Following a break for the summer, the next members’ monthly online Community Conversation is on Monday 8th September (7.30 to 8.30pm) and you can now sign up to attend by signing up on the September 2025 community conversation sign up.
Event access and permissions are becoming more challenging. Come along and let us know if there is something we can do to support you, resources which would be helpful or simply if it would be helpful to talk through an access or permission issue.
Club Networking Day taking place between 10am and 4pm on 6th September 2025 at North Inch Community Campus in Perth. Book your spot now!
One of the key strategic aims identified within the Scottish Orienteering Strategy was to the need to provide lifelong pathways for progression within orienteering. Having structured pathways for recreational orienteers, performance athletes and volunteers allows people to identify opportunities to improve their skills or indeed opportunities to develop new skills within the sport. For most of us the feeling of getting better, improving our skills helps to keep us engaged in our sport.
As part of this and as a result of discussions with clubs, we have held what we hope is the first of many Adult Beginner training days and are about to advertise for a new Scottish Elite and Development Squad co-ordinator who we hope will help provide training to Adult Improvers alongside training for existing young adults within the orienteering. This can only ever compliment all the hard work which is being done within clubs to encourage newcomers and retain existing orienteers.
We are however aware that there is a lot of great work going on within the Scottish Orienteering community to foster lifelong learning. In order to allow clubs to have the opportunity to discuss and learn from each other, about how we can, should and are helping to develop our members skills both as orienteers and volunteers we are proposing that this year’s Club Networking Day should focus on Lifelong Progression.
The four main themes for the day will be:-
Helping adult and junior beginners develop TD3/4 skills
Developing volunteers
Communication and how we can improve/ learn from each other
Small/ Large clubs – allowing clubs of similar sizes and perhaps similar opportunities/ challenges the space to swap ideas
The aim of the day will be to provide opportunities for members from all of our clubs to come together and learn from each other. There will be refreshments (tea/coffee/ cake/lunch) provided and an orienteering activity at lunchtime to get everyone moving.
This opportunity to come and exchange ideas is not just limited to committee members or post holders. We welcome participation from any club members young and old, veterans or newbies who feel that they have a contribution to make. There will be Staff and Board teams present to support the day but the main purpose of the day is to provide the opportunity for clubs and members to exchange ideas on how we create an environment for lifelong participation and progression.
The SOA Board is responsible for the governance of orienteering in Scotland. Much of the work is behind the scenes, navigating challenges, avoiding issues where possible and managing those that might arise – whilst they can certainly make life interesting at times, resolving them can be very satisfying. Examples since I joined the board 7 years ago have included:
regularly making the case for the ca. £100,000 pa of government finance that we receive;
managing through COVID as we became one of the first sports to be allowed to operate again and getting permission to run the first large outdoor event post COVID (the Scottish 6 Days 2021);
securing, financing and putting on the Sprint World Championships.
Last weekend Scottish Orienteering ran a beginners day at Cammo Estate, Edinburgh. The purpose of the day was to encourage newcomers to the sport by offering a days coaching. The coaching started by focusing on most basic orienteering skills building up towards TD4.
Participants were from a mix of backgrounds and wanted to try orienteering for a wide range of reasons, from wanting to improve their navigation for hill races to being interested in trying new outdoor activities. We had 8 participants on the day.
