Discussion: AOL

Latest AOL standing are at

What is your oppinion about AOL? Is anything that need to be changed? I hope to present AOL awards at US Champs this November.

Next year list includes so far:
1. USA Short and Long Champs, 2 days, May 3-4, New York
2. Canadian Short and Classic Champs (2 WREs?), 3 days, August???, BC???, Canada
3. USA Classic Champs and WRE, 2 days, September 13-14, Lake Tahoe, CA

Hopefully, there would be more WREs so we can icnlude them into the AOL schedule.

Cheers,
Sergey

Sorry, forgot the link. It is at http://velichko.home.mindspring.com/aol/

Beautiful site Sergey. Although, there is something I have to add. It seems that the only folks that somewhat stand a chance to make it to the top are those who will manage to participate if not in all competitions but at least in most of them. As such, between more or less equal athletes the one who completes in greater number of meets will prevail. I believe that runking should be done based on performance with constatly moving average of a runner's score ( somewhat is done on attackpoint.) Otherwise, your job is praiseworthy which demostrates not only dedication to the sport, but an attempt to elevate it as well on the continent. I am convinced that as time will pass, the site will gain more evaluations as other suggestions pour in.
Sergei

part of the league's mission is to encourage greater elite participation in important national events. this is deliberately reflected in the scoring system.

AOL is an extension of TECHNO which started in 1998. I am glad that Sergey has volunteered to do this. It takes a lot of time.

The idea of TECHNO was to pick key events to increase head-to-head participation and also to generate greater meaning to non championship races. TECHNO started off very well with the Flying Pig and a large Canadian team attended. The series was also viewed as a Canada vs. US competition using the Bjorn Kjellstrom trophy system adopted at the North American Championships. The AOL replicates most of this but I must admit myself and many Canadians didn't know it existed until a week ago. TECHNO consulted with both a CDN and US rep to choose the races in each country (I believe it was 6 or 7 events in each). Does it make sense to only choose the champs or WRE events? Won't these be highly attended anyway? Choosing a large number of races and you may as well just use the US Rankings (which I believe uses Canadians and many Canadian events).

What is the goal of AOL? To increase elite participation? To determine the top ranked in North America? To create an elite series of races? If it is the first and last point then ideally you want to limit the number of races and work with the host clubs and COF and USOF to re-think elite orienteering. If it is the 2nd point then just use the ranking system already adopted.

Personally I think Canada and US needs to take a serious look at its elite orienteering. What we need is a Continental Cup of about 6 weekends per year. BUT those weekends need to be a little different than just two days of classic orienteering. There are four official WOC distances - sprint, short, long, relay. In North America we seldom race any of these distances (we race something in between short and long). The Continental Cup should have the odd weekend in which participants race three times over two days. e.g., short on Sat. AM, a sprint or sprint-relay Sat. PM and then a long on Sunday. If you increase the team aspect then you will likely increase the participation.
These key weekends should be an opp. for our respective teams to travel as teams and to raise the profile of elite orienteering in North America. The continental Cup becomes the venue for top juniors in Nor-AM to race agains the elites and the stepping stone to WC, JWOC, and WC.

Cheers,
Mike Waddington
www.teamhammer.ca

The major goal of AOL right now is to increase participation in elite NA events. It is shameful that most of WREs were ignored by more than half of potential competitors. The scoring system reflects this major goal. We may change it if needed when elites would start participating in events regularly.

I like Mike W idea about Continental Cup. However, we need support of both federations and clubs to have such system. I for myself can not travel more than 4 times per year outside of the NW region due to my vacation time and most of the elites are in the same position. I am in favor of having 2-3 long events that encompass 2 weekends each as well as time between and include national champioships ala APOC this year, PNWOF, etc. These long festivals should include all the types of the courses that Mike mentioned. I think that would work well for most of the people and may meet the support of the clubs. 1 Festival in Canada including all COC Champs and 2 Festivals in USA including all USA Champs (Classis, short, long) at East and West coasts would be most optimal. I hate to see bazillion of USA events that I can not even attend :)

Cheers,
Sergey

Check out nordic skiing Continental Cup goals, format, bidding, etc. It may be the way "O" needs to go for an elite series:

http://canada.x-c.com/getfast/eventsgeneral/bidint...

http://canada.x-c.com/getfast/eventsgeneral/ccpkge...

