About Angela

Angela Watson (Just Train The Dog)

Just Train The Dog is run by Angela who started competing in obedience in 2011 and has achieved high levels of success with her golden retrievers. She competed at Crufts in 2016 and has since qualified Hanans Golden Liberty @Wygulmut (Berty) to compete in the championship class in competitive obedience.

Angela is a Kennel Club Judge for obedience and is the resident guest trainer for the obedience competition class at Basingstoke and District Dog Club. She is also founding member of Micheldever Obedience Training Club and the Micheldever Open Show.

Alongside her dog sport career, Angela is a Certified Executive Coach, and Master Trainer in Executive Coaching. She has 20 years’ experience coaching and training thousands of people in high-pressure performance environments. This background informs her approach to competitive obedience, and she understands both ends of the lead better than most.

Angela now tours her obedience workshops around the UK as well as providing outdoor obedience lessons and workshops at Angela’s Paddock, in Aldermaston, Berkshire.

Me and My Training Background.

I know what it’s like to dream of having a dog that’s a joy to live with, loves training, and takes you to the very top.

I’m fortunate to experience this with my dogs.

But it wasn’t always this way…

I came to dog sports later in life.

I didn’t get my first dog until I was in my forties. But it was through trying to find someone to help me with my adolescent golden retriever, Harry, in 2011 that I was introduced to competitive obedience and positive training. I was immediately hooked! I just needed to learn how to do it.

My love for dogs began when I brought home my first puppy – a golden retriever called Lucy. Like many other first-time dog owners, I thought ‘OMG…how on earth am I going to train this creature? So I enrolled us in puppy classes, fell in love with training her – and within a year I was running the pet obedience classes at the club!

Two years later, Harry arrived. He was was the perfect puppy. Bright and biddable. But as adolescence kicked in we were asked to leave dog club because he was ‘too much’. I refused to use aversive methods to ‘manage’ him and for a long time walks, training, and life felt like a constant battle.

Well-meaning trainers told me to rehome him. I felt as if I was failing him. Eventually I found the right help. What started out as a desperate search for answers turned into a commitment to learning and a passion (ok, obsession) for competitive obedience.

With the obedience foundations in place, Harry worked his way through the classes from Pre-Beginner to Class B, qualified for the Obreedience Finals and competed at Crufts in 2016.

Over the years, I’ve raised 4 golden retrievers, trained 3 of them to competition level in Obedience, and in 2025 I qualified Hanans Golden Liberty (AKA Berty) to compete in the championship class.

I spent 20 years of my coaching career teaching the mental elements of performance excellence, combined with 15 years learning the technical and physical elements of competitive obedience. I’ve judged hundreds of teams, been judged by the best, and trained with the top instructors.

Along the way, I noticed that I trained my dog better and worked my best rounds when I wasn’t thinking much about what I was doing, or concerned with outcomes and scores. Interestingly, I also noticed that whether I felt confident or not, had very little bearing on my performance or the results.

This simple realisation changed everything.

This has shaped how I train, how I compete, how I prepare dogs for competition, and how I coach other sports dog handlers, trainers, and competitors.

From this, I developed my signature workshop Just Train The Dog.

The simple truth behind dog sport excellence.