Training Log Archive: iansmith

Easy jaunt around the river. Watch died. Ankle still feels a bit strange, but it feels stable.

C • Celsius 3

I am officially running for the Orienteering USA Board of Directors. My candidate statement - which is largely reflected in the log entry from Tuesday, is here. I welcome feedback, and I look forward to talking to many of you about these issues before the election.

I ask all of you to vote for the "coalition" candidates - Barb Bryant, Boris Granovskiy, Alex Jospe, Ian Smith, and (possibly) Jim Baker and Kevin Teschendorf. We are interested in changing the priorities of OUSA. I would characterize our platform as follows:

1. Support junior development and junior programs.
2. Increase our marketing and publicity presence both within and without the organization. Engage the membership more fully, and be transparent and accessible.
3. Increase the support for the elite teams.
4. Reorganize OUSA to execute these goals. Bring the budget into balance, and increase spending on the above areas while reducing unrestricted spending on paid positions.
5. Support clubs through resources, promotion, training, and best practices, and incentivize and adjust our event system to reflect the changing atmosphere of orienteering.

This is of course in addition to all the hard work in OUSA that goes into keeping the lights on and keeping everything running smoothly. OUSA represents a huge community effort, and I would like to see that effort directed towards a new set of priorities.

Archery at MIT. I shot perhaps 12 ends of 7 arrows. Fun times.

Easy peasy jaunt to test the ankle out. It held up ok, though there still is some swelling and pain when I probe it with my fingers. I think it is structurally sound, so I will resume moderate low-risk activity gradually.

Bowling with Izzy, Ethan, and Astrid. I struggled to get into a rhythm, but good times were had by all. Izzy fell short of her goal of beating Ethan, falling 91-96 and 78-112, but her resolve is undiminished. It was disappointing in both games to finish with a whimper, with only 1 mark in the last 3 frames of both games.

My scores:
5/ 8- 9/ 8/ 71 7/ 9/ 62 81 62 = 129
36 9- 63 9/ 72 X X 8/ 71 7- = 133

What is the role of OUSA in orienteering in the US? What can - and should - OUSA do?

Orienteering USA is the governing body of the sport in the US, but its role isn't well defined. Most of the power to impact the sport lies with individual clubs. A main facet of OUSA's ability to impact the sport is its budget. It has averaged an income of $286k/year from 2011-2015. No other entity in orienteering the US commands such resources. How we allocate those resources reflects our priorities.

However, some of the budget is restricted - restricted contributions and fundraising. Restricted income is explicitly allocated to a particular spending category. For example, someone can donate to the Junior Team, and OUSA must spend that money on the Junior Team. In that sense, OUSA is a conduit for funds. I wanted to know how OUSA spends is discretionary or unrestricted moneys, as that is the degree of freedom available to the leadership. For example, if OUSA spends $20,000 on the US Senior Team, but $15k came in the form of restricted contributions and fundraising, some of which likely came from the team itself, OUSA is in practice only spending $5k.

Method: I went to the OUSA website and obtained the December financial statements from 2011-2015. In addition to the revenue and spending for that month, the document includes aggregate data for the entire year. From that, I defined unrestricted spending as the difference between spending in a particular category and restricted income to that category. This data is meant to be illustrative rather than definitive. As I am not an expert on the OUSA accounting system, there may be some errors or confusions, but the broad trend should be clear.

Documents, which I would be happy to share upon request:
Summary report
Gross excel spreadsheet with underlying data

Key points:

1. OUSA has unrestricted spending of about $240k/year, while unrestricted income is only $220k/year for a deficit of about $20k.
   
2. Insurance Premiums and ONA - both of which I consider indispensible services - account for about 17% of the unrestricted expense.
   
3. Unrestricted spending on the elite teams amounts to 5.9% of the total unrestricted. (Senior, Junior, WUOC, SkiO, MTBO, Trail-O).
   
4. Categories whose product I do not understand - Payroll (30%), Fundraising (11%), Accounting and Member Services (10%), ED (8%), and a few others account for $150k/year or 61% of the unrestricted spending.
   

Fundraising in particular is baffling; while I may not understand the accounting system, we are spending an average of $27k/year explicitly on fundraising, but our average fundraising of both restricted and unrestricted classes is about $10k. Perhaps the best way to raise funds is stop spending money on raising funds.

In my mind, the key priorities for OUSA are:
1. Providing basic services for clubs, including insurance, communication within the community through ONA and newsletters, best practices and information sharing, and technology infrastructure like eventreg and membership databases.

2. Offering services to assist clubs like map loans, website templates, and instruction e.g. on how to run a National Meet. Ideally this would also include access to mappers.

3. Publicity, marketing, and outreach outside of the orienteering community. It's not clear to me how successful global marketing will be compared to marketing local events and calendars, but at the very least, the national federation should be publicizing the national event calendar. It can also assist clubs with their own marketing because economies of scale make this better done at the national level.

4. Support of elite teams. I think in most sports, the elite teams are the marketable product. OUSA should do all it can to advance and promote the growth and progress of elite orienteering in the US because success at the elite level is a viable mechanism for drawing attention to the sport. Consider how many people know of Ali Crocker because of her performances at WOC, e.g.

