Most people assume a championship course gets designed from the top down. Set the senior courses, find the route choices and the traps, then trim the whole thing back for the younger grades.
Christina Freeman, who set the sprint at this year's NZ Secondary Schools Championships in Canterbury, works the other way round.
I always start with trying to make sure that my white and yellow courses are actually fun and that they go somewhere.
The route choices and the traps for the senior grades come after that, not before. It's a small reordering with a large consequence, because the white and yellow courses are the ones deciding whether a kid ever comes back.
She's also quick to say she doesn't do it alone.
I'm still relatively new to planning and I rely heavily on my awesome controllers.
Martin Peat controlled the sprint, and Christina credits a lot of what she learned to him, particularly on how to use that map.
The only target that matters with a school group
Christina does a lot of work with primary schools, helping to get kids outdoors and interested in navigation-based sports. When doing this she has one goal that sits above everything else.
First and foremost, we want them to have a good time, so they want to come back.
She's honest that it's harder with some groups than others.
It's sometimes a lot more difficult to achieve, especially when you're working with more challenging age groups and it's a bit awkward and you never know what you're going to get.
The fix isn't a better talk before the start. It's the course itself.
I make the courses so that they can actually find the controls and have a good time so they want to come back.
Teach the basics, set something they can genuinely complete, and let the sport do the rest. A kid who finds every control on a white course has had a good day. A kid who spends twenty minutes lost in a gully on their first attempt has had a different one, and you usually don't get a second go at them.
The piece of kit she comes back to
Ask Christina what gear matters and the answer isn't a gadget. It's a compass.
A compass is the backbone of the sport, and the only thing that really counts is that it's reliable. Everything else you do with a map depends on it settling where it should and staying there. That's true for the kid on their first white course, who mostly needs the map the right way up, and it's true at the other end of the field where a bearing has to hold across a long leg.
JWOC 2029, and the maps that come with it
Canterbury will host the Junior World Orienteering Championships in 2029. Christina's first thought went to the students, not the schedule.
The more students we can get excited about developing themselves for that opportunity, the better. And even if they don't make the team, I'm still hoping a lot of them come out of it with something.
What genuinely excites her about 2029 isn't only the international field turning up to run on Canterbury terrain. It's what gets made along the way.
What I'm excited about is not only the fact that we're going to have lots of international athletes come and run on our maps, but also the opportunity to get some new maps.
New maps outlast the event. The athletes fly home, the results go into an archive, and the maps stay in Canterbury for every school group and club night that follows. That's the part of a JWOC legacy that actually gets used.
