What an absolutely perfect NOD day we had at Highland Park. The weather was just right. The park itself is very scenic with lots of interesting features. Per usual, there was lots of delicious food and tasty drinks including apple cider. The building facilities were great. We had many “newbies” as well as seasoned veterans and a lot of enthusiastic students from several RCSD locations that enjoyed National Orienteering Day 2011. I did not go out on the courses since I needed to stay close by to the Command Post at Cornell Cooperative Extension. However, I heard more than a few people say, that the courses including the sprint and trail challenge were enjoyable for all the right reasons even if some found them more difficult than expected.

This perfect day to hold our NOD meet was made more perfect by the dedicated, energetic and friendly volunteers who made the event run so smoothly and who were so helpful towards participants. Dick Detweiler was the course setter for the event. Dick was able to make the most of a small park by designing challenging courses with some extras like the sprint and the trail challenge thrown in to satisfy a wide variety of skill levels. Our knowledgeable greeters, who consisted of Don Winslow and Karl Kovla, were kept very busy instructing the hordes of students also the “newbies” trying out orienteering for the first time and those needing a refresher course.

The registration table seemed to be swamped for an extended period of time, however, our highly skilled team of registration officials including Patty Borden,Carol Moran and Sandra Lomker were able to process everyone with a high level of efficiency so that participants could get out and enjoy the day. Start and Finish was run with a very high level of IT efficiency by the skilled and knowledgeable group of Ravi Nareppa, Erik Pieh, Jim, Zak and Tyler Borden along with some fellow RIT guys I think.

Mary Kolva outdid herself as usual and prepared and absolute feast of delicious baked treats. Thanks to Mary for keeping the hungry orienteerers so well fed! We had lots of fresh fruit too which Sandra provided.

Thanks to Faith and Stephanie Reh for stringing up our String-O course which had a lot of traffic. Flag pick-up was handled by a large group of pick ‘er uppers that very efficiently and thoroughly reclaimed the multitude of controls that were spread out around Highland Park. That group included Brian Thomas, Tyler Borden, Dick Detweiler, Rick Lavine, Patty and Jim Borden, and some RIT guys including Zak Borden, Jon Erbelding and Kalvin Connor.

Thanks to all that stayed to the very end and collected all of our meet items and loaded them up in Rick Lavine’s car. The most special volunteer opportunity of the day went to Ravi’s son who had the pressure filled job of selecting all of the winning entries for the raffle drawing.

And a final thank you to my quasi-official Co-Meet Director, Jim Pamper. He helped out in a very big way “behind the scenes” by picking up all the meet boxes from the Lavines, posting all the signs,installing the banner, collecting all of the meet equipment and signs which were then loaded into and unloaded from the Lavine vehicle into the Lavine garage.

All in all a successful day of Orienteeering.

Results

Sprint | Trail Challenge | White | Yellow | WinSplits | RouteGadget

Sprint    2.3k  

Trail Challenge    5.9k  

White    2.5k  

Yellow    3.3k