HH Junior Training 2021 (part 2)

juniors, news, training

By now you know that HH is aiming to introduce regular training sessions for two groups of Juniors, those competent at Yellow standard and those competent at Orange standard.

My previous article was aimed at giving you some background to the decision to begin regular training and to provide you with a sample of the material used in our first Zoom session for the ‘Yellow’ group.   As mentioned before the intention was to return to Nomansland Common after the recent event and to invite competent Orange standard juniors to attend.

As planned, on a warm sunny day, 5 juniors (some invitees being unable to attend having already booked half term holidays) were present. Since this was the first session of a series it was decided to do some recap of the basic skills needed for good orienteering.

Firstly we talked about handling the map and in particular;

  • Folding ; ensuring that the map was folded to a convenient size for easy reading (no flapping about in the wind)
  • Thumbing; using your thumb to indicate on the map your position
  • Orientation; ensuring that the map was always orientated such that the north lines always pointed north!
Grid1

We followed the discussion with a couple of simple exercises;

  • Snake; follow my leader what ever direction they took but always ensuring that the map was correctly orientated.
  • Grid; a grid is set up (using flower pots) and the participants get individual maps showing a route through the grid. As above the participants are expected to keep their map orientated throughout the exercise.
 

By now the juniors needed to be a bit more competitive and the athletes split into teams of two and tackled a simple relay seeing how good their knowledge of Map Symbols was. We then moved on to discussing attack points; what is an attack point?

  • It is an obvious feature
  • It is near to the control
  • It is at the end of a viable route.

Moving on we talked about ‘CAR’. It is a simple acronym which is useful in remembering how to plan your way to your next control;

  • C – Control; where is the control; what feature is it on; what’s it control code
  • A – Attack Point; what is your chosen attack point?
  • R – Route – to the attack point

Remember to always plan backwards from the control – and then to move forwards!

After all that talking the juniors were allowed to run a course (see below).

In fact we had planned three sample courses to try to illustrate the points we had made;

  • Correct map orientation
  • Use of Attack Points and CAR.

And so we move on with the hope that those who attended learnt a little about the importance of formalising their Orienteering. Only the future will tell!

Run well! And enjoy your sport!!

Read part 1 here…