The SOA Financial Statements for the year to 31 December 2025 have now been finalised and approved, and are attached. A finance report to accompany these accounts will be included in the AGM papers.
We are notifying all members of our intended Annual General Meeting date of Monday 14th September 2026. The Annual General Meeting will be held online at 7pm. There will be a proxy vote option for those unable to attend.
Read More…Thank you to BASOC and GRAMP for their stellar work in hosting the recent Scottish Orienteering League (SOL) events which provided very different areas to test our skills. Results can be found on the Scottish Orienteering League page
This area provided a lovely mix of birch woodland, grazed farm land and open moorland with areas of intricate contour detail, crags and boulders, dense juniper and ruins to test our concentration. Despite being the weekend after the JK the organization was seamless. Thank you to the Organiser Janette MacLeod, Planner Jane Chisholm and Controller David Esson (GRAMP).
Read More…It has been a strong year for our regional squads, with regular East and West junior training sessions and re-establishing North area training. The regional squads offer valuable coaching opportunities for juniors at TD3 level and above. These sessions allow juniors to develop their skills while connecting with other juniors. Discover more about what our squads have been up to this year.
The last Scottish Orienteering Urban League (SOUL) event of 2025 was hosted by Edinburgh Southern Orienteering Club at Newhaven this year and saw the 2025 SOUL League winners receiving their trophies.
Read More…Last night, we held our December Community Conversation focused on safety within our sport. The meeting was led by the Scottish Orienteering Association Safety Director, Tim O’Donoghue, who shared updates regarding how safety is managed at the British Orienteering Federation (BOF) level and learnings which could be taken from incidents reported.
Read More…With lots of calls on all our member’s expenditure at this time of year we are grateful to those who have renewed their SOA membership ( 2026 membership opened on 1st November) – either through British Orienteering or direct through SI entries. Did you know that you could give SOA an additional gift this festive period at no cost to yourself if you are a UK taxpayer?
If you are a UK taxpayer and have signed the Gift Aid form, the UK government will pay an extra 25p for every £1 of your membership fee?
Gift Aid is a simple government initiative which allows you to increase the value of your donations at no extra cost to you. HM Revenue and Customs regards membership subscriptions as ‘donations. Therefore, the SOA can claim Gift Aid on your membership fees.
Those who renewed through SI Entries will have had the opportunity to consider providing a Gift Aid donation but there are at least 450 senior members who join through BOF who have never signed a Gift Aid declaration. Did you know that means for every senior member, who is a UK taxpayer, the SOA could claim £3 in Gift Aid and we can claim for up to four years previous membership fees.
It takes less than 5 minutes of your time and only needs one form filled in, with your name and address, and sent to our finance director. If you are a UK taxpayer and would like to sign up for gift aid please use this link to complete the Gift Aid Declaration
Thank you!
The November session in the SOA’s monthly online Community Conversations series focused on the crucial topic of supporting and developing our volunteer base, including our pipeline of event officials. This is of course core to delivering on our mission for orienteering to be a thriving sport for all.
One of Scottish Orienteering’s four strategic aims (read more here) is around lifelong pathways, and a new one for Volunteers was published earlier this year (Lifetime Pathways infograms) (many thanks to Jen Leonard, FVO, for developing the original pathways graphic). This sets out clearly for everyone what the opportunities look like and how to progress.
How can SOA and clubs best work together to encourage and engage members as club volunteers, to drive positive developments for orienteering, at all levels? Some of the foundations might be around training and sharing technical information; however, a great deal is around the ‘people’ side of things.
Read More…2025 has provided some exciting opportunities for our juniors at all levels. With Edinburgh Southern Orienteering Club having just hosted the successful 2025 British School Orienteering Championships it seemed like an appropriate time to reflect on the junior year and the opportunities available to our Scottish juniors at all levels in 2026.
The focus can often be on performance as that is easy to measure but when we asked two of our successful juniors to reflect on their year you will see it is not just the competitive elements of our sport which they highlighted.
Read More…Congratulations to the following juniors who have been selected to be part of the Scottish Junior Orienteering Squad (ScotJOS) for 2025/26.
The ScotJOS team are looking forward to working with the new squad members to support their orienteering development and we hope to have a lot of fun along the way as well as plenty of hard work.
On Sunday 16 November, in the stunning grounds of Hopetoun House near Edinburgh, Edinburgh Southern Orienteering Club hosted the British Schools Orienteering Championships for the first time in Scotland since 2011. Around 340 pupils competed, with approximately 220 from Scottish schools, making it a fantastic showcase of pupils from across the country. The weather couldn’t have been better, with blue sky for miles and not a cloud in sight, providing perfect conditions for competitors, spectators and volunteers alike.
