Today, I went to one of our Sunday Series level C "district" events.
On the BOF fixture list it's described as:
"SAX District Event. Sun 27th Nov 2016
Venue:Ightham, Nearest town:Borough Green, Club:SAX, Association:SEOA, Level:Level C"
That doesn't sound very exciting.
Unfortunately the event isn't part of a regional competition such as the South East League. Except that it's part of a national competition that's generates arguably much more interest than the regional competitions - the ranking list. The competition guarentees a level of quality since it's only level A/B/C so there must be a controller. And no matter where you are, everyone has the chance to be Britain's Number 1. *
My suggestions are that
1. All level A, B and C events are automatically "National League" events (better names quite likely).
2. On the BOF event list, all levels A, B and C events automatically have "National League" (or better name) labelled somehow in the event listings.
3. We make more of the the ranking lists by giving out annual prizes at the JK etc eg.
- first in selected age categories
- most improved
- highest points etc.
(unless we do this already?)
4. We make more of the ranking lists by publishing a National League "scores of the day" page on the BOF website which lists everyone's scores on one page, most improved runners, best scores adjusted by age etc.
What do you think?
* especially over the past few weeks
Underselling the sport
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Re: Underselling the sport
Most experienced orienteers will know what an event will be like by the location and details on the event website.
Details on the BOF website can be brief but the club website that it's linked to usually has loads (often too much if you're wanting to print final details) of stuff.
Orienteering prize givings at large events go on for long enough in my opinion.
I don't care about rankings. I only really measure my performance against a handful of orienteers and don't care how well I do against people I don't know.
I think we could be better at publicising what an excellent sport it is to people who have never tried it, but unfortunately it is also quite a complex sport (initially) and local newspapers are often hard to get interested unless you do lots of photos preferably with kids in and most of us have limited time to spend on promoting the sport; but this is the one area I think "we" could improve on (but by we I mean other people as I hate that sort of thing).
I should add that publicity and trying to interest new people in the sport was the main thing our club development officer concentrated on whilst she was in post. She was successful at this, but put in a lot of effort and I think orienteering will always have a limited audience due to the fact that you have to have to put some effort in to learning how to do it and it isn't seen as a "cool" sport.
Details on the BOF website can be brief but the club website that it's linked to usually has loads (often too much if you're wanting to print final details) of stuff.
Orienteering prize givings at large events go on for long enough in my opinion.
I don't care about rankings. I only really measure my performance against a handful of orienteers and don't care how well I do against people I don't know.
I think we could be better at publicising what an excellent sport it is to people who have never tried it, but unfortunately it is also quite a complex sport (initially) and local newspapers are often hard to get interested unless you do lots of photos preferably with kids in and most of us have limited time to spend on promoting the sport; but this is the one area I think "we" could improve on (but by we I mean other people as I hate that sort of thing).
I should add that publicity and trying to interest new people in the sport was the main thing our club development officer concentrated on whilst she was in post. She was successful at this, but put in a lot of effort and I think orienteering will always have a limited audience due to the fact that you have to have to put some effort in to learning how to do it and it isn't seen as a "cool" sport.
- frog
Re: Underselling the sport
I don't care about rankings. I only really measure my performance against a handful of orienteers
This is actually one of the things the rankings list does rather well - you can ignore as many others as you want and see how you compare with your selected peers!
And I agree with SeanC that we are underselling our rankings events and could/should do more to promote their incentive value.
The case for doing so is not strong at the moment however as we are going through a well-documented period where mickey mouse points are sometimes awarded. But we think we are now on top of the correctable errors causing this and hope that we can return to reliability soon.
We all saw how significant it was when Andy Murray reached the top of the world tennis rankings recently. If our own much more humble rankings attracted just a fraction of this interest amongst competitors, we might get a welcome boost to participation ...
- DJM
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