MW

There is one serious drawback to the Continental Cup - looks like it aimed at Canadian and USA athletes only. One of the things we would like to be in AOL is an incentive for long visiting non-NA athletes to participate in O events on a wider scale even if they are not qualified for Canada/USA teams. I think we can amend AOL rules and redefine goals to meet better demand from NA elite athletes.

I should perhaps clarify the history of the AOL idea. Being a newcomer to North American O, I wasn't aware of any system except the US ranking system for determining any kind of season championships. It seemed to me that that system had three main drawbacks:
- it is too complicated either to serve as a motivational device ('I have to beat Sergey by 3.7 points today to beat him overall this year': have you ever heard anyone say that? Of course not - the system is too complicated to calculate in 'real time') or to be easily explainable to anyone outside orienteering.
- it doesn't encourage competition, participation or big fields in any way - there are too many events that count for anyone to attend more than half of them. What's more, if you're lucky you can easily score higher at a poorly-attended A meet that at the US, CAN or NA champs, which isn't my idea of how a ranking system should work.
- there is no team system (so you don't get orienteers coming to meets so that their team can be competitive).

Hence I proposed AOL. Although it turns out to be similar to TECHNO, it was actually inspired by the Australian National League system (I didn't know about TECHNO). The original idea talked about a competition between regions as well as an individual competition, with something like 2 CAN and 4 US regions to compete. Nothing has come of this. I raised the idea to the usoteam email list and got some favorable comments, a couple of 'why do we need this?' comments, and not much else. Sergey was enthusiastic, however, and picked up the ball and ran with it. Apart from a couple of comments from others about what events to include, he has done all the work and all the promotion for this. Why were Canadians not consulted? No good reason – rather, I think we thought that at short notice it would be good to run the system for a year as a trial to see if it works.

What are the good and bad things about AOL as it stands?
- good: the scoring system works and seems to be producing sensible results
- bad: I don’t think anyone cares enough about it to prefer to go to AOL events; plus, since the system wasn’t put in place very democratically, noone ‘owns’ it except Sergey (who is doing an excellent job - as Mike says, it takes a lot of time. Thanks, Sergey.). And I think there are still too many events in the series since noone is making an effort to go to all of them (all of these are related problems).
- bad: there is no team competition.

What can be done?
- I agree with Mike: we need a team competition. Make it the US versus Canada. That will work because people care about representing the US and Canada, and it should be reasonably balanced if the scoring system is done right. Make it include (say) four weekends. Realistically two of those must be US and CAN champs and another one another major event like a WRE, but it would be good to have one more. Include some kind of team competition (mixed relay? 2M + 1F on each team?) Publicize it in ONA. And let the Canadians know about it :)
- More important, let's not just have a discussion about this here. This is not democratic, though it’s a good place to share ideas. Ultimately an idea needs to go to other places for decisions and action. First the US and Canadian elites need to discuss it and agree on a system (or decide that most people don’t care – there’s no point having a competition if only a few people are interested). Then we need to make this official – let’s take a united proposal to USOF and the Canadian OF. And let’s start next year... so this needs to happen now.

(Incidentally, Sergey, the non-NA runners issue is not very important – it only applies to a couple of people, and the obvious solution is just to let people represent the country they live in.)

William

In the mid-1980s there was something called the "Trans-Atlantic Cup" that was intended to address some of the same things as TECHNO and AOL.

The Trans-Atlantic Cup was a US-Canada-Great Britain event. I'm not sure how many runners were on each team (maybe 6 with 12 from the host country?). The format was an individual race followed by a relay.

I don't know how other countries selected teams, but in the US there were 3 of 4 A-meets that were designated as team trials. The top two F21 and M21 at each of these races was on the team (there must have been some sort of selection committee to fill any remaining slots).

In the US, the Trans-Atlantic Cup encouraged top runners to attend the various team trials and gave them a non-WOC-year big race to work toward. It made use of the existing USOF A-meet schedule and didn't require any additional work for the organizers of the team trails races.

I think the Trans-Atlantic Cup died after just two or three rounds. In 1984, NEOC was host. In 1986, Great Britian was host. I don't remember if Canada ever hosted.

FYI: Canada hosted TAC in 1988 but I don't think it was taken very seriously and I don't think GB showed up.
A good AOL should provide the stepping stone to international events and can provides for a good US-CAN competition. Fewer events than are currently in it.