Discussion: Something tells me...

...that they would also consider what cyclists wear to be "silly"

And football or baseball players....

I am having a hard time imagining any sports clothes so cool that people want to do that sport based on the clothes alone.
Maybe yoga, there are some nice yoga outfits; or running, some nice stuff there.

Also, I love the name orienteering, and would fight changing it. I know there are strong voices wanting to change it though.
I don't have any useful opinion on the name rogaining.

They can call it whatever they want, it will always be Orienteering!

Clothes: did you read Hunger Games?

Is that one of those contests about how many hot dogs can be devoured in a set time? That kind of game?

Re: branding. I think it's telling that the one North American club who has hired an outside marketing agency is the same orienteering club who has the fastest-growing junior program on the continent. And a very popular race series with a big name sponsor. And it's no coincidence that this club is rebranding to use "adventure running".

We honestly have an image problem with our name. We aren't the primary cause of the problem (think: military & scouting), but we unless we do something about it, the problem isn't going to magically go away, and we're missing out. I know that dyed-in-the-wool orienteers won't like this, but we need to be proactive if we want to grow our sport (and we'll need to grow a lot in the next decade just to replace the aging population we have).

There are plenty of Attackpoint threads debating what to change the name to, and you can't please everyone. Personally, I'd go with adventure running, with variants of adventure skiing, adventure biking, urban adventure running, and ultra adventure running (rogaining). But that's just me.

I'll admit that the achilles' heel to this catering to non-runners with running in the name. I also like the name TrailCross, but that's not perfect, either.

Re: clothing: as an athletics aesthetics geek, I don't think it's a design issue, I think it's an implementation issue. Because I think the design for orienteering clothing has the potential for looking good. From the ground up, you'd have running shoes, gaiters or tall socks, slim-fit knickers or shorts, and a slim-fit jersey.

None of those items, taken individually, is all that weird. Soccer players wear knee-high socks with pads. Football players wear slim-fit knickers. Many sports wear slim-fit tops.

I think the issue is that we don't have enough orienteers that care enough to design something to look good, or to wear well-designed things all the time. It's difficult because we abuse our equipment pretty hard while we play, so unless you have an endless supply of gear, it's really hard to look good every time you head out.

I think you could make the case for tennis and golf, as examples of sports with fashion as an attracting feature. And while not getting people to play a certain sport, it's been well documented that uniform design does play a factor in getting people to play for certain teams (ie Oregon getting a lot of top football recruits).

"golf... sports..." haha, nearly had me there :)

I was thinking the last couple of days that ARK is about as fantastic a name as possible. It's got a K in it so it's rare. It has Kids in the name, so the Kids are part of it, rather than merely catered to. Parents will say, my child is an Adventure Running Kid, which sounds way better (or more pretentious, I guess they have to say it a little sheepishly) than my child plays this or that. And an ARK is a safe, protective place where one can have worry-free Adventures.

On the other hand, I think orienteering can be rebranded with the same name. It will take work and time, but with the likes of Erin going around spreading the word, the word will get out. Those following hammer's log saw the effect of Serghei Logvin, the kids now want to make the national orienteering team. Good exposure.

About clothing, the clubs haven't strong enough identity in the US. Get good clothing and *expect* club members to wear it, to represent. Then people may be happy to pay the $$$ for the gear.

Re: club identity, agreed, but I think we need relays. Tough when some clubs are so isolated. But we can start by getting juniors excited about them...

Erin was saying to me yesterday that he would like to create (or have others create) more relay events.

I really liked Pink Socks's suggestion (in another discussion) of having a one day A meet/ ISIC champs, folllowed by the Relay chanps the next day. I think that is a great combo, and would encourage kids and adults to participate in the relay. Maybe someone will bid for 2014?

I really liked Pink Socks's suggestion

I think this suggestion may have been hidden away in my log several months ago, so I'll give a quickie recap. What do relays need to work? Teams. What existing event has the most teams? IS/IC.

Since 2008, what was the largest relay event in the US in terms of attendance? It was the bonus, non-sanctioned sprint relay that we had at 2012 IS/IC (153 starts). Honestly, I thought attendance was too low; we had only 43% of the participants run in the relay, even though it was within walking distance of the Athletes' Village. Because it wasn't sanctioned or contributing to any championships, I think that's why a lot of the kids stayed away, even though it was the highlight event for many. In other words, the relay had the potential to be huge had championships been on the line.

