Level Up Dog Sports | Main Building

I'm only giving 2 stars based on my experience, but want to acknowledge that I think this is a wonderful facility for a lot of dogs, but our experience was unfortunately not a positive one. So I'm sharing to help other dog parents who are deciding which facility to use for training. I adopted a 1 year old Mountain Cur/Rat Terrier mix from Southside SPCA. He is a wonderful dog who is very smart and eager to please and loves to learn. However, he is very easily over-excited and distracted, has zero impulse control, no recall, and wants to play with every dog he sees. These are the exact reasons we were bringing him to a basic manners class to begin with, and I was hoping that he would be able to progress to agility as a constructive outlet for his energy and a way for us to continue to bond. Despite describing his temperament on the intake form after enrolling, and looking over the website, nowhere did I see mentioned that the basic manners class takes place in the same building where dogs are running the agility course...at the same time. Immediately upon entering the building for class my dog was overly excited and anxious because there were dogs running, jumping and playing on the agility course (and many dogs bark loudly the entire time they're doing the course). I will say I LOVED our trainer Amy, she was very patient, encouraging and went out of her way to use our dog for demonstrations, which gave him some extra 1:1 training time. However, the distractions in the building were just too much and halfway through our second class we ended up having to just take our dog into a separate room to try to calm him down. Unfortunately the experience even resulted in some negative behaviors outside of class, and he began barking and lunging at dogs on our walks (not in an aggressive way, he just wanted to play with EVERY dog he sees, and his frustration from the over-stimulation at Level Up carried over into our everyday life.) We also felt a bit out of place (which may be in our heads) but we were the only people there with a mixed breed rescue dog. All the other dogs we saw were purebred and we did receive some glares from other dog owners who seemed annoyed by our "misbehaving" mutt. My partner emailed and shared our experience, and we were offered a spot in a different class (evening) which we were told would maybe be a calmer environment, but it didn't work with our schedule. We didn't receive any follow up or refund despite only attending 2 of our 6 classes. If your dog is already pretty well behaved and just needs to learn cues, this is probably a great place, but if you have a high energy or easily over-stimulated dog it might not be the right place for you.