Smith Training Equipment Dog Sport Facility
hi my name’s Sheena I’m the building
manager here at Smith training facility
and Abbotsford BC our business is we’re
a dog sport facility so what we do is we
accommodate a variety of dog sports in
the BC Lower Mainland for people mainly
agility but we do offer the space for a
couple of other activities dog obedience
there’s a new game called pullers which
I’ve never played it sounds kind of
interesting and so they’ll be doing some
training here for that as well but
primarily dog agility is what we focused
on we do accommodate pretty much the
whole dog sport community in the Lower
Mainland at least for agility so there’s
probably several hundred people that use
the building on a regular basis
an average event will probably have 300
runs a day so you’re looking at you know
six hundred people it’s been really
challenging for the dog sport community
to find somewhere to hold their events
and trials so this was put up
specifically to meet that need within
the dog sport community so without it
there would be a lot less trials and a
lot less training when this got put out
people who were very very excited it’s
reasonably centrally located and can
accommodate quite a number of people we
did have a small outdoor training field
that we rented out but the seasonally
dependent you can’t use it and really
hot weather really cold weather storage
of equipment was an issue now we have a
completely enclosed building people can
train pretty much year-round and they
can do it from early in the morning till
late at night so it’s been great there
are a couple of large roll-up doors so
that enables us to access the building
with the tractor to broom the floors
bring the equipment in and out as
necessary we’ve got – in and out doors
so that people aren’t trying to pass one
another with dogs in the same door and
we’ve got lighting that we installed so
the building can be opened late at night
and throughout the winter months as well
as
humidity sensor so we have some fans
that come on and some events that open
up when it gets too high in here in
terms of humidity there were a couple of
factors that were important to the owner
one of them was the amount available
natural light so the building what’s in
quite a bit of natural lighting as well
as we wanted to maximize the square
footage so as much usage without
anything in the way that would impede
the use of the building it’s been great
it’s booked almost solid all the time
we’ve got a wait list for trainers who
want to hold classes in here
there are definitely months where not a
single weekend is free from a booking
it’s been great it’s it’s been a
wonderful addition to the business it’s
really interesting to see on social
media and stuff you know people talking
about you know oh I’m looking for
somewhere to Train and you know can
anyone recommend a trainer and then
somebody will recommend a trainer and
then you know probably more than half
the time that trainer teaches here at
Smith training building so yeah
you