I'd propose a Team Champs weekend. One day of individual starts, one day of relay. There are a lot of kinks to work out, naturally. An IS/IC relay would need teams of 3, but the club relay traditionally has teams of 4. Would the team trophies be awarded to the best teams on individual starts, or relay, or a combination of both? Would you also include a club competition (for non IS/IC) for the individual starts? What about the conflicts where a top runner has to choose between an IS/IC team and a club team?

Ok, so maybe it's better to separate the club relay from IS/IC. But I think IS/IC would be a lot more fun if it had one day of a championship relay.

Also, looking at the sanctioning calendar for 2014, one club (OCIN) is interested in hosting IS, and another (DVOA) is interested in hosting IC. This just seems silly to me. IC is currently so small that it makes so much sense to combine them (and they've been combined for 3 years now).

On the other hand, I think orienteering can be rebranded with the same name.

I agree with this, and I nearly said as much in my earlier comment. The trouble here is that it will take a lot more work and money to successfully change the brand. If you switch to a new brand, it's a lot easier, because you're essentially starting from scratch and you can create what you want (ie Adventure Running Kids vs. Hamilton Orienteering Juniors).

You see a lot of corporate rebrands after bankruptcies and well-known failures. Two that I can think of are AirTran replacing ValuJet and Altria replacing Phillip Morris. Granted, orienteering is nowhere near as bad as plane crashes and cigarettes, but I think the principle still applies.

ARK is about as fantastic a name as possible.

Agreed. I also love how the older kids are in ARX. Older kids don't really want to be called kids anymore, so moving up to Adventure Running X-treme was a good way to avoid that.

It may come as a surprise to some, but once upon a time this is the way the Intercollegiates were organized - a one day individual race, followed the next day by a relay where the team titles were awarded. You'd think all team titles would be decided that way, by an actual race (a relay) rather then some arbitrary off-site method of adding up individual results, etc. etc.

Companies can rename, staff have no choice. In democratic organisations, it's a lot harder because you have to convince the people. You don't see USA changing its name after Iran Contra or the Vatican after a few thousand priests misbehave.

I am an orienteer.

DVOA's interest in the IC's is to pair a one day IC with the US Relay Champs.

Yes--that is exactly it, for 2014.

Speaking as an organizer from OCIN, I offer a couple comments.

I understand that many people would like to see the IS and IC together. It sounds like a great idea having all the kids in one place, letting the younger kids see the older, faster ones, and giving them something to aspire towards. It would be even better if there actually were many college age orienteers and many college teams, having a fierce, intense competition. Okay, maybe it is fierce and intense, but there are not currently enough college age orienteers or teams to be all that inspiring. But leave that aside for the moment. The concept of putting everyone together has a lot of merit.

The difficulty lies in the organization. Both the IS and the IC have extremely complex and different (from each other) rules for eligibility, individual scoring, team scoring, and categories of awards. Producing timely and correct results for either of these events alone is a tremendous challenge. Doing it for both at once, and getting it right, essentially requires two independent systems.

OCIN did the IS and IC Champs together a number of years ago. More recently, BAOC and COC tried putting them back together. The efforts were admirable. And not to insult any club or organizer, but whenever these two events have been held together, there has never been an awards ceremony that has been completely on time and completely accurate, in terms of giving the right awards and not having to call someone back for an exchange of medals or awards. Protests and complaints over eligibility have been the norm, not the rare exception. Not to say that it can't be done, but as an organizer of both, it has been my opinion that we should focus on doing one event extremely well, rather than trying to do both at once and greatly increasing the risk that one or both will be compromised.

That said, technology is getting better, electronic online registration is getting better at clearing up eligibility issues early, and I have slowly warmed up from "Never again will I be involved in organizing these two events together" to "Well, with enough lead time and enough good volunteers, I think we could pull it off". So, perhaps someday, you will see OCIN bid to do them together again. But, we definitely won't step in on DVOA's current plans to host the IC's in 2014.

And in the meantime, I hope we can turn our current crop of high school and JROTC orienteers into many, many, more competitive college orienteers, on many different college teams, so that when the events are held together again, the younger orienteers will be awed by a truly large and impressive collegiate competition between many different schools, instead of USMA vs USMA vs USMA.

OCIN did the IS and IC Champs together a number of years ago.

If I am not mistaken, that number would be 15 or so...

The recent rewrite of the rules made a variety of rule changes to the IC champs to bring them in line with IS to make it easier to host them together.

I would just like to jump in and say that I for one am against renaming the sport, unless, perhaps, it is to come from the top - the IOF.

Otherwise you are going to be training a bunch of adventure runners to compete internationally in the sport of orienteering... confusing no?

