On the Norwottuck Meet
I greatly overextended myself setting the NEOC local meet at Norwottuck this weekend. A combination of oversight and poor planning resulted in several critical errors, and the worst episode of my brief orienteering organizational career. The fault is my own, and I am sorry to everyone who suffered from my errors. It is fortunate that some of you were able to escape unscathed and have a pleasant session.
The Plan
Particularly since my injuries, I have focused more of my efforts on setting meets. Norwottuck marked the fifth meet of 2011 at which I designed all the courses. I have a vision for what NEOC can become and grand ambitions as the Events VP, and I am willing to shoulder considerable burden to achieve those objectives. Norwottuck offered an opportunity to experiment with route choice - a problem I have not studied in great detail, and to set a blue course. Blue isn't necessary for local meets - a point Alex emphasized to me in September when I asked for her feedback on drafts. I am disappointed that more meets don't have a blue course, but a red course is often sufficient. I found all the advanced courses very hard to make interesting without making them too long; Norwottuck's odd start location is sufficiently remote that much distance is consumed even getting to the nearest feasible control sites.
Setting all controls the morning of the event is a monumental task, especially given the need to set up registration, put out signs, set water, and so on. I learned at Rocky Woods that it is crucial to check control sites before finalizing courses; on many maps in New England, features which might seem obvious at first glance are untenable in practice. I like to retain creative control of course design, which necessitates visiting all sites personally. In practice, this isn't possible, especially at a site as remote as Norwottuck, which is difficult to visit far in advance of the meet. While I did secure considerable volunteer assistance (a big improvement over past events), I was reluctant to ask someone to join me for four or more hours of course setting and revising, and that irrevocably handicapped me.
What went well
- A dedicated and merry bunch of meet-day volunteers ran the meet smoothly. Pete Lane and Jim Paschetto worked the entire day at registration and results. Michelle Faucher, her son Garrett and friend Nolan, Ali Crocker, Richard Powers, and Pete worked registration. Dean Sturtevant and Phil Bricker offered instruction to beginners. Peter Gagarin and Alex Jospe corrected a disastrous error on the white course, set beginner and intermediate controls, and put out signs. Bill Binnette picked up the white course.
- Apart from a lack of a sign displaying course lengths, I procured all the equipment I needed. Unfortunately, it required three separate trips in Boston to get it all, and delayed my arrival in Amherst on Friday.
- The weather was great, and all the attendees, including a platoon of marauding girl scouts, were pleasant and enthusiastic. They were also tolerant when I erred.
Errors
- My approach to event directing failed miserably. I should have asked for help from the eager and willing Amherst crowd, either to vet sites far in advance of the meet or to assist me with control setting and course updates on Saturday. Even a single person to vet and revise white, yellow, and orange would have fixed many of the problems I created.
- I pulled off a solid set of courses at Mt. Tom single-handedly on June 12 in an effort made Herculean by unnecessary oversights. Norwottuck is a much larger problem than Mt. Tom, especially with its size, climb, lower map quality, and a blue course. In short, I set a much greater hurdle to overcome at Norwottuck than at Mt. Tom.
- Exacerbated by delays due to my poor course/control planning, I had an adventure Saturday night getting maps printed that required driving to Hartford. While I had written the correct description down for control 139 on brown, green, and red (north foot of southern cliff), I transcribed it into purple pen as north foot of north cliff.
- Because I didn't have enough time to visit the orange, yellow, and white courses, the white and yellow were of notably inferior quality, with poor sites. I narrowly avoided sending white and orange runners through a shooting range, with PG correcting me about an hour before the event. I changed two orange control sites, and was only able to get acceptable maps because NEOC brings a printer to events for just that purpose.
- Worst of all, I made the most egregious error that can be made at an orienteering event: I set a control in the wrong place. Green #9 and Blue #10, control 128, was set on an unmapped cliff about 30-40m southwest of the true location. The correct location was already bingo-y, because there were many unmapped cliffs in that neighborhood. I fixed the control at around 12:30 PM, after many people had already been affected and wasted countless minutes hunting for the control. To runners who were affected: I am very sorry for the ordeal I put you through.
- I failed to recruit enough help for control pickup, and had another epic adventure retrieving all the controls with Ali.
Lessons
I am devastated by the magnitude of my failure today. The errant control is an irrevocable problem of the highest degree, and casts the entire event in the worst light. I was exacting verifying the locations of many of the control sites, as my track will attest, but I was in a hurry by the time I set 128, and I was less thorough. An additional 2-3 man hours in course planning and control checking were necessary before map printing, and I squandered too much time on remote blue controls that only a handful of people visited while failing to devote enough attention to WYO (and at least one green control). I failed to recruit sufficient help for the magnitude of the course setting and control pickup projects, and Ali had to bear an excessive burden.
In the future, I will:
- Obtain the assistance of at least one other person for control setting, and advance control site vetting if needed
- Recruit enough volunteers for setting and pickup.
- Avoid a blue course unless I have a second person to help set advanced courses. In general, it is unnecessary, as my courses tend to be demanding, and red is sufficient.
- Be sufficiently well organized to identify any problems well in advance of the meet, and communicate more regularly with my event volunteers.
- Avoid knuckleheaded excessive self-reliance.