okansas.blogspot.com
Occassional thoughts about orienteering


Wednesday, October 07, 2009

If you had $50,000...

 

Suzanne posed the question:

If you had $50,000 to spend over the next 5 years to improve junior orienteering in the US, what would you suggest?

Several of the ideas that came up involve funding trips for juniors to Europe. Of course, $50,000 over 5 years won't really be enough to pay for many juniors, but the impact on those individuals could be quite high. If you can do a good job of picking out the "deserving" orienteers, this just might work. By "work" I mean inspire some young orienteers and give them some good knowledge.

But if it were up to me, I'd bring some European orienteers here and have them travel around visiting juniors. It wouldn't have the same impact on a given orienteer as visiting Europe for training and racing. But it would spread the impact widely. Spreading the impact widely is especially useful if you don't have a good method for identifying the most deserving orienteers.

The two options basically involve trade-offs: higher direct impact and fewer orienteers versus lower direct impact but more orienteers.

Back when I was a young orienteer I spent a bit of time in Europe, but I think the bigger impact for me was having a chance to meet some really good European orienteers when they visited the U.S., pick their brains a bit, watch them train and do some training with them. It was inspiring.

The discussion at Attackpoint is a bit long and wanders off topic, but is worth a quick look.

Back to okansas.blogspot.com.

posted by Michael | 8:06 PM

2 comments


Comments:
I'd spend the money on marketing, developing local programmes and bring top Euro's to the U.S. There are plenty of good races and terrain and maps in the U.S. There just isn't enough publicity and marketing...

MW
 
... I guess if there were some low-cost airlines flying between Europe and North America, half of the problem can be solved. Many European orienreers want to visit the United States and Canada, do some sightseeing and try the nice terrains (WOC'93?), but when the ticket costs as much as a two-weeks long training camp in Spain ...

By the way, Thierry Gueorgiou is somewhere around you now :) He's taking three weeks in N.America.
 
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