November Community Conversation: Coaching

Thanks to our members from across Scotland who joined us on Monday evening for the final community conversation in the 2026 series. This session was focused on coaching and the issues facing coaches. We were lucky to have a wealth of coaching experience present for the discussions.

Coaching for All

The perennial problems of convincing many of the benefits of coaching was discussed. The value of coaching for attracting newcomers and beginners is well established, as well as coaching for juniors at all levels. However, many club members attend only events and are less receptive to the idea of coaching. There was much discussion as to how we could overcomer this although no magic bullet was identified!

The organic nature of growth was discussed and although numbers for coaching may seem small – as word spreads perhaps we can convince more of the benefits and fun of coaching sessions.

Area Based rather than Club based?

East Area have been combining their resources and bringing all the clubs together for coaching days which were open to all adults and juniors across all the East Area clubs. The juniors and adults were coached in separate groups with coaching available from TD 1 to 5. Although achieving 40 participants across 6 clubs can seem disheartening – this combination of club effort and resources helped to create a critical mass and create a buzz about the days. They ran 4 sessions last year and have another 4 planned for next year. The sessions were spread geographically throughout the area with one in Perth, 2 in Edinburgh and one in East Lothian to try to make them accessible to as many people as possible.

Coaching by Stealth

BASOC runs a series of Tuesday = O activities. For each session the maps and coaching notes are available online and participants are encouraged to read the notes before attending. Ideally they have a coach present for people to chat to and to facilitate coaching conversations between participants, but the set up is largely “self service” and the exercises can be undertaken at other times (apart from the Tuesday evening). This is beneficial in the winter months for those who may not appreciate Night-O. The coaching notes and exercise design mean that the participants are still receiving guidance regarding what they should be focusing on and take away messages.

Those of us from city based clubs were jealous of the fact that they can safely leave controls out for long periods, but the benefits of this approach were widely seen. It also fitted into the model of small informal coaching sessions which were suggested with peer to peer feedback and discussions.

Lead Coaches

Many clubs have a lead coach who coordinates the coaching for the whole club. However, this can lead to the scenario where all the effort and burden of planning the actual coaching sessions falls on the same person. We need to be be careful not to overload individuals and to share the experiences of planning coaching to enable the upskilling of the whole coaching workforce and to ensure we don’t create vacuums when these people move onto other opportunities.

It is also great to see Lead coaches encouraging others to start on the coaching pathway, with many of those currently undertaking the Coaching Foundation and Club Coach coming via this route.

Coaching or Training?

Or Club nights or Club Activities? Does what we call the sessions influence how many people we attract to sessions? There seemed to be a general consensus that it didn’t make much difference how we advertised – the main issue was to keep advertising until people actual paid notice and that consistent branding is always beneficial – for example Tuesday=O.

Not just Forest Coaching

Sprint orienteering continues to grow – but not the coaching for it (unless you are an elite athlete). East Area dedicated one of their 4 coaching sessions to Sprint and this was well received by attendees. A campus based setting was used so that younger juniors could still safely participate with exercises appropriate for TD1 and 2.

With the Scottish Score still fresh in the minds there was also discussion of how we can coach for non standard events such as Score.

Sharing of Resources

The benefit of club “electronic stores” of coaching materials were appreciated, where all the exercises, coaching notes and risk assessments could be stored and were then accessible to other coaches in the club to access and use as the basis of future sessions. There is often little sharing of this type of material with each coach holding all their material. Nikki was also keen to remind us that we do need to store Risk Assessments and attendance for 5 years after every coaching session!

We then discussed whether there could be sharing of these resources between clubs – with a club travelling to another area for an Away Day of coaching and utilizing coaching materials and resources that had already been used by that club.

There are plans to also make more resources available via the SOA website – but this would be more suited to generic ideas or games based ideas. The ideal platform for hosting materials was discussed but no solution identified.

Star System

FVO has used the Orienteering Star System with their juniors to record their progress against a series of criteria for each level and to determine when they could graduate to the next level. Moravian were interested in hearing more about this. There are details of the star system at https://www.scottish-orienteering.org/resources/coaches/#56-167-star-awards The 1st 2 levels were redone in the past to provide a glossier format, but the details for levels 3 and 4 are still available in the older format.

Fun and Games

The session concluded with discussion of fun and games type formats that clubs were experimenting with – particularly with festive fun sessions planned. I don’t want to give any details away but think 12 Days of Christmas, Christmas images and bonus controls! Formats to “gameify” score events were also discussed – Bingo, Poker, Suduko.

The session concluded with a promotion of the upcoming Coaching Safely in Remote Terrain Workshop on Thursday 3rd December (sign up HERE). There will also be a further opportunity to attend this workshop as part of the British Orienteering Coaching and Development Conference in January.

Thanks to everyone for your inputs. We look forward to hearing about how club and area coaching continues to grow.