Event report: junior camp

Sat 29^th June - Mon 1^st July 2024

This year’s camp was held at Swan Valley Adventure Centre, hosted by new Camp Coordinator, Riley McFarlane, and De Facto Coordinator, Rob West.

We started off by Riley hosting a team based 4-part sprint orienteering course. One participant each had to complete each part of the course. However, with some map printing errors we had to improvise a bit, but we still successfully completed the main goal of an ice breaker for all the participants of the camp.

We quickly had some lunch, packed afternoon tea and headed out to Christmas Tree Creek for the afternoon. We did a short warmup led by John Toomey, followed by the first exercise led by our Coaches in residence, Jíri Vales and Veronika Kubinova. The exercise was called O-Craft, where participants used their orienteering skills to gather and ‘mine’ resources you would see in Minecraft, then meet back at the village (start & finish area) to ‘craft’ items. Participants were split into five groups and given a scatter course of control sites on a half contour only, half normal map. At the beginning, all controls had resources placed by the other coaches at the camp. Then every five minutes, all the coaches would replenish resources gathered by the villager, Riley, who had received resources from the kids so they could craft their materials. Some participants ran up to 8 kilometres and challenged themselves in the contour only area, whereas others ran in and out of the circulating tracks in the area.

We came back to camp, had dinner, then completed the quiz night, hosted by Nick Dale and Mark Lommers. This was followed by the last activity, a Night-O activity, set by Jiri and Veronika, where a 10x10 metre square grid of 16 controls were placed on the hillside adjacent to the pool. The map given was a blank white map with a line course, and participants had to orientate their maps based upon the direction of the grid, not true north. It was a challenging exercise, teaching the participants a valuable lesson on how important Entry and Exit directions are, as well as reading your control descriptions. We then rushed into the showers and headed to sleep for the first night of the camp.

Day 2 began with some breakfast at camp before heading off to the Yetar Springs event, where participants of the camp could meet up with their families again at the event. Most coaches shadowed participants on a harder course before and/or after completing their own courses, so they could help identify and provide instant feedback to participants on how to improve their skills to successfully complete their courses. We then had some lunch at the event arena, before completing the afternoon activity, called Battle Flags, set by Jiri and Veronika, which was a combination of the board game battleships, and the game of capture the flag. Participants were split into two teams and given a base map, their personal yellow tape, and started off with only a few control sites. They had to search throughout the forest to find pink tapes at control sites, or extension maps to collect more tapes, or invade the enemy territory and steal their opponents yellow tapes. Once a certain quota of tapes was met, they were granted a permit to steal their opposing teams flag in order to win the game. Coaches were given a master map, and instructed to put out tapes, extension maps at designated control sites that Jiri and Veronika requested, then were required to patrol their designated area in the forest and report back to either East or West camp. We rushed back to camp for dinner and showers, then reviewed in depth the camp’s activities and courses to learn from any mistakes, or correct decision-making skills from all the camp activities throughout both days before heading to bed.

The final day involved breakfast, cleaning up and packing away before completing the final exercise, being a modified biathlon sprint orienteering relay. Participants were split into groups of five and completed a line course before returning for a map flip, where they had to ‘shoot’ cups held upon the benches, and then complete a scatter course before swapping over to the next runner. The amount of cups knocked over equalled the amount of controls you could skip on the scatter course. This was followed by morning tea and an official announcement of the Western Australian Schools Orienteering team by Tom Brownlie (see OWA Enews, thus concluding the camp.

A major thank you to Sharon McFarlane, Janet Fletcher, Rachel, and Rob and Lois West for doing majority of the booking and helping do the paperwork, and to coaches Jiri Vales, Veronika Kubinova, Mark Lommers, Nick Dale, John Toomey, Sten Claessens, Tom Brownlie, Ekaterina Klyukina and Anthea Feaver for coaching the kids as well as setting up and packing away training activities.

Photos: by Rob West.