Scottish Orienteering

Jason Inman says:

Excellent submission Scott.  The only mistake I can spot is the reference to the 6 day “festival” - rotating every 12 years…...... 

Aside from this, it’s an excellent piece.

With support of Active Stirling I have been fortunate enought to introduce orienteering to over 150 P7 schoolkids over the last few weeks.  FVO’s challenge now is to capture some of this into the club system….

Scott Fraser says:

Firstly, thanks very much for your comments. 
Before going on I can acknowledge that it would be possible to misinterpret the wording as suggesting the 6-Days is held every 12 years (which I assume is what you alluded to).
Earlier in the paragraph we refer to a ‘weeklong International Orienteering Festival, which has been held in alternate years since 1977’ i.e. every 2 years.
The 6-Day typically moves around Scotland and returns to an area/region every 12 years (e.g. Royal Deeside 1993 & 2005, Strathspey 1995 & Spey 2007)*.  However, this is not completely fixed as it is important to let new areas/initiatives to be introduced e.g. World Champs.
‘Festival’ was used in our consultation as it was intended for the non-orienteer and the term was felt to be more representative than 6-Day ‘Event’.  It is also a term used by the 6-Day for sponsorship reasons e.g. Spey 2007.

Good luck with the Active Stirling initiative.

*For a full list of the previous 6-Day events see:  http://www.scottish6days.com/home/about/results-77-to-07

Mike Rodgers says:

It’s good to see such a well-informed and comprehensive submission from SOA to this important inquiry, and I’d like to congratulate Scott on a great piece of work.  It puts my meagre offering into its place!

I’m very interested to hear how Jason gets on with attracting some of his 150 P7s into mainstream O.  It’s still early days for us up here in Moray, but we’re finding that getting kids involved during school time is one thing while getting them to events at weekends is quite another!  That said, we’re grinding away and gradually we’re starting to see an increase in awareness and attendance at events.  At last year’s Forres Schools champs we discovered 3 young lads with a bit of talent and they became one of our mini-relay teams at the British Champs.  They came within 2 seconds of the gold medal and 2 of these 11 year old are now running light green!  Constant exposure in the local paper is important, and we’re trying to make sure there’s a local event every month so that parents don’t have to travel miles to get their kids to events.

Our Active Schools Co-ordinators are very good at publicising our events within their schools, but very few kids come along as a direct result of that.  It does help to increase awareness, but most newcomers are brought by others who have tried it and liked it.  The secret is to really encourage those who do turn up and make sure they’re looked after and made to feel welcome - they’re sure to tell their mates.  Hence we always try to make sure we have plenty club members at our mini-events to socialise, help, advise and generaly enthuse about the sport.

One thing that does seem to work well is to have taster events prior to schools champs using the same competiton map.  We’ve done this at Forres using the Grant Park map and this resulted in over half of the kids who ran for their school coming to evening events with their parents beforehand.  It really helps the youngsters to do better at the school champs proper, imroving their confidence with the map no end and making the event much more enjoyable - and successful - for them.  With the Moray Schools Orienteering Festival due to be held at Gordonstoun on 24 April, we’ve managed to secure permission to hold a weekend taster event on the school’s O map on 22 February, and it will be interesting to see how many turn up.

Private Schools are under increasing pressure from the government to make contributions to the local community in order to retain their charitable status, and with these schools often having fabulous gorunds that are ideal for schools orienteering, this is worth investigating for clubs who are working with council-run schools (if you have a private school in your area that is).  They might well be keen on having thir own school map drawn - and have the funds to pay for it as well.

Good luck with the Active Stirling initiative Jason, and to anyone else out there doing similar things.