Training Log Archive: barb

I am seeking volunteers to help with a 1-hour introduction to orienteering for most of the public school 5th grade girls in Cambridge, on June 2nd in the morning. Let me know if you can help!

I really need to create time to get Navigation Games some grant money or other income, so I'm not paying for everything myself, and hire a director. Then I can retire from everything and just teach an O class here and there...

C • retire 2

Event: NEOC: Breakheart Reservation
 

Walked around grounds of NCDS and Edmands Park to finalize control and station locations for this week's 2-day orienteering program. Am happy that Isabel Bryant, Katia Bertoldi, Jeff Saeger and Jason Tong will be helping!

The class was not a success today; need to rethink how to work with these 6 boys and 1 girl in grades JK-1. Three don't speak English too well; none of them did what I asked upon first request. I need to come at it with something that engages them more immediately, and doesn't involve talking.

Money.
When I was JTA, OUSA paid $14,000 for JWOC. I believe that was actually $7000 from the central budget and an expectation of raising $7000 in donations specifically targeted to the junior team. This covered costs for the week of JWOC. Erin asked the athletes to come for a week or two of training prior to JWOC, and we did fundraising to cover most of that cost. Athletes still had to purchase their plane tickets.
This year, OUSA will pay $4000 for JWOC, but also has a new requirement that athletes pay for insurance obtained by OUSA, which is estimated to cost $3000. That leaves $1000 for the usual JWOC expenses. There are more team members than there used to be. They are asked to spend more time in Europe preparing.

It is great to have a donor-paid coach, and to see the program becoming more serious. But I don't think it makes sense for OUSA to pull back from financial support of the JWOC team in this way, while also asking the athletes to spend more time in Europe before JWOC, which incurs even more expense. The cost has gone from a few hundred dollars a few years ago, to $2500, $3500 or more this year, particularly if you count the Finland training trip in preparation for 2017. (Which seems that it will be sparsely attended, perhaps partly because OUSA is not helping to pay for it.) Is this the right trajectory?

Frankly, I don't have a big problem with asking people to pay for it if they can afford it. But I also think that the organization should make absolutely sure that everyone who makes the team can afford to go. This is a time when families are facing huge college costs. The reduction from paying for all athletes to attend JWOC several years ago, to this year paying only a token amount per athlete, does not make sense to me.

It feels particularly strange when it seems there should be more money for the junior program. There is the junior coach / youth development position that is new in the past few years, thanks to PG - shouldn't OUSA see this as an opportunity to increase the resources that come from OUSA funds for juniors, to synergize and build on that opportunity? There have been various efforts to fundraise for juniors, but that money has been targeted elsewhere than the team. I am not sure of the rationale for reducing the financial support of the JWOC team, other than that budgets are tight. I don't know what is being prioritized over this team. I don't understand why the Board thinks that the JWOC team deserves such a large reduction in resources, despite all the hard work these kids have done, and the seriousness with which they have tackled their training, and the increased competitiveness as seen at the JWOC trials this year. It feels as though the new money that has come in has ended up raising the cost for juniors to attend JWOC, which seems backwards. More money equals less money.

I worry that we already have such a hard time growing the youth program; to add the financial hurdle seems counter-productive.

A math teacher in central/western Mass coaches a math team; many of them run track; many would likely be interested in orienteering. I don't have bandwidth to do outreach to them, but if anyone would like to take it on, let me know!

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First day of classes at the Peabody school. The first class was 11 kids in junior kindergarten through first grade. I set the littlest kid right off the bat because I asked him how to spell his name. He doesn't know. He also can't read numbers. So next week I need to go back to pictures. In the second class there were only two kids. One is a high functioning Aspergers kid and the other is a big for her age 1st grader.