Discussion: Getting More People into Ski-O

We had great results from this year's WOC Ski-O and we should try to build on this. Good skiing ability is definitely a plus although you need to read a map as well. My question is how can we get the good, junior XC skiers and others who perhaps tried to make the national team but didn't quite make the cut, interested and participating in Ski-O? This year we had two junior ski-o competitors at the JWOC but we need more that than to make the program viable. How can we tap the national XC ski programs so that we can build on the recent successes?

Pretty grim outlook by Alex in the discussion above for the get-quick-skiers-and-get-strong-team-fast scheme....

This has certainly been discussed over and over in years past, but even the best of ideas don't seem to get particularly far. I agree with a lot of what has been said in the above-referenced thread and have heard or said most of it before.

Some points to add reinforcement to:

- If we're going to have any kind of ski-O development program at all, we need to have events, they need to be of reasonable quality, and they need to be attractive to juniors as well as masters.

Living in New York state, these are the events I've seen most of. Historically NY has had way more events than everyone else, but quality has been lacking at many of them, as has attractiveness to juniors.

With our ski-O babies now half-grown and involved in the NY Bill Koch skiing program, we are taking an interest in helping expose kids to ski-O here. Looking around we do see that some of the (ski) clubs are including ski-O (or at least something they perceive to be ski-O) in their kids programs, and from what I see the kids are loving it. I organized the ski-O event for the Mid-Atlantic Bill Koch ski festival this year and despite weather that was very much like what the team faced in Tänndalen, we had 31 kids give it a try, even though it was optional and sandwiched in between a full slate of other ski races and activities. At the Mid-A festival last year the ski-O event was organized by another former US Team member, Mike George, and it was as well received despite it raining at the time. (For those not up-to-speed on XC skiing lingo, Bill Koch skiing is for kids roughly 8th grade and younger.)

So as in Alex's club, kids here are being exposed to ski-O and are liking it, but there are few to no accessible quality events for them to participate in once they get old enough to begin racing. And as has been said elsewhere, once they do begin racing, many of them are focused so narrowly on one type of racing that they don't have time to give ski-O any thought.

- Ali made what I think is a great point about how to recruit skiers to O. Don't bother trying to lure them to a ski-O event during their racing season, try to get them to give foot-O a try during their lengthy off-season when they're looking for interesting things to do. We had a little bit of success with this locally a number of years ago when an accomplished junior orienteer from New England, Craig Murray, came to Cornell and joined the XC ski team. Between him working as an insider and a few local orienteers working as outsiders we managed to get the entire Cornell Ski Team involved in foot-O for a while. They were very into it, so I organized some training sessions for them and a few of them then went off to the Intercollegiate Champs and placed 2nd to West Point in the JV category. Unfortunately most of them graduated that same year and the momentum was quickly lost, though some of them were subsequently seen at both foot-O and ski-O events for a while. One bright side-note is that a local middle schooler named Ross something-or-other came out to all these training sessions aimed at the college kids, picked up the skills with impressive quickness, and eventually made a name for himself on the US foot-O scene. So you just never know what you're going to get when you start something like this.

- My kids are younger so I'm not as tuned in to the JO scene as I might be in a few more years, but I believe Will Frielinghaus was on the Mid-A JO team this year.

- I made, as did others, comments about ski-O event quality. We have a number of events where there are significant issues. Some have little to no route choice. Some have one-way trail restrictions that either restrict route choice or create fairness issues (or both). Some have little to no trail grooming. Some have little to no publicity. Many have little to no participants. Some have no decent course offering and recognition for juniors. If we want to develop ski-O we need to think hard about these things.

- This year there was one event that I got to that was of incredibly good quality. World Cup quality good. An unfortunate missed opportunity for most people. It was at Mark Dominie's touring center and was the same weekend as the New England Balsam's event. Mark knows how to design and groom a proper ski-O competition area and it was fantastic. Having it on the same weekend as Balsam's was maybe not the best idea, though I do wonder even if it didn't conflict, would anyone else have been there?

Will is a good kid, and a good skier. We should absolutely keep him involved. He didn't quite make the Mid-A JO team (points), but he went to the Eastern Highschool Championships and did well (23rd of 107), and placed 6th at the NY state champs. If only there were more than one of him... What he needs are some teammates. Working with highschool kids, you quickly learn that no matter how much they may love a sport, if they don't have peers around them, they won't stick with it.

So here is the question - why should we bother with ski-o development? Clearly, it's been tried before, and clearly, it's failed from a development standpoint. So is it worth the time and energy and money that could otherwise be spent on something less ephemeral?

I don't take the failure of efforts like fossil mentions to be that clear. Exposing ski-juniors is just plain good, of course nothing is going to generate an immediate influx of hundreds of juniors to ski-o. But increased exposure might mean some, like you and me, are actually willing to try it, post-collegiate ski careers.

