ORIENTEERING AUSTRALIA
A President’s Perspective – My Final Words Bob Mouatt
A
FTER 11 years of submitting articles to The Australian Orienteer this will be my final contribution to the magazine. Some may say after reading it - thankfully. I leave with considerable regrets about not achieving my goals. The primary impediments were: • The sudden growth in professionalism in many sports in the mid 1990s. This impacted adversely on minor sports (like Orienteering) gaining media coverage and sponsorships. • The Australian Sports Commission’s unexpected abolition of Orienteering Australia’s Sport Development funding. This halted the momentum we had been developing. • My inability to bring about sufficient change in the attitude of the Orienteering community towards a wide range of matters that are important to the advancement of the sport. My background (see Bob’s brief bio) meant that I have a totally different approach on many matters to that of the average orienteer. This meant I had to temper my forthright approach. Some of the key issues are outlined below. Leadership, Vision and Management. There are too many people in positions of authority from the same background. Look at the membership of Boards, Councils, Committees, etc. Most are university academics, schoolteachers, scientists, engineers, etc. Few if any are entrepreneurs or have experience as genuine managers, ie managing budgets and making critical choices to achieve objectives. There needs to be a major change in the profile to create more diversity for the sport to progress in a highly competitive environment. Data Collection, Trend Analysis and Planning. As a person who spent a greater part of his working life committed to long-term plans, and using accurate data to forecast requirements and to analyse trends, I have been frustrated that, notwithstanding the high proportion of orienteers with tertiary qualifications, there is little appreciation of and support for these activities. Planning and the complementary task of evaluating outcomes are important and need to be given more prominence.
Why did Norway’s Ingunn H. Weltzien need to take a water bottle onto the podium at JWOC 2006? Was she concerned about dehydration while she stood up there for all those long minutes? Or was she, quite rightly, acknowledging the support of a sponsor?
orienteers look like a rag-tag bunch of nondescripts at the presentation of awards and other functions. Many photographs of orienteers do not present an attractive, sporting image that encourages the media to publish photos or sponsors (or new people) to become involved.
Media and Marketing. Another frustration has been the lack of understanding for the need to continually attract new people to the sport to replace those it loses. I don’t know the figures for other States, but OACT has a membership churn rate of 25 per cent, that is around a quarter of members do not renew and have to be replaced by new or former members rejoining to retain the same membership level. Thus media and marketing becomes an important factor. The Australian Orienteer (new version initiated by Ian Baker) and the new national website including the results database (initiated by Andy Hogg) are two success stories of the past decade, but coverage in the mainstream media has been limited mainly because of the image of the sport. See more below.
National League/National Series. After 11 years I have just about got most people using the term National League (in place of ‘O’ League) or NOL, but have I failed miserably to get orienteers to differentiate between the teams’ competition (the National League), and the individual competition (the National Series). It has been hard enough explaining the National League to the media and others outside of the sport, as no other sport in Australia conducts a League on the same basis as orienteering, and no other sport describes individual competitions as Leagues, it is invariably Series. The National League and the National Series are two separate competitions, but the results of the League are based on the Series. The persistent use of Orienteering idiosyncratic language is one of the sport’s main impediments to be being accepted as a mainstream sport.
Projecting an Image and Creating a Presence. People have been using clothing (and make up) for thousands of years to project an image and create a presence, eg waring tribes, the military, etc. My first senior football coach used to say, “Even if you can’t play well, at least dress like a footballer.” While the standard of competition uniforms of most orienteers is improving, especially in the National League, quite often
Presentation of Results. Another crusade that has fallen on deaf ears (outside of the ACT, where I have had full control) has been my attempts to have the names of all participants displayed in results and for the results to be separated into men, women and groups. My reasons are we are a gender equity organisation and the results of men and women should be separated, and that for a number of reasons all participants on a course should be
14 THE AUSTRALIAN ORIENTEER MARCH 2008
