AF JROTC Leadership Camp Orienteering

16 Jun 2002

Mark Novitski, Meet Director

Father's day dawned cool with projected highs in the 70,s and sunny all day. I arrived at Cricket at 12:20pm to get set - start time was 1pm as the cadets had a chance to attend a church service. 125 AF JROTC Leadership Camp cadets from various schools throughout SW Ohio were represented. They were in the 7th day of a two week training camp where they ate, slept in tents and showered like they would if they were in the military. They experienced rides on a C-141 cargo airplane and tours of base facilities. At night they learned evade and capture techniques.

I designed 5 unique courses using the permanent course at Cricket Holler. I had half the group run the courses backward so I actually had 10 courses for the 125 cadets. All courses had 9 or 10 controls, and were between 2.1 and 2.6 km with less than 40 meters of climb.

As the cadets arrived in flights - appx 30 cadets to a flight - they were assigned a team number and a course. When they were finished copying their course, I gave them a start time and they started. 40 Groups started within the next hour. 2 cadets opted out of the competition and I enlisted them to help with start and finish. All cadets started before the first ones finished.

Over the next two hours the cadets finished their courses with the best times of 47:02 and 48:02. The times trailed off after that but averaged around 80 minutes with all but 5 groups finished under the time limit of 2 hours.

The event was a great success. The cadets had a good time! I think there was some interest in the schools who did not regularly attend our event to attend. I wish I had 10 more coaching manuals to hand out.