5. Growth of the sport through the development of junior programs. The best prospect for future development of orienteering in the US is junior programs like WIOL, ARK, Barb's Navigation Games in Boston, and generally engaging children in schools. This is a mammoth endeavor, and I don't think many clubs can create a school league or junior program on their own. At the very least, it would facilitate it if moneys and expertise at the national level were made available to interested clubs.

Agenda
My goals and plan for OUSA, in brief, as are follows:
1. Paid Positions: The Executive Director experiment was a worthwhile one to understand how to grow the sport. I'm grateful to everyone who invested effort and time, but after six years, we can conclude that it has failed to meet the two stated goals of funding the position through external fundraising and growing the sport. I would like to replace the position with a more sustainable and more limited in scope marketing role whose responsibilities are to create a marketing campaign for OUSA, aggressively market it on social media and in the press, advertise the national event calendar, and assist clubs with their own marketing efforts. This position could be part time; I propose a budget of $30k-40k. I'd also consider funding a technical position, probably also part time, to offer database support, build tools as needed, and help clubs with event registration and websites.

2. The Junior Programs are among the most important impact OUSA can have on the sport. Funding the Junior Team coach is paramount. I would also like to see a substantial allocation (say $25k/year over 3-5 years) in grants to clubs to startup junior programs in the style of WIOL or Navigation Games. Money is helpful but not sufficient; in addition to providing seed funding, OUSA must create a task force to collect and publish best practices. Finding clubs with the interest and manpower to create junior programs is also critical. Goal: start at least 3 junior or school league programs in the United States with 100+ participants in the next 5 years. I am counting Navigation Games as a new one even though technically it existed in 2015.

3. Increase spending on elite teams. Less than 6% of unrestricted spending on elite teams is a joke. I propose to increase that to at least 10% or $25,000 of unrestricted spending. Spending should not be uniform; the Junior and Senior national teams are higher priorities.

4. OUSA restructuring and outreach: I consider myself among the more interested parties in the US community, but I really don't know much about what OUSA does. There are many committees whose function is unclear to me. In addition to restructuring the committee system - figuring out what is working, changing what isn't - the budget must be brought under control through restructuring. Finally, OUSA must do a better job engaging the community. There are countless attackpoint threads which lead no where, and I am unsatisfied with how the OUSA leadership has reached out on the best forum for orienteering discussion. I would also to see regular open calls or chat rooms to discuss topics - perhaps 6-8 times per year. For instance, there could be an open forum on junior programs - what OUSA plans to do, what it is doing, how people can get involved, other ideas and so on.

Relating to this, I'd like to continue work on making OUSA membership more attractive to members of the community. We need to improve our offering and tell more people about it so becoming an OUSA member is second nature for anyone in the US orienteering community.

5. Events - it's not clear how much impact OUSA can have on the event calendar, since clubs organize everything. That said, I'd like to see better coordination among the various clubs and regions for the national meet calendar. I also would like OUSA to encourage additional national meet sprint tournaments like the Seattle sprint competition and Boston sprint camp. Forest racing is the pinnacle of the sport, but sprinting is readily marketable and an attractive alternative.

C • Smith 2016! 27

I use my attackpoint log for much more than just logging my (generally inadequate, especially of late) training - it is means by which I record my thoughts and share them with all of you who have chosen to read my log. I'm the 22nd most viewed log on attackpoint, and while I have been recently passed by actual athletes like TGIF and Cat_T, it is clearly not my training alone which warrants this attention.

Often, I come across something I want to share with others who might appreciate it, and while there are other social media outlets for this broadcasting, I have never found twitter or facebook particularly useful for that purpose. For one, 140 characters is clearly not enough.

Today, I have two nuggets. First, I strongly encourage anyone who finds themself* with an hour of mindless or idle activity to listen to recordings of the Boston Symphony Orchestra on WGBH. BSO is a world class orchestra, and classical music is a wonderful canvas for expressing the human condition. I don't particularly care for either the WGBH or BSO's websites' layout for the concerts, but you can easily pop into the media center and listen to the latest concert - which appear to typically be made available once a week or so. Youtube is another excellent alternative, and I'd be happy to suggest some of my favorite classical music pieces. Today, I listened to pianist Garrick Ohlsson perform the gloriously romantic Piano Concerto No. 1 by Tchaikovsky from a concert July 23 at Tanglewood.

Equivalently:
BSO Media Center: https://www.bso.org/mediacenter#search/wgbh
WGBH: http://www.wgbh.org/programs/The-Boston-Symphony-O...

Second nugget: soundtracks have become one of the outlets for music expression, particularly classical music, of the television era. Howard Shore's soundtrack to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy is as epic and intricate as Wagnerian opera. I recently came across a superb piece of music from the television show Game of Thrones, which sets up a tense buildup to a climactic conclusion.

Light of the Seven, by Ramin Djawadi from Game of Thrones, Season 6.

Left ankle still looks like a bee stung it despite icing, elevation, and Aleve. On the plus side, the ankle generally feels ok through the full range of motion, though the outside ankle under the bone is tender. It ballooned a bit after bike intervals on Friday. I expect to be back in action this week, though I will take great care with it, especially when I encounter unfamiliar sports balls. The appearance of a hematoma along the lower edges of my foot suggests some bleeding.