Granted that kind of thing does exist in soccer / football but that's a whole different ball game ;)

Besides that, orienteering already has a very good name in certain North American cities. In the Yukon the sport is well respected. The same can be said of Ottawa where a number of young competitive skiers participate semi regularly in orienteering and quite enjoy it. We are also included in things like the annual Ottawa Sports Awards and have recently been getting some very good press. Being Emily's hometown helps of course :) That said, changing the name away from orienteering would, for us, be a bad move.

In Hamilton it made sense. I understand that - Adventure Racing has long been bigger than orienteering in Southern Ontario and it makes sense to follow that brand. Not everywhere though.

"The same can be said of Ottawa"

Ummm, looks like some editing of the OOC web site is in order:

http://ottawaoc.ca/adventure/index.html

;-)

Indeed Mike.

We weren't able to come up with a proper marketable name for our pilot last spring and ended up with that (not my personal first choice by any means but it worked nonetheless)
We're working on putting together the first full season of the program now and are again working to come up with a decent brand for the program.

Wow, how far away do you take the kids that they need "sunscreen"?

re: renaming the sport.

As Pink Socks mentioned above my club (GHO) has had great success with our Dontgetlost Adventure Running brand. That success has come through extensive promo and marketing costs and extensive market research to develop innovative ways to reduce the barrier to entry to the sport of orienteering. These efforts combined have ballooned participation in our events and programs.

Our Adventure Running Kids® program, had over 850 unique participants (coaches and kids) in 2012. And yes Neil, Adventure Running Kids® is as "fantastic a name possible" ;-) The Salomon Dontgetlost Adventure Running Series races are routinely among the largest participation events in Ontario (if not Canada) and I think our Dontgetlost Adventure Running Schools Challenge at 1100 students is the biggest orienteering race in Canada each year.

Looking at those ARK numbers a little more closely we estimate that 1 in 7 or so members in Orienteering Canada are now linked to ARK as either a coach or participant. Tomorrow marks ARK's 3rd birthday.

In the 46 year history of my orienteering club we have never had participation and membership numbers like we do today. Nothing even close. I recently sat down to talk to the founder of my orienteering club, Jack Lee, to discuss the growth of orienteering. People need to realize that Jack was among the first involved in orienteering in North America and through clinics in the early 70’s helped several large US clubs grow. He also wrote a great book on activities for kids in orienteering. I asked Jack if he approved of the change in our marketing. Jack stated he was super impressed with our ARK numbers but he reminded me that the schools orienteering race that he organized for the better part of 20 years never really grew above 100 kids until he changed the name from orienteering to 'adventure challenge'. Race participation jumped from 100 to 350 kids at that time (late 80's, early 90's) when the name change took place. He also reminded me of the participation bump that happened when our junior program at that time was renamed 'Forest Adventures' from something bland like HKF Orienteering Juniors. Marketing the sport as something different than orienteering therefore has been a part of our approach for over 25 years now. ;-)

However, adding the term 'running' in the brand/race/program together with the 'adventure' was the key to take our participation and membership growth and trajectory to where it is now. The fact is the public, and kids and parents know what running is and they know what adventure is and that makes marketing a much easier sell.

This is why I think Adventure Racing did so well when it launched here in Ontario in the late 90's. An easily identifiable name and some very powerful marketing by for-profit companies like "Raid the North". AR would not have done as well if it was marketed as 'Team Multisport Orienteering'. We did extensive market research on the AR successes and followed in a similar approach (though I should note that Orienteering Ontario had been using the term 'Adventure Running' as early as the mid 80's).

We have developed a means to get people doing orienteering which at the end of the day is the goal of our club. We have enough revenue now to support 1.75 full time employees and now have more juniors in our club than adults (likely for the first time in the 46 year history) so there are some exciting opportunities ahead. If the kids we have in ARK end up enjoying mountain marathons, trail running, rogaines, adventure racing, hiking and/or orienteering like the hundreds of adults that run in our Salomon series already do then we have done our job.

We have a few kids in our Adventure Running X program that clearly have a goal to make Canada's Jr. Orienteering team. It helps having a role model in the club like Serghei Logvin. It is also easier to inspire a few kids to move up to the international level when you have several hundred kids involved starting a very young age (6).

Exposing hundreds of people to orienteering organized within an orienteering club but not calling it orienteering in our view has been a much better way for the sport to develop locally than the old approach we tried for four decades. The numbers prove that.

Dontgetlost Adventure Running is our brand but the O in GHO still stands for orienteering.

Like.

And you are doing good work rebranding orienteering (without changing the name), as the ARK crowd find out what orienteering actually is, and with those numbers, it doesn't really matter what the public thinks now.