2022 Scottish Orienteering Events – an exciting year ahead

Enthusiasm for returning to orienteering after the pandemic is evident in the nearly completed 2022 calendar. It looks like we’ll have a full SOL series, an abundance of SOUL competitions and hopefully a full set of Scottish Championships along with some popular events in the calendar. We remain committed to offering Juniors exciting opportunities with dates to finalise for Jamie Stephenson, Scottish Junior Cup and Inter-areas which we hope to announce very soon.

A big thank you to the everyone who has helped pull this together and to the clubs who have offered to organise these events. It’s going to be an exciting year when combined with all the other planned events and activities. A full calendar will be released in the coming weeks but we were keen to give you a flavour of what is in the offering.

Scottish Orienteering League (SOL) 2022

Clubs have offered to organise 7 SOLs on some great areas and this is how it looks

Many of these will be combined with events on the Saturday to provide some great weekends across the country. As ever parking is an issue at Linn of Tummel but Janet Clark (ESOC) & Terry O’Brien (STAG) are working on a cunning plan. That should be a great weekend as TAY have also offered to put on the Scottish Middle Championships at the newly mapped South Creag Vinean.

Thank you to Paul Hammond (FVO) for looking after the scoring for the SOL. The rules in 2022 will remain unchanged with the best 4 results to count.

Scottish Orienteering Urban League (SOUL) 2022

A big thanks to Pat Squire for coordinating next year’s league with up to 14 races. I would like to note that Pat is stepping down as SOUL coordinator and we would like to thank him for his energy and enthusiasm over the last few years as the Urban League.

Paul Caban has kindly offered to look after the league results next year.

Scottish Championship Events 2022

We can confirm that the Individual championships (SOC) and the Relays (SRC) will be held on Deeside on the last weekend in May. The individuals will be on Glen Dye and the relays nearby. You can guarantee some quality competition from Gramp and Maroc.

We are still working on the Nights and hope to hold in in the Edinburgh area on the night before Interlopers SOL at Gullane.

Other events

In addition to these events the Compass Sport Cup Final will also take place in Scotland on 16^th October at Devilla & Tulliallan. The heats will be on a new area near Callander on 13^th March.

The Harvester relays are also pencilled in the calendar but the date and arrangements have yet to be confirmed.

The JHIs are coming to Scotland this year and will be combined with SOL6 on Speyside. We are also planning to have another Junior Cup series which will include events such as the Jamie Stevenson.

Develop your skills

The extensive 2022 events programme provides a great opportunity to develop your skills so please let your club committee know of you if you want to be involved. For example by being mentored as a planner, or developing your controlling or organiser skills. We will also plan to do more than we have in the past to coordinate controllers for these events (e.g. with sign-up sheets).

Get involved with Scottish Orienteering

So it’s an exciting and busy year ahead and most of you will be involved with your clubs in some way in organising, planning and controlling.

However, most of this wouldn’t happen without quite a lot of work behind the scenes to coordinate leagues and events, make sure we have appropriate rules and standards, and develop volunteer skills.

Clubs do a lot of this but some of it has to happen at a Scottish level and at the minute the SOA team (board, staff and volunteers) is quite stretched. So as you read this and feel excited about the year ahead please could you also think about the following vacancies:

• 6 Day coordinator and Events Manager post – this is a 4 day a week paid post replacing Colin Matheson. It’s a great opportunity for a keen orienteer to make a significant contribution to Scottish Orienteering including the 6 Days event and WOC2024. If you are interested please look out for the job advertisement or in the meantime please feel free to talk to me or Dave Kershaw.
• Operations Director – currently I’m covering this as it’s vacant following Ade Chapman’s resignation. It’s a great opportunity to get to know the clubs, and shape the future of the sport in Scotland.
• Advocate roles – these are effectively champions for the main volunteer roles: organising, planning and controlling. Lynne Walker has shown how valuable this can be as Planning Advocate with the training programme that she’s developed. We’d like to do the same for controllers and organisers, and alas Lynne is also standing down after 2 years in the role. If you have the energy and enthusiasm to help develop new officials please get in touch.

Thank you!

Richard Oxlade (Acting Operations Director)