Discussion: Route Choice for Youngsters

Yesterday I was surfing YouTube videos about orienteering and came across this gem. I'm not kidding. It is really good particularly as it covers an often overlooked but very important part of orienteering learning - the post race review.
Not to give too much away but an orienteering coach sits with his 11 or 12 year old student (who happens to be his daughter) as they review how she made her route choices and ran her race.
There are lots of videos of how the best ran their championship courses but a pre-teen so well articulating how she got around her course. That is worth passing on to our your young orienteers.
I was impressed with ... well, I'll leave it to you to form your own impressions.

At Tahoma during winter league and other big races we do a pre race map meeting before every race.
Then at the next week’s map review we start with the last race. We look at good route choices and mistakes as a team and analyze choices in a group setting. At first discussing your mistakes or failures in front of a team can be hard but by continually practicing this and seeing even the best athletes make and share their mistakes openly we are all learning from these sessions and is the biggest source of skill growth.
We also celebrate what we call the bounce back. Say you had a really bad leg, made a big mistake then instead of carrying it forward you let it go and come back and crush the next leg. Continually reminding them each leg is a new opportunity to start fresh helps youth not be overcome by the emotions of a failure especially in big races.
We stress until you can look critically at your mistakes and learn from them they are failures, but once you can analysis them and gain insight and growth then you are failing forward and they become research that moves you to skill improvement.

They are becoming very adept to noticing red flag areas now and identify places to approach with caution and a strong route plan, as well as places to send it.

Wow was that really a M/W10 (or 12) course in that video? That was almost the equivalent of a moderate (M/W14) in this country. No wonder the Europeans are so much better than us - they start them young!

Never mind, saw the course name on the map and it's the 14 class.

There was a good example in that video of why black dots shouldn't be used to indicate vegetation boundaries. Even the experienced orienteer thought it was stony ground!

From my experience, there's a lot of difference between countries in the difficulty of M/W12 and 14 courses - M/W10 is easy everywhere but there's then big variations in how quickly they advance. I've seen M/W12 courses in a number of southern and eastern European countries which are considerably more difficult than what we're used to.

Absolutely agree wit course difficulties around the world, I have been amazed since my first O Ringen how difficult the 10 to 18 year olds courses are, way tougher than anything in the US. Also, I think the idea of pre race briefing is way more useful than post race. Instead of a "should have, could have" discussion, it's a discussion of doing it well the first time, and the strategies are fresh in one's mind. Practicing doing it well is much better than getting it wrong and lamenting over it, and likely forgetting it by the next time.

So one option for pre race briefing is to post the kids courses ahead of time to allow that. I’m pretty sure I saw that at Scottish 6 days many years ago.

That was in fact _really_ nice, I was very impressed by her ability to read the contours and run along the edge of the dropoff!

Of course anyone who coaches orienteering teams knows that both the pre-race and post race briefings are equally important. It baffles me that anyone would think that one would be done at the expense of the other.
But this video, apparently part of a series, dealt with the review of a 11 or 12--year old's run on a F 14 relay course.
Coach and Hammer, you both have world-class running daughters. They probably had the skill to articulate their route choices and decision making as well or better than young Hanna and do it in Polish as well as that Polish girl did in English but I was/ am impressed.
(In fact folks, if you have not seen the YouTube video of Samantha Saeger's miked run of a course in this year's O'Ringen you should find and watch. It is very instructive on keeping one's mind in the race.)
The older youngsters I deal with in Florida often cannot express where they went or why they went there. I hope by watching this video the Florida teens and their coaches will see how to better recognize and expresss their use of orienteering techniques.
Two other things: 1) This course featured in the video shows that yes, beginner courses and courses for the young should stick on or very close to 'hand rails' but they can incorporate choices at handrail junctions something the rules for our White courses specifically prohibit.
2) All those depressions in the forest: They probably were created in '39 or '44 as rival air forces swept over the area.

This might not be the one you were referring to Gord, but reposting anyway.

"Keeping one's mind in the race", one piece of advice I remember from a person I consider one of the best (of about 2) navigators in the US...."you have to concentrate, really, really hard".

I think Gord is referring to this video from Day 4 of O Ringen.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTL7QQThzQ

CMorse and Coach both those videos are great learning opportunities but coach is correct that the YouTube he linked is the one I have in mind.
I tell you that after years of reviewing substandard YouTube orienteering videos - including one where yours truly is interviewed- Samantha's two and now Hanna's are truly breaths of fresh air.

Agree Gord. During lockdowns I scoured the net for good material to push out to club members and there's sooo much that I didnt care for. Now we are meeting face to face we are doing "live" training again and these are wonderful reinforcements. (At two different levels of course.) But a constant theme is "find a line" bearing in mind that a line is different at different levels.

Fun to watch Sam running the course from Day 4.
I ran that same course and recognized most of it - even made a similar mistake on both 5 and 7.