Junior News
Great day out for SO juniors at the YBT final- Irchester Country Park
Very well done to all our juniors who took part in the YBT final in Northamptonshire at the weekend. Everyone scored points for the club and we came 8th out of the 10 best clubs in the country, which considering we were one runner short and had a relatively young team is great. Results here http://www.leioc.org.uk/wordpress/lei_results/2022/Irchester-YBT22/index_clubresults.html We celebrated everyone’s runs afterwards with the traditional ice creams!
SO Juniors Qualify for Yvette Baker Trophy Final
Our team of 16 juniors put in a great performance at Worthlodge to qualify for the Yvette Baker Trophy final, the annual junior inter-club competition. Our 9 highest placed runners scored 897 points.
For many of our juniors this was their first time competing for the club and for four of our younger juniors they paired up to complete a yellow course without shadowing for the first time.
Mole Valley and Dartford Orienteering Club were also competing, but they took part in the Yvette Baker Shield event as they have smaller junior teams and the best 5 scores count towards the final result. Mole Valley scored 498 points and DFOK scored 300 points.
JK Success in Wales over Easter
Well done to everyone who took part in the JK2022 - the annual international Festival of Orienteering - which always take place over the Easter weekend. We competed in very varied terrain from University to iron workings to mine workings to a military training site. Great competition, technical areas, social assembly areas and great weather made for a great weekend. Special congratulations to Mike Gammon M90 who became JK Champion, Emils, Tommy and Nick Jarvis who won the JK Men's Short Relay event and Ruth Rhodes W80 who became JK Sprint Champion. Take a look at the maps and routes here. More photos if you read on ...
March Club Coaching
Will Heap, one of our Club Coaches ran a fantastic coaching session in the sunshine at Cowdray Forest near Crawley. Participants included children from the age of 11 upwards and adults of all ages who take part in orange to black courses. Everyone had a great day and learnt so much from the different exercises.
We started off with a gentle warm up, led by Scarlet and then split off into three groups.
Strong Junior Performance at Compass Sport Cup
A very strong performance from our junior squad M/W12 to M/W20 helped SO win the regional heat of the annual interclub competition on 13th March. The terrain was really physical with lots of slippery mud around, but our juniors put in an excellent performance on the Balcombe Estate. Our juniors competed in courses from Orange to Short Brown and a number of them ran up on longer courses than their age category, but still beat the competition.
Juniors learn about contours at Washington Common
At Washington Common on 22nd January, we held our third training session of the season for our younger juniors and some new adults. We had a great turnout and had four large groups taking part. Our main focus for this session was understanding the brown features on the map. Washington Common is a good venue for this as there are lots of steeper features.
We started by looking at contours on the map and comparing them to a 3D model to help picture the ground. Can you see how the model relates to the map below? You may need to rotate it slightly!