Discussion: The value of a good announcer

This past weekend we held the Canadian Champs in Alberta. Pardon me for saying so myself, but I think that we had great arenas. And a lot of that comes down to Brent L & Meghan R who were our announcers over the weekend. They took what could have been (and usually is) a rather boring stream of runners coming down the finish chute - and changed that into something quite fun and exciting to watch. The Sprint and Sprint Relay in particular were great fun. Here are some of the things that I think contributed to the great announcing:

Brent & Meghan are well equipped for the job...

great knowledge of the sport

they know a lot about a lot of orienteers

lots of practice following online results, so they are handy with the "speaker module" in MeOS

they have great voices for announcing ... high energy, and recognisable

they are well-connected and trusted by the organisers who are happy to share course information with them

they are very good at interviewing people

everyone (almost) knows them and is (mostly) happy to be interviewed by them

Good equipment

Eric T's cell-phone based radio control worked well. Though we need more experience using it with the MeOS software so we can reset things if they go wonky.

Great PA system

MeOS speaker module is quite good

Good arena setup

the finish chute is long enough to allow for announcing

sight-lines are good

arena designed so that people hang out around the finish chute

Thanks to Meghan & Brent for doing the announcing at the Canadian Champs and really making the arena a fun place to hang out.

And did I mention Brent does a great "Per Forsberg" - one of the highlights was Brent pretending to interview PF, doing both sides of the interview. And finally, to bring a smile to your face here's a tribute to Per Forsberg who is definitely the Gold Standard in orienteering arena announcing.

It was great fun to announce and it is easy to make it exciting when you have a great announcing partner and so many cool things are happening :)