# The trainer marked one class, not the whole dog

> A training-class scorecard printed across the back, six rows of dots filled unevenly, because the sheet a trainer fills in only ever rates one evening in a hall.

August 22, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-trainers-scorecard

Six rows run shoulder to shoulder across the back. Each starts with a small dog, drawn plain and
black: sitting, standing, walking level with a pair of legs, running, lying down, easy on a lead.
Beside every dog, a row of circles in olive and chalk white.

Some rows run nearly solid olive. Others sit mostly chalk white, filled in only here and there.

## Why does a scorecard read as a portrait when it isn't drawn as one?

Because the six dogs on it aren't six different dogs — they're the same one, doing six different
things, and a reader's eye assembles that into a single animal without being told to.

A trainer filling in a sheet like this isn't drawing a picture. They're marking what happened, row
by row, in the order the class ran the exercises. The dots are the record. The dog icons are just
labels for which row is which. Put together on a shirt, though, six poses of one dog read as a
sequence — sit, stand, heel, recall, down, loose lead — and the unevenness in the dots starts to
look like a character sketch, even though it's a record of forty minutes, not a verdict on him.

## What does a mostly-empty row actually mean?

Less than it looks like it means. A weak row records a bad heel on a specific Tuesday, not a dog
who can't walk beside somebody.

A car door slams outside the hall. Another dog barks mid-exercise. The trainer's own count is off
by a beat. A close-work exercise like heeling gets hit hardest by anything happening nearby, because
it depends on the dog choosing to ignore everything else in the room, and rooms are never actually
empty of things worth noticing. A scorecard tells you what happened under one set of conditions on
one evening. It was never built to tell you what a dog can do in general — that's a different
document, closer to a training log kept over months than a single class sheet.

## What's the difference between a good scorecard and a busy one?

Restraint. The whole point is that a trainer working through a class in real time has no spare
attention for anything except the mark itself.

That's why the six rows carry no numbers, no headings, no names for the exercises beyond the icon —
a working sheet from an actual class wouldn't either, because whoever's filling it in is watching a
dog, not writing a caption. The unevenness across rows does the only work that needs doing. Circles
filled in five different amounts, five different ways, say more about one specific evening than any
written note could, and they say it in the half-second it actually took to make the mark.

## Who owns the format of a class scorecard?

Nobody. Rows, dots and a category down the side is a record-keeping shape used by every trainer,
gym and coach who has ever had to grade a session in real time — it belongs to the method, not to
any one instructor.

A specific school's actual letterhead, its logo or its named trainer's own sheet is theirs, the
same as anyone's branded paperwork, and reproducing that would need their permission. An invented
sheet with generic icons and no name on it sidesteps that question entirely, and it arguably reads
as more accurate anyway — a real trainer's handwriting on a real class night, without borrowing
one specific instructor's name to make it feel more official than it needs to.

## Does the same shape work for a different kind of class?

Yes — [the exact vocabulary a working dog answers to](/stories/working-dog-shirt) makes an
equally good set of rows for a herding or agility class, and the six categories change completely:
weave, contact, table, jump, tunnel, dogwalk, whatever the discipline actually scores.

A single dog across multiple weeks of the same class works too, one shirt per session if the
household wants a set, each with its own uneven pattern of dots. [A ruled week kept at home instead
of in a hall](/stories/pet-behaviour-chart) is the same idea pointed at ordinary days rather
than a class — categories down the side, marks filled in as the days go, no titles needed because
the shape explains itself.

## Doesn't reducing him to six rows misrepresent him?

It would, if the sheet claimed to. It doesn't — it's a record of one class, not a summary of the
dog, and the difference is the entire reason it's interesting to look at rather than reductive.

[A record made by a stranger the week he arrived](/stories/rescue-dog-shirt) works the same
way: it's plain about what it is, a document written by somebody else under specific conditions,
not a complete account of the animal. A scorecard that pretended to rate the whole dog would be a
worse design and a less accurate one. One that plainly rates one evening gets to be both.

## Does it print well?

Cleanly — flat icons and solid circles are close to the simplest artwork this fabric reproduces,
and the whole design is built from repeating one small unit six times.

Two flat inks plus the garment colour showing through as the third tone is the entire palette here:
black for the dog icons, olive for filled circles, and unfilled circles read as chalk white against
khaki. Nothing in the design depends on gradient or fine line work, so it holds its edges through
repeated washing the way a genuinely printed record would.

## How do I get one made?

Describe him at [JustOG](/) — the exercises a class of his actually covers, and how the marks
should fall row to row. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real
garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Forty minutes in a hall, six rows of dots, and none of them are trying to be the whole dog.