10 pet hates about orienteering

[EddieH]

Sounds of dubious advantage to me. I know many children on yellow ignore the contours, but as they are going to progress this is surely something they do start to look at even if before and after they actually run.

Similarly why change the colours, becuse the stepup to orange is huge (look at last Sunday's INVOC Dallaschyle course on routegadget). How much harder if they've never used a map with most of the features on before?

[RJ]

IMO the most important thing is the size of the picture(!). The scale that they use is so important. If they have a decent picture to look at..... and not the usual postage stamp then they can read the detail they need. 1:5000 should be the norm.

[madmike]

I know many children on yellow ignore the contours,

not just kids Eddie - a few years back I did some brown maps for training and it turned out that there were a surprising number of more mature and experienced orienteers who could not read complex contours; unfortunatley this number included one of my control hangers who regularly used to beat me at orienteeirng

[AndyC]

we've got a training session coming up on sand dunes (in preparation for S6D and the October Odyssey which are in dunes) and I'm tasked with delivering an exercise on a brown only map - I'm looking to find out who gets lost (worst)

[SeanC]

I'm really thinking about the under 12's and the first timers. My experience is that it's a lot easier to get under 12's orienteering than teenagers so it's a good age group to target (it's also relatively easy to market to this age group by getting junior schools involved).

It's standard practice in junior and infant school teaching to present things as simply as possible to aid learning. If you give children a lot of information and say ignore this and that, then we're making it harder than we need to, more confusing, and therefore less fun. Of course the super bright kids will have no problems, and these are no doubt future O stars, but we want as many as possible doing O and if we make it accessible and fun then more will come back.

Having a pile of children moving from yellow to orange is a nice problem to have, at that stage they really need coaching where they can learn the symbols, as well as skills needed to leave paths, but by this stage hopefully they will be in a club junior squad and motivated to learn (and probably a bit older).

Adult first timers are a different problem. Of course you can say "just ignore the contours, forest is white or green, don't worry about black dots blah blah" and they should be Ok with that, but that is using up valuable volunteer time when we really want to be making them feel welcome and sell the sport.

What do orienteering coaches (lapsed or current) think?

This reminds me of another pet hate. Expecting young juniors and adults to compete at the same event, which often gives events that are suitable for neither (or more often just the adults).

[Red Adder]

hate

(12) the *rseholes who vandalised 5 control sites (about 1/3rd of course) last night.


love

orienteers who quickly perceive the problem and abandon their runs to help recover and rebuild the scattered kit so that the rest of the field can enjoy their runs largely unaffected
[tagging all the sites is worthwhile even for an informal summer evening jaunt]

[frog]

If I'm printing control descriptions I usually choose the print size to fit in a holder because one of my dislikes (I'm not bothered enough to call it a hate, I hate very little) is control descriptions that don't fit in my holder, so longer courses usually have 5 or 6mm. I could print a variety of print sizes and folk could choose their favourite. I'm clumsy and rubbish at putting them in so would prefer to get them as early as possible at the start.
If I'm in a new area I like not seeing the map until the start. Studying it in depth before hand feels a bit like cheating, although now I'm getting long sighted as well as short sighted it would allow me to take my glasses off and look for features I might fail to spot with my glasses on, although no doubt I'd have forgotten where they are between looking at the map at assembly and walking to the start..

[martyn]

My pet hates being excluded from attending events for no apparent reason.

He's called Jasper, by the way.