Entry Fees for Non Members

[Paul Frost]

I agree with a lot of what Paul Frost says, but it's good to encourage newcomers to cross into neighbouring clubs' territories now and again. If they know they'll be getting discount at those events too, it's just one more membership benefit (in theory). I therefore think it best, on balance, to apply discount no matter which club people are a member of.

But if you did get lots of other club members your surplus income would be reduced.

The most surprising thing to me about these well-attended Level D events is how few people from neighbouring clubs come to them. Just 14 non-local runs out of 375 competitors at the 3 events so far this year. Either the member discount is no incentive or there's something else putting people off.

This highlights the problem of making the discount apply to all BOF members rather than just your club. The Moravian Saturday events Mike refers to are aimed at juniors, with a limited range of courses:

As usual, there will be a short (Yellow-standard) course plus a longer course somewhere between orange and light green with a likely winning time of about 25 minutes.

So it's hardly surprising that not many nearby club orienteers travel to these. So the cost of offering a discount is minimal.

Whilst BASOC's last 4 level D events (on quality TD5 terrain, Blue, Green,Orange & Yellow courses) had an average of 58 competitors of which only 12 were BASOC members. I think almost everyone was a BOF member. We priced the events too low, thinking that they would be mostly BASOC members taking part and were happy for the club to effectively subsidise them, in the end we made a loss.
So for BASOC, with a lot of non-BASOC club members coming to our events, offering a discount to all would cost us a lot of money, whilst for Moravian it's insignificant.

[Sunlit Forres]

I don't agree that events need to have TD5 course to make them attractive to experienced orienteers. The Moravian Saturday League long course is planned in such a way to make it achievable for people at TD3-4 while providing a good race with a decent-sized field for the experienced where the emphasis is on route choice and saving seconds through the controls rather than minutes. The other aim is to reduce the organisational effort and make the events as simple as we can, providing a realistic way in which new planners can be introduced to designing courses that they've become used to running.

At the last event, there were some decent runners coming in between 30 and 35 mins - the sort of running time that decent 10K road runners will travel for. Also consider you often get indoor facilities, refreshments and a good social thrown in. To my way of thinking a good orienteering event is about more than just what's between the start and the finish.

In the end it's whatever works best for individual clubs, and this seems to work for Moravian.

[greywolf]

The Moravian Saturday events Mike refers to are aimed at juniors.

No, they're aimed at orienteers who like to race and be sociable and aren't precious about age categories or "TD5" orienteering being the only proper version of the sport
Even in Scotland much of what's notionally badged as TD5 isn't - don't think I had a single TD5 leg at last weekend's SOL and much of my course at INVOC's recent event at Anagach was TD4 - didn't stop them being enjoyable events or prevent me stuffing up!

[Paul Frost]

Mike, I'm not knocking the Moravian formula, as you say, it's working for you.
I was only suggesting why you might not be getting experienced orienteers from other clubs travelling any distance to take part (which your statistics show). Plus highlighting the difference in the percentage of non-locals at BASOC events compared to Moravian events and the impact of discounting all BOF members.

If they were closer I wouldn't be averse to participating, but I don't feel they are tempting enough to spend 2 hours in the car for. Whereas quite a lot of people have travelled a lot further for the opportunity to run around places like Loch Vaa and Inshriach on TD5 courses.

Greywolf, I based my comment on the fact that 60% of participants are juniors and 33% are not members of an orienteering club. I also agree that age class and technical difficulty are irrelevant to having a good experience.

To Both, I'm just trying to highlight that different clubs have different audiences. My analysis was to explain why I think that a discount policy to encourage membership should apply to club members rather than all orienteers, rather than knock what Moravian are doing.

[Sunlit Forres]

Enjoyed that exchange but I think I'll knock my posts on the head now before it gets to parochial. I love BASOC's events which make a nice contrast to our own and long may the balance continue.

I do think that the reluctance of 'mainstream' orienteers to compromise is one of the reasons that orienteering hasn't reached the potential that I'm 100% convinced it has.