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Hello
Welcome to the Orienteering Canada newsletter. Submissions for the next newsletter are welcome. Please send them by the 15th of each month to newsletter@orienteering.ca. We aim to get the newsletter out by the end of each month.
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Update on Major Events
As we all know, COVID-19 has had a big impact on major events over the past year. Unfortunately, that trend continues for another year. In our orienteering world in Canada, here is where we are at:
- Earlier in the year, Orienteering Canada announced that the Canadian Championships would once again be postponed by a year. We are all looking forward to reuniting as a community in Alberta and British Columbia in the summer of 2022 for a long awaited week of orienteering.
- Just recently, OUSA, Orienteering Canada and the CalOFest organizers, with approval from the IOF, have jointly announced that the NAOC’s scheduled as part of CalOFest this summer will be rescheduled to the summer of 2023. We look forward to a COVID-free trip to California in 2023 for some amazing orienteering!
- NAOC 2022 was scheduled to be hosted by Orienteering Ottawa. It is being rescheduled to be after the CalOFest NAOCs. Among other things, this will allow for mapping to take place that has not been possible during COVID, due to travel restrictions preventing foreign mappers working in Canada. There is some discussion as to whether it will take place in 2024 or 2025.An announcement will be made once this has been decided jointly with Orienteering Canada, OUSA, and the IOF.
- Team Canada has made a decision to not send a team to the World Championships in Czech Republic, the Junior World Championships in Turkey or the first round of the World Cup in Switzerland this summer. Decisions about later World Cup events will be made at the appropriate times.
We look forward to being able to hold and participate in our major events again. I want to once again thank our major events organizers for the work they put into the events, and the enormous efforts in juggling and planning in these crazy times. To our Team Canada leadership – thank you for your efforts at keeping our Team safe at home, and yet still engaged in training and invested in our sport. And to all orienteers across Canada, thank you for your patience and support as we navigate this long and ever changing course through COVID-19. Stay with us, stay active, stay safe, get out and enjoy the forest, and we will all get together NEXT summer!
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Coming Up: #IFoundOrienteering Campaign
Orienteering Canada is teaming up with Silva Canada, Icebug Canada and o-store.ca on their facebook and Instagram accounts to talk orienteering from May 7 – 16th. There will be some great prizes up for grabs: Silva compasses and Icebug shoes.
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Orienteering & Cadets
On March 24 Orienteering Canada hosted a Club Connect Call with folks who were involved with, or interested in, partnering with Cadets for orienteering. Orienteering is part of the Cadet curriculum. A number of clubs and PTOAs have worked with cadets to offer training, practice events and competition events. To date, much of this work as been done on an ad hoc basis, with clubs and local cadets working out programs or events that work for them. The CCC was an opportunity to bring together people from different clubs to share experiences and learn from each other. One of the outcomes of the CCC was that perhaps it would be useful to creating a working group to develop a Canada wide strategy and partnership with cadets.
The potential is huge! There are many, many youth, both boys and girls, involved in cadets across Canada. We have an opportunity to participate in introducing these young people to our favourite sport and maybe turning that introduction into a interest, a pursuit or even a lifetime passion!
We are in the process of putting together a working group and looking for interested and willing individuals. If you have worked with cadets, if you are part of the cadet movement, if you are interested in working with cadets, we are interested in have you join our working group. Please reach out at president@orienteering.ca – we would love to hear from you!
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Orienteering Canada's NCCP Community Coach Workshop - Now online!
For the last 12 years, Orienteering Canada has been delivering the National Coach Certification Program’s (NCCP) Community Coach (CC) workshops across the country as a one-day, in-person course with the emphasis on group activities and frequent feedback with the Learning Facilitators. We now have 268 trained CC coaches from Nova Scotia to the Yukon.
After losing most of the 2020 coach training season to the pandemic, and with the 2021 season in doubt, we realized that we had to offer an alternative format to the classroom-based workshop. The Coaching Association of Canada (CAC) had been converting many of their sport-generic (multi-sport) workshops to an online platform. They were also encouraging the national sports organizations to look at online learning options for their coach training programs.
There were two main types of online “classrooms” that we considered. A ZOOM meeting type of classroom led by one of our Learning Facilitators or, an asynchronous (self-timed and directed) on-line workshop.
I say “we” because fortunately Linda Hildebrandt and her colleagues had recently introduced the online Officials O100 workshop. Now I had both an experienced online course developer in Linda and a great example of what could be achieved on that kind of platform. We agreed that using a cloud-based Learning Management System (LMS) where the student can advance at their own pace and on their own schedule (like the O100 workshop) was the most effective option. We considered using the same LMS as the O100 but expanding the subscription on that software was too expensive. We looked around at the ever-expanding LMS options now on the internet and decided on a relatively new product called TalentLMS for its flexibility and reasonable cost.
Linda is converting the O100 course to the TalentLMS platform and her team will continue to develop the more advanced online Officials courses with that product. Orienteering Canada (OC) has provided the funding for the annual subscriptions.
One of the most important steps in Orienteering’s CC training program is to provide an opportunity for planning and executing an actual practice with athletes. This type of hands-on training is virtually impossible to replicate as a virtual activity but there were many other components in the training program that could be presented effectively through a self-timed, online training course.
As such, we have now developed a two-part training delivery system. Part 1 is the online LMS module that covers the background and conceptual material. It will take the new coach approximately two and a half hours to review all the presentations, videos, and readings. There are several short tests (multiple-choice quizzes) inserted between the 11 Learning Units.
Part 2 now consists of the in-person session for the practice planning and “on map” practice activities, which will be scheduled within 2-3 weeks of the online Part – or whenever it is feasible in these trying times. As a prelude to the outdoor activities, the LF will probably have a ZOOM meeting with the participants to review the Part 1 curriculum and prepare for the outdoor sessions.
Orienteers who are interested in the NCCP Coach training will sign up in the usual way – through their Club or Provincial Orienteering Association representatives who have either scheduled a workshop or are responding to the interest of their members for the training.
For more information about the NCCP, training opportunities, and provincial contacts, please visit Orienteering Canada’s coach training webpage called Get Coaching.
Many thanks to all the LF’s who have vetted and improved the online presentation: Jim Blanchard, Linda Hildebrandt, Barbara Scheck, Dave Hildes, Bogi Gyorfi, and Marg & Brian Ellis.
Cheers, Bill Anderson
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Ski Orienteers - we want to hear from you!
Orienteering Canada has had an eye on building our ski orienteering program for a number of years now. At this juncture, with the impetus from a group of interested folks in southern Ontario, we want to collect a group of like-minded ski-orienteering enthusiasts to continue the conversation about building the ski discipline of orienteering in Canada. We have started the conversation, and there are three directions where there is interest which want to pursue:
- a ski-O series in Canada,
- a major international ski-O event, and
- starting an Orienteering Canada Ski-Orienteering Committee.
Mark Tarnopolsky with DGL and Pam James with OANS have both committed to being a part of group. Don’t let the idea of a committee scare you off – while we do want a committee, we also want to hear from everyone who is interest is creating a (small) Canadian series of events and/or hosting a major international event. Please reach out to us at president@orienteering.ca if any part of this project (growing ski-O events across Canada, helping to bring an international event to Canada, or joining an OC ski-O committee) sounds like you should be or want to be a part of it!
Many thanks to Oliver Tabay, Nick Duca and Mark Tarnopolsky for getting us started in this exciting new direction.
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Team Canada Update
With COVID showing little sign of releasing its grip on Canada Orienteering Canada has made a few key decisions that we want to share.
We will not be sending teams to the World Orienteering Championships, Junior World Orienteering Championships, or first round of the 2021 World Cup. We are actively looking at how we might safely send athletes to the second and third rounds of the 2021 World Cup in August in Sweden and in October in Italy. See the full announcement here.
Not sending teams to these events allows us to focus our energies on developing our program and providing more training opportunities for Team Canada athletes. This year we are working on hosting local training camps in Calgary, Southern Ontario, and Ottawa in early summer and in the fall. We are also working on a variety of training initiatives and fundraising programs which we hope you will support when the time comes. Though there are little in the way of competitive goals this year our athletes are all working hard on improving their own orienteering and raising each other up to all become better athletes.
Stay tuned for more. If you have any questions about the program or want to help support our hard working athletes email hpp@orienteering.ca.
Bounty Control: Upcoming fundraiser for the Team Canada Program
The Team Canada Program (TCP) is going to be running a fundraiser in the month of June to help support upcoming and elite athletes through coaching, training camps, and more. This year we are doing a control pledge fundraising event.
How will it work?
>TCP athletes record their control goal for the month of June, and then update their daily control total when they do go out on a map. Controls count as they are marked on the map, even if there are no flags in the forest.
>Anyone can see the spreadsheet and make a pledge. Be as creative as you want! Minimum pledge amount is $0.50. Some examples:
- $0.50 per control for all athletes to a max of $100.00
- $1.00 per control for a single athlete
- $5.00 per control on June 17th
- $1.00 per control to the athlete’s goal, $2.00 for every control thereafter
More information to come closer to June, including how to pledge. We'd love your support!
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How to Use the Course & Class Guidelines
Visit the Course Planner’s Corner on Orienteering Canada’s website to read their latest contribution: How to Use the Course and Class Guidelines. This is a useful document for any organizers who are putting on a Canada Cup (aka A meet) level event.
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The IOF's Speakers' Corner
Check out the IOF’s Speakers Corner - you find podcast conversations with some of the best orienteers in the world. Per Forsberg, the Event Director of Orienteering World Cup Round 2 – 2021 in Idre Fjäll, has invited both interesting and successful athletes for a longer conversation about their life as a top level orienteer.
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Donating to Orienteering Canada
Please consider donating to Orienteering Canada. Charitable tax receipts are provided. Donations may be for the general use of the organization or directed to a specific Orienteering Canada project or program. Here are a few ideas of projects and programs that you may wish to donate to (but not limited to...):
- Junior Development > for instance, helping to finance the Sass Peepre Jr training camp and other programs to get kids more involved and loving orienteering.
- High Performance > helping to develop our Team Canada Program.
- Endowment Fund > if you want to help ensure the long term future of orienteering in Canada, this is the way to do it.
- Awareness Projects > help us get the word out about this great sport, help us build our capacity to introduce newcomers to orienteering.
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Contacting Orienteering Canada
Are you wondering who to email at Orienteering Canada with your questions, comments and ideas? Orienteering Canada's email directory is handy. You can also find this on Orienteering Canada's contact page.
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