Hello again everyone

The North West Orienteering Club course setting competition is back for 2020 and Renee has all the details! 

Take a break from study, brush up your course-setting skills or learn some new ones by designing three courses – the entries will be displayed and the winner will be announced at our club dinner on 6 December.

 The pdf link to the competition is here (scale of the map is 1:10,200, as opposed to 1:10,000) or read on....

The North West Orienteering Club Course Setting Competition 2020.

It’s back again! In 2018, NWOC organised a Course Setting Competition, which hadn’t been done in a long time. Many people joined in and created a range of courses on a map that most hadn’t seen before, let alone experienced.

While normally you wouldn’t want to put in all the effort to set courses and not actually hold the event, it can still be a fun exercise where you can do whatever you want without moving from the couch.

The map you will be setting on this year is called The Slump. It is a detailed farmland map in Hawkes Bay. This map was used for a chasing start event in the 2013 World Orienteering Cup. There are areas of cliffs and boulders, as well as a multitude of tracks, fences, and small areas of pine forest. As well as a pew ponds scattered around.

Before you start:
Download and install the free course setting software, PURPLE PEN from here.

 It literally takes a few seconds and you are away. Please download this onto a Windows computer. However, if you only have a MAC, there are instructions on the websites home screen about how to download and use it on a MAC.

 Download the Purple Pen event file and the Background map file (The Slump) by clicking here, which opens to a google drive folder with the necessary files. The  Slump map file can also be found here. Put the downloaded Purple Pen event file and Background map files into a folder on your desktop that you can work out of and save your work to. Open the Purple Pen file, and the background map should already be loaded in as the background map. THEN START PLOTTING!!

 If you are a bit unsure about how to work Purple Pen and don’t want to read a massive instructions guideline, click here to watch a Youtube tutorial. There are multiple Youtube tutorials, so if you don’t like this one, just search for another.

Course Setting Competition:
For this competition you must set three courses; a long red course 6-8km, an orange course 4-6km and a yellow course 3-4km. You can put the event centre, start, and finish wherever you want, and you have total freedom to have pivot controls, run-throughs, taped legs, and anything else you can think of.

Then describe each of your courses; why you set them that way, what you think the highlights of each course are, the most difficult legs, and any challenges you had setting these courses.

Judging Criteria:
A subset of the NWOC executive committee will be judging your courses. You will be expected to set each course in accordance to ONZs rules regarding what red, orange, and yellow should be. However, do not be afraid to make bold and challenging decisions.

Different aspects that the panel will be looking at will be: Course shape, route choice, variety in leg length and change in direction, appropriate difficulty, and special factors that would be important if this was to be at an actual event; e.g, Finish being visible to spectators or a spectator leg.

For guidance on difficulty levels, read the ONZ guidelines here.

Submitting your courses:
Once you have exported your courses to a PDF, email them and a blurb for each course to me (Renee) at Rabeo22@hotmail.com. Please submit entries by 25 November.

If you have any questions, flick me an email!

Each course will be showcased at the annual NWOC prize giving and we will award prizes and someone will become our new reigning NWOC 2020 course planner of the year!