Trainers Who Judge

A trainer on the panel can give a bad appearance to spectators if they know a judge is a trainer of someone in the show. Ideally, this should be avoided, if at all possible. However, if it is not practical to do so, or if substitute judges aren’t available for classes where judges know competitors (due to no shows or whatever other reasons), trainers or others who have a close relationship with a competitor can judge accurately and fairly. They must, however, be armed with information ahead of time about things that can compromise the accuracy of a judge’s scoring, or things that might affect their judgment subconsciously. And, of course, the person must have integrity...

Even if something slips through the cracks, there is protection from these situations. Shows typically drop the high and low scores for each competitor, so if a trainer was biased for his/her client (or was being too hard, scoring the client lower, which also happens), and the judge’s score was out of scope from the panel, the score would be dropped and not be counted in judging.

So is it fair? It certainly can be. It depends on the circumstances.

Certainly there should never be two people on a panel that have a similar relationship with a competitor. Then the risk for hanky panky becomes too much of a factor.