Peter Palmer

[Jene]

i agree with that as well.. this year SWOC could not make up a full team and so borrowed runners from SBOC therefore allowing them to make a full team, but it was n/c and wasnt that high up the results as they used all their juniors...

though should it be allowed? im not sure, for the last two years, ERYRI who only have 6juniors elligible to run pull together to make sure we all keep that weekend free so we can get a team, this was my last year but we have another younger one coming up next year so can still get a team.. but only just.. ERYRI is a tiny club and we manage.. so there cant be many clubs who would have to run non comp.

[HOCOLITE]

The small can be the problem, if you are a junior member of a small club in a region primarily made up of large clubs what do you do? Also is definintion of Small done on number of juniors, number of active juniors or number of members?

[helen]

Hocolite - I'm fairly sure its total number of members as SARUM is a small club but we have quite a lot of juniors. Having said that, we don't have as many as some people think...just all of them run regularly and most are at a fairly high standard.

[awk]

When I was development officer, we changed the definition of a small team. Basically we listed clubs in order of their junior BOF membership (including those in families), then said that the top 20 (or it may have been 25) were large clubs, and the rest small.

Whether that still works that way, I don't know (and haven't checked the BOF site), as this was before the teams were made smaller, but the list of 'large' clubs was significantly different to the usual BOF definition based on senior members. In fact the latter list was seriously misleading.

If the spirit that has been outlined above is followed (i.e. clubs are working but aren't there yet), then I'm not overly against mixed club teams as sjc's post suggests. As long as the spirit is not abused, and as long as clubs don't cop out.

[Jude]

The guidelines only mention small clubs when it comes to combining teams and specifically say non competitive teams should not be allowed to take part.

Okay so large clubs should be be able to get a team together, but if they have say 11 juniors wanting to run then at least 3 are going to be disappointed.

I welcome non competitive teams taking part for development reasons.

[Tatty]

Despite many years of trying we only have family juniors in our club. It has not been helped by our local LEA being very anti O (The PE "Adviser"(!!) considered O an extreme sport and virtually wanted a parent or teacher at each control. Certainly several parent helpers and teachers at each event. The names had to be given in each September and there must be phone contact at all times!! As you can imagine this meant orienteering has never got off the ground. Some club members with youngsters have worked very hard in their own schools but keen teachers have left and we are yet again back to square one. Of our family juniors we have one M18, 1 M16 and 2 W18's. All the rest of our juniors are 10 year olds or younger, and then there are only 4 of them. Although we qualify as a large club for CSC there is no way we can raise a team of 6. When our younger ones come through we will have lost the older kids!! We seem to be in a Catch 22 situation. If we had joined with one of the two nearby clubs to put together a team then at least these 4 would have had the cahnge to run. As it is as we were unaware of the relaxing of the rules 2 of those 4 have now lost the opportunitty as next year they are too old. Any team we put together would not have been at the top or "competitive". I think nowadays you are unlikely to find joint teams vying for top places. It did happen once or maybe twice in the past and the comment made about people not running for their own club applied only once. It seems unfortunate that our 4 juniors were denied the opportunity to run. Incidently the club Committee is working very hard to get more schools involved as the restrictions are being eased, but it will involve a long timescale.

[awk]

It seems Tatty, that MADO style development rather than schools would be more appropriate for SOC (he says without knowing what development work SOC has tried), as schools will be a bit of a dead horse from what you say.

Also - under the rules we devised, SOC was a small club - a small junior club that is. It certainly wasn't one of the largest 20 or so. Maybe this definition needs resuscitating.

[Tatty]

It's good to hear SOC would be considered a small club, however we weren't informed of that!!!