British O Federation Level 2 Coach

Hip-hip-hooray! This weekend wrapped up a year-long process of becoming a qualified British Orienteering Federation (BOF) Level 2 Coach. Last year in October eight of us spent two weekends doing coach training with two BOF trainers. And then followed a couple of months of written tasks and a series of progressive coaching lessons that we had to plan and teach. I finished my pracs in early June. Part of this included self-assessments and also acting as mentor to another trainee coach (and in return she was my mentor too). We check through each other's lesson plans and self-assessments, commenting on progress or adding ideas.

This weekend was our final assessment and we had an assessor out here from BOF to watch our lessons and add her very experienced feedback.

I chose a section of the map that had lots of contour features because my lesson theme was 'contours and rock features'. Our guinea-pig subjects were some of our more experienced youth and junior orienteers and our lessons were planned at a mid- to upper-mid level.

I had great fun assembling my activity and delighted in removing all vegetation features from the map. I also restricted compass use. I know that I rely a lot on vegetation and it is often faster to quickly orientate by compass when leaving a control rather than to focus on contours.

The activity went very well, taking these enthusiastic young participants into an aspect of orienteering that they'd never done before. Actually, I've never done this as a training activity either.

I was 'nice' in that I left some paths and also the fences on the map. The difficulty level goes up quite considerably once these are removed too.

It was an excellent weekend with much learned and I'm now a British Orienteering Federation Level 2 Coach.

I have a number of coaching plans cooking in my head, especially for my AR Club members and also adventure racers. But, these will have to wait until the months of Nov to March when daylight is longer and week-day evenings can be used.