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'NZOF' or 'Navigation Sport New Zealand'

Show Profile  Jamie Posted: 7 August 2003, 7:59 AM  
Just to put the cat among the pigeons.

Isn't it time for a name change?

Orienteering's best opportunity for development and promotion in NZ is in aligning itself with the growing 'adventure sports', notably adventure racing.

We have orienteering, rogaining, MTBO, mountain marathoning and skiO...does the NZOF title really represent these sports as well as it should? Does it put us in a position to control them and work towards the overall development of Navigation sport?

Some of our best elites of recent years have appeared out of 'adventure sports' and the offshoots of orienteering...Chris Forne, Aaron and Lara Prince. Are there more of these people out there (you bet...I know several). And on the other side of the coin there are orienteers that make their mark in the other adventure sports, from mountaineering to multi-sporting.

Changing our name would act as a catalyst for further changes, increasing our marketability in the adventure sport community and give MTBO etc equal status with traditional orienteering.

Is this a choice between 'geeky sport' and 