The Master National Retriever Club wants to thank the young men from Triumph Youth Services who worked the Master National event all week. This Retriever Training Program, founded in 1998, is a part of the Triumph Academy, a fully accredited Junior and Senior High School.
Founder Sterling Lyman says he and partner Bruce Humphries taught the youth in the program how to train, and work with retrievers. They also learned the Bird Boy skills and often work at local hunt tests.
Lyman says while the retriever training community is filled with amazing and passionate people willing to share advice and knowledge while helping anyway they can. Of course it was an added bonus for people training with us to have an abundance of young, energetic and strong boys around to help out which they were happy to do in trade for knowledge and the privilege to be around all of the dogs and good people. By that first spring we (TYS) were helping at all of the picnic tests, hunt tests and field trials. Before long we built kennels and developed a voluntary retriever training program to teach boys how to raise, care for and train retrievers as part of their therapeutic process.
The retriever program has grown and become one of if not the most impactful parts of our program as a whole. At one time for several years, they also owned and operated a large upland hunting club and small waterfowl hunting club where the boys also learned to raise and care for birds, guide upland hunters and hunt upland and waterfowl with their dogs (we still raise upland birds on a much smaller scale specifically for training). They have had many boys go on to train professionally and a great many who still train and run hunt tests and field trials, while others have gone on to find careers working with dogs in other training capacities.
Congratulations to Triumph Youth Services and it was a pleasure to have you with us at the Master National this year.
