Tamara Stimatze, PhD, has worked with animals most of her life. Her degrees in psychology developed her understanding of animal behavior and training principles, such as positive reinforcement. Tamara has trained in agility for seven years, currently competing at the masters and excellent level with two of her dogs. Tamara has a lot of experience with a variety of dogs through her work fostering, transporting, and rescuing animals. She has experience working with reactivity and behavior modification within her own rescue dogs. Tamara uses a balanced and creative approach in dog training to help bring out the best in every dog and team!

Denise Maggard has been teaching in some capacity for over 30 years. She started training horses and giving riding lessons professionally when she was 17. She still has a small private group of students and horses in training. She and her husband owned a martial arts school for 20 years and were the primary instructors. Both are 4th degree black belts in Chinese Kenpo Karate.

Denise has been training in agility for six years and competes at the master and excellent level with one of her dogs. Her first agility dog was an amazing Rottweiler, but she did have reactivity issues, so Denise has experience working through those issues. Her current competition dog is a border collie who is very high drive and fast, which has helped her expand her handling capabilities. She is also bringing up another border collie who is more thoughtful, so between her three dogs, she has learned many different training techniques and is looking forward to sharing them with her students.