By Louise Adams – SOA Development Officer
The 2025 Scottish Schools Orienteering Festival brought together over 350 pupils from across the country for a day of activity, adventure, and fun. This year, we invited schools to share their own reflections on the event — from training and preparation to the experience on the day itself. Read on to hear from two schools who took part.
Read More…On Thursday June 5, Pittencrieff Park in Dunfermline welcomed pupils from all across Scotland, hosting the much-anticipated Scottish Schools Orienteering Festival. This year’s event was a resounding success, bringing together almost 400 enthusiastic pupils to showcase their navigational skills, sportsmanship and teamwork.
Scottish Orienteering Association is committed to clean sport and supported UK Anti-Doping’s (UKAD’s) Clean Sport Week campaign from 19 – 23 May.
The Jamie Stevenson Trophy is an annual inter-club competition for junior orienteers in Scotland. This year the competition will take place at The Hill of Alyth, on Sunday 15th June. This is a great event for juniors of all abilities to meet, socialise and compete against each other. There will be a parade, warm-up and challenges for all to enjoy as well as the orienteering. In 2024 approximately 110 juniors from 12 clubs took part.
Hopefully by now, you’ve got the date in your diary for this year’s Scottish Schools Orienteering Festival. If not, here’s another reminder!
Organising seems to strike fear into the hearts of the most stout orienteers but is an essential job for all events. Have you ever wanted to help out your club by organising an event but have been put off by the seeming complexity of the job? Well, help is at hand – 2 levels of courses for adults and juniors (16+) have been devised to demystify the whole process and equip you – yes, You – to organise a Level D or local event.
The first presentation of this course last year was very well received and we are anxious to equip more potential organisers to do a great job.
The Scottish Schools Orienteering Festival is back for 2025 and this year will be held at Pittencrieff Park in Dunfermline. It will be on Thursday 5th June so make sure to save the date! A huge thanks are extended to Kingdom of Fife Orienteers for giving permission to use this area and for providing the organiser and planner for the event.
Read More…Make sure you don’t miss out on any selection opportunities this year. We have gathered them all together in one place.
Read More…In an effort to assist clubs and individuals to plan training to qualify volunteers and keep them up to date, we have gradually been moving towards a more predictable training programme that will run on an annual cycle. Obviously this will have to incorporate a degree of flexibility to accommodate the events calendar, school and university holidays but on the whole we will try and run the same courses at more or less the same time every year.
At the 2024 interarea weekend, we held a feedback session for our juniors to express their thoughts and opinions on orienteering for juniors in Scotland. They were given 4 topics to discuss: social opportunities, communication (juniors to SOA and SOA to juniors) and prizes. The overarching theme was that orienteering needs to be made more social for juniors by providing more opportunities for them to socialise outwith their clubs.
