Discussion: Boston Globe article is out

NPR calls orienteering a 'wacky sport;' the Globe, a 'fringe sport.'

Both true! Doesn't mean it isn't awesome, but we can't deny that it's also wacky and fringe.

Nice. NEOC has a hotline? Do people use it?

NEOC does have a hotline. It is a relic of the pre-internet age, but is is printed on all our control flags so we keep it active. We haven't figured out how to tell how may calls we actually get - the phone company give us a count but we don't know how many are real people and how many are telemarketer calls.

We record directions to the weekend's event, sometimes people are en-route and forget how to get there, or which particular start area we are using. We probably get 1 or 2 messages a month, but most people e-mail us.

Given a choice between "wacky" and "fringe", I would take "wacky" everytime.

In just about every description of something as "fringe" that I have read or heard, the connotation is a negative one. Think political groups that have a radical agenda, but are not violent. By applying that term to orienteering, the Globe reporter screwed up.

A sport, which has the following that orienteering has in Europe, can not be labeled "fringe". That said, it certainly is not a "mainstream" sport -- even in Europe. I would say that orienteering comfortably occupies the part of the spectrum between "mainstream" and "fringe".

Now, where does that leave "extreme"...?

Fringe is not a bad word.

One can be picky about a word here or there but I thought it was a pretty good article. Those quoted well expressed the variety of orienteering - from the amble to the singular focus to the entertaining form of running.
Good on ya!

I think it is fringe. It's not particularly wacky, though.

However, I like the phrase I heard in the intro of the NPR piece, which I think would make a better slogan than "At One With Nature". Bill Littlefield said that orienteering is "safer than running with scissors".

@Cristina: At least not in Edinburgh.

Nice article...O is getting some good press lately.

The sport may not be wacky, but some of us are most decidedly so! ;-)

Wacky? You want to know wacky? How about a sport where teams run around a field and kick a ball to each other trying to get it in a goal, or another where they toss the ball back and forth trying to get to one end of the field and jump on the person carrying the ball, or that really fun sport inside a building on a tiny court they toss the ball to each other and try to get it into this little elevated basket.
Of course non of these are as spectator popular as sitting in huge stands and watching internal combustion machines go around in circles for hours on end.

Of course, no one actually participates in those sports.

Football, American football, basketball, car racing, motorcycle racing, and many other sports may have far more spectators than participants, but nonetheless the participants in each of these sports far outnumber the orienteers in the US. I assume that I know pretty much all of the Cornell employees who orienteer at all regularly, yet I know considerably more fellow employees that are enthusiastic regular participants in each of the 5 sports mentioned above without having done any surveys, just hearing about the week's activities in casual conversation. But those are just casual participants, like orienteers are usually casual participants. In the NFL, for instance, there are 32 teams, each with (usually) 53 players on their active roster, and a fair number that are out on injured reserve. So just at the top professional level of the game there are a good fraction of the total number of people belonging to OUSA. Think of the number of elementary, high school and college kids that are very serious participants in this sport. Wacky, perhaps, by the definition of non-enthusiasts, but not really lacking for participation.

The number of participants in our local NEOC meet today was around 200!!! The publicity in the Globe and on NPR has really paid off. Tons of kids. Kudos to Ian for scheduling a meet late in the season, allowing us to take advantage of the good press!

That's great! Did any of the newbies cite NPR or the Globe as their initial impression?

When I do beginner instruction at our events, I usually ask them how they found out about our event. We had a vampire-o a few years ago that was in the Times as one of the 10 things to do that weekend, and that directly brought 20+ people that night.

Yep, ideally when a media piece comes out, a club should have all info for the next few events ready, with preregistration open (not necessarily with prepayment, but for some business models prepayment also makes sense). Then those who find out about the event will have a possibility of structured interaction with the club: find out about it; go online and find out when/where the next event is; sign up; about a week before, get an email reminder/event-day update (perhaps with a payment voucher); after the event, get a followup email with a link to the results, and a story or two. The participant's email goes on the long-term communications list, where news about future events get sent.

(Compare with: Media piece comes out; people google for the club's events, but all they find is general info about some event taking place at a location with "Pending permit" wording or such; they soon forget about it.)

Kudos to the NEOC folk who made the connections and to Ian S for devising a schedule that facilitated follow through. More to be done, but it is great to get these reinforcements aka victories on the journey.

All PR is good PR if you ask me....

Great month for Orienteering in the press....Boston Globe article...NPR feature...Ali Crocker in Sports Illustrated...and now GAOC's Matt Stout in Boys Life (the national publication of the Boy Scouts of America). Great work by all from CSU to GAOC to NEOC to OUSA.

That got some of us thinking. What other years has Orienteering made the general media. What year was Peter's Wheaties box? What year was Peggy's Sports Illustrated Faces in the Crowd feature? What are we missing?

Just reply to this thread...

Have a good day.

Glen
OUSA

What year was Peter's Wheaties box?
1985
http://www.petergagarin.org/misc/wheatiesstory.htm...

What year was Peggy's Sports Illustrated Faces in the Crowd feature?
February 12, 1990, page 224

Wasn't Peggy also featured in a women's sports mag article once? Did it also include Kristen and a few others?

Dang. Peter used to look a lot like Ed.