Canada and maybe Australia also for either shows or seminars and we always mention where we are from.
In the sport some might ask so your dog catches a frisbee/Disc I have to share it is a little more then that. There are appx 10,000 teams across the world and people either Compete for Titles or they do shows or they do seminars we do a lot of each but prefer competing the most.
In a competition you have like appx a little over 2 minutes to do as many tricks as you can, then you have a timed distance round to pick up more points then you have a second round of "freestyle" the Tricks. You have four judges, One judges the Canine, One judges the human, One judges you as a team and a fourth judges your throws vs catch percentage then the scores are added up. There are three main organizations across the world and we compete in all of them. Normally at the World Championships they get down to the top 50 teams around the world, usually 12 or more different countries are represented after all the qualifying events and you compete for the World Championships.
A lot of people love to do shows due to their is a lot of money to be made in doing shows for a living. You have to think there are thousands of Carnivals and fairs etc who hire frisbee dogs for shows.
Then there is also something I love to do and that is after my number one love of competing I love to do seminars outside of the USA, It is a great way to teach the sport plus some pretty neat paid vacations.
I dont know what my future holds. I have been a Fire Fighter for 20 plus years and I love my job but maybe in 6 or 7 years I will retire and do something in the sport of frisbee dogging fulltime.
Some ask why do we use the word "DISC" over frisbee well Wham O has a patent thing on the word and we are not allowed to use it that much especially if we are trying to make a profit off of the word somehow.
I just wanted to tell the people of Pike County, seriously my wife and I want to thank all of you for the incredible warm welcome we have received since we have lived here. We have met so many great people and look forward to meeting many more.
Thanks again
Mark and Stacey Muir
ROCKET AND GIPPER AND IRISH AND THUNDER
www.georgiairishdiscdogs.com
There is a video at the website above on the front page if you kind of want to see what we do.