Meet the Trainers

PattyEmery-Ypya

Patty brings organization and leadership to our team. Patty has spent many years working with sporting dogs.

Here we need to brag a little bit. Patty and her dogs have competed at very high levels in different disciplines. She placed at worlds in the Toss & Fetch league, against participants all over the country. On top of that Patty, has competed in Worlds at the Dock Dogs end of the year championship competition, along with making it to Nationals with several of her dogs for the North American Diving Dogs.

Patty continues to further her education, with Michael Ellis School of Dog trainers.

Benji Wilson

Benji. what can we say about Benji and his extremely calm soul? Not only is he a lover of all animals' folks, but he trains coon dogs for coon dog trials all throughout Missouri.

Have you ever met a dog, who is either really scared of you, or any humans really? Well don’t worry, in a few short minutes with Benji your dog will have a best friend for life.

He has also competed with the best of the best in Sky Houndz and Up Dogs. Along with this, Benji works with dogs training them to be around and work with livestock.

Steve Matulevich

Steve Matulevich brings the toughness of a Marine to our training team, but along with his softer side, the dogs become his little baby love bug.

Not only does he enjoy crayons for his diet, but Steve also known as Steve the decoy, takes many bites from highly trained dogs, as he has been training for 18 years working with both law enforcement and Military working dogs, and brings so much wealth of knowledge to this amazing team

Harlie Rodriguez

Harlie Rodriguez’s love for dogs started before she was out of diapers. Harlie grew up learning from some great hunting dog trainers. Her first grand night champion coon dog being Annie. Working cattle dogs soon became her passion and took her training in a new direction.

Harlie is now a professional trainer and travels the state with her K9, Zeppi, conducting narcotic searches.

Harlie still maintains her cattle dogs at home and is active in dog sports. She is still enjoying dock diving with her 2016 Dock Dogs world champion dog.

Daniel Burkett

Daniel has experience in agility, rally, obedience, barn hunt, and became a decoy after attending a dead pool decoy camp. He is also learning bite work.

He's been an avid animal lover his entire life. When he was young, Daniel had a speech impediment, and if you didn’t know him personally; you would have been unable to understand anything he said. This drew him to dogs, because he could connect with them without having to say much.

Daniel started working at vet clinics when he was in high school and after a few run ins with problem case dogs, he learned he was able to help. This helped him find his passion and life purpose in dog training.

Lindsey Shipley

Lindsey was raised on her family's ranch and has always been around animals, so she didn't have much of a choice but to be an animal lover. She has always had a dog that was a family companion, but she also had animal guardian dogs and coon hunting dogs. She loved going out hunting with her grandfather and dad, who taught her a lot about how to work with dogs.

Lindsey loves working with dogs, but also enjoys teaching people techniques of how to have dogs learn from them to achieve the desired goal.

She is also getting into other dog sports, such as Toss and Fetch and Dock Diving.