Discussion: Event information has been ...

Event information has been posted for the 2021 OUSA Masters Nationals, a two-day classic event in the kettle moraine terrain of central Minnesota.

And a Puzzle Friday to go along with it....

117MN-Mille_Lacs_Kathio

Registration is now live! Go to https://www.mnoc.org/2021-masters-nationals or EventReg.

MNOC Continues to add more meet information to the MNOC.org event page. Things are firming up. All the courses have been taped and vetted. The woods are really nice and it will be interesting to see what changing colors and a little leaf fall will do to the difficulty.

The permit is finalized and fully approved. Last details falling into place.

Looking good. Will the controls be enabled for SI Air punching?

No, the controls will not have SI Air punching enabled.

Thanks. Disappointing, it is very easy to program most existing SI units to handle Air. But I know your club already has a ton on your plate, just making this event happen at all. See you there.

(sheesh)

Lest other organizers feel like it's important to enable SI-Air capabilities at their events I will offer that I find it completely unnecessary for the vast majority of events. Neat, but not at all a requirement.

Maybe I should put this under the "remote events run by retirees" thread, but I'll offer to configure controls for any club that wants to use Air at their meets. Hint, you change one setting in SI Config; otherwise its exactly the same as programming units for non-Air. After getting used to using them at all of your club's local meets, you really come to appreciate it. And reducing the likelihood of accidental physical contact with control units and especially the finish, is another plus in your COVID playbook :-) Not complaining, just sayin' there is a lot of upside and the only minimal downside is slightly faster battery consumption.

Organizers need to be able to offer SI-Air (rental sticks) to all competitors at National Ranking Events so that the playing field is level. Perhaps MNOC does not have enough rental SI-Air sticks to be able to offer them to everyone and/or does not have the resources to deal with that additional bit of logistics.

The controls all need to be turned on within a certain time window before the races start, which is usually done by prerunners, but not every event has the manpower for that.
I'd love to have SI Air at every event but I know it's not always easy or even feasible.

I care a lot about having a good area, good maps, good courses, and correctly sited and positioned controls. Compared to that, SI Air is completely unimportant, at least to me.

Maybe it has some meaning for a major international event with TV production, and for those who know and say it does, fine. But here in the US? For our events, where we struggle to get even 150 or so people to show up? As if *that's* what we should be worried about? Right.

I'm not suggesting that it is a major issue, yes this is a very minor point, but one very easily solved.

@Glen: I believe the requirement is that rental of Air cards be offered at Championship events that use Air, not any NRE, but I could be mistaken, and since this is a championship, that part of your statement is a reasonable concern. But, OUSA has a set of rental Air cards which can be used (I think 40 or 50). Are there enough? Air was offered for the 2020 OUSA Nationals, which were cancelled just a few weeks before the event, due to COVID. At the time of cancellation, there were 158 entries. There were only 9 requests for Air rentals (less than 1/4 of the available cards) and 5 for regular SI-5 card rentals. Of those entrants with their own personal SI cards, 44 had registered with Air cards (a little over 1/4 of total entrants); the others had registered with standard cards and apparently didn't care about the option to use Air. Presumably, 18 months later, an even higher percentage of potential entrants have personal air cards by now.

@Peggy - the regular SI controls also need to be turned on before a championship event, so I don't see why the controls being in Air mode would increase the personnel needed.

This reminds me of the arguments to keep using pin punching when regular SI first came out. But in that case, organizers also faced tremendous expense, time, and learning curve in implementing SI. The upgrade to Air is not nearly so big a leap, but it also is not nearly so intimidating or expensive to accomplish.

Hey, if nothing else, we are keeping the reminder to get registered for this meet at the top of the events discussion...

I totally see the value of SI Air for Ski-O and MTBO. For regular orienteering, physically tagging the control seems like a reasonable requirement.

And unless I'm mistaken (and I'm not saying that anyone is saying otherwise), pin-punching-only is still an option at all events. It's true that it hasn't been used so much lately. The most recent course I did with pin punching was... hmm... the most recent course I did -- today! But I am sorely tempted to put on an NRE with pin punching and see what happens.

MNOC seems to be shy (or maybe they're eager to collect sweet, sweet late and day-of registration surcharges) so I'll issue a last minute reminder - today is the last day of regular registration. If you wait until tomorrow, your cost for the two race event will increase by $20.

Thank you for the plug Jon. I don't look at us as shy. We have some key members on AP who are either on the other side of the globe, or buried at work. We appreciate your support here this month on our other map locations and at our local meets as well as plugging the Masters reminders for us.