In terms of time, first priority should go to hosting good events and publicizing them, because without that, we don't have ski-o! If anyone has extra time and energy left over, setting up a training for ski juniors or college kids or normal orienteers is definitely a good thing to do for the sport.

If Ski-O' could get into the olympics, it would make a huge difference in the numbers trying and pursuing the sport. I think it deserves to be an olympic sport and it certainly has been trying to be included. So, when trying to convince someone to give Ski-O' a try, it wouldn't hurt to mention the possibility that it may someday be in the olympics.

So it seems like there are a couple of strong ideas:

1. get skiers to do summer orienteering
b. hold more ski-o events, especially short/accessible/fun ones

Regarding b, do we need a ski-o Sprint Series? Can we get all of the clubs in snowy areas who've never held a ski-o to commit to hosting one or two next winter?

I can't promise anything, but I bet they could even have a ski-o or two in AZ next winter...

even more.. come north of the border.. we'll have some

Ski-O in the Olympics, give me a break! There were only 27 nations at the world champs, that's not a world-wide sport. One country from the southern hemisphere. You should develop Ski-O because (a) people like it and (b) the effort is less than other things you could do.

What about dealing with training? A lot of training for XC skiing, or XC running for that matter, is just getting out and getting miles under the belt. it is like swimmers that have to swim back and forth hundreds of time in the pool. To me, that would be boring! Can we think of a way to get Ski-O into the XC ski training program as an alternative to just going out and skiing X number of kilometers? Would visiting controls be an interesting change and variety? The same is true of XC runners, they could use a map on trails and instead of running in circles, run to controls. I am not saying that we need to get them to go to a ski-o event instead of their XC ranking event, but if we could get some orienteering embedded in their training, some would cross over. How can we get this to happen. I have understand that there are problems in getting this going and the link provided by Dan amply shows what the issues are. I am just looking for a new way to try to break into the XC and XC skiing programs. With the XC skiing, there is the fact that we did so well at the Ski-O WOC so there is, perhaps, more incentive to get people interested. If only 12 skiers go to worlds as pure XC skiers, what about the next 10 or so? If they had been training once a week or once every two weeks using a map, might a few of these skiers take up Ski-O? How can we get this going? Don't say we can't, say "this might work" and then let us try to follow through on it.

I have introduced orienteering to the Kanata Nordic ski club in Ottawa as part of the youth groups' dry land training in late fall before the snow arrives. The orienteering has been easy, mostly along trails in areas of dense trail network (just like ski-O). It gives the kids another activity for dry land ski training instead of pure running. The Kanata Nordic club now has ski-O on the event list every winter, in cooperation with Ottawa OC. Unfortunately, this year we had to cancel due to snow conditions (too icy after freezing rain).

Any thoughts as to how we can introduce that kind of dry land training into programs where the coaches are not orienteers? The Kanata program seems to be working.

In the Kanata case my son already trained with the ski-club. I approached the club if we (OOC) could map and use their ski-trail network for a ski-O. It helps if you already are involved with the ski club's activities. An offer to organize a special training (orienteering on trails) for a Saturday morning ski training session was warmly welcomed.

I'm quite interested in the prospect of hosting a ski-o here in Michigan. I'm also hoping to ski-o some day too! Biggest obstacle for me is location, location, location. In order to go to ski-o events now Michiganders junior to senior have to travel to NY, Tahoe, etc. (Same obstacles I'm having with trying Biathlon!). So I'm thinking if I can at least make it to one ski-o event to get a grasp of it, I can help put an event together in Michigan. I think there is great potential here for ski-o development, plenty of x-country ski going on, and our SMOC club offers spring and summer foot-o. I'll ping the rest of SMOC to see if anyone has experience with ski-o. This has been on my mind frequently and so thanks for this discussion as it has reminded me I should look into this for next winter.

GHO, Stars, Adventure Running Kids and Highlands Nordic are in the preliminary planning stages of co-organizing three ski-orienteering events in the Collingwood area of southern Ontario next winter. We are also planning to host a joint 'dryland' training camp for our respective junior programs in October. We knew of the partnerships that Ottawa OC has done with XC ski clubs so GHO decided to do the same here in southern Ontario. Last month GHO helped raise several hundred dollars for the Highlands Nordic Track Attack kids program with a successful last minute ski orienteering race fundraiser. When I say last minute I mean it. Five days before the race we didn't even have a map! The participants (about half of which were kids) really enjoyed the event.

Stars have been organizing great ski orienteering (and snowshoe orienteering) events the last few winters at Wasaga Nordic in Wasaga Beach so hopefully together with GHO we can create an attractive alternative for XC skiers and that this will get more people giving ski-orienteering a try.

Here is the future link for next winter's events and we will have more info here in a few months (just the shell of the web page is constructed so far)
http://dontgetlost.ca/index.php?option=com_content...

Click on the results tab for this year's results and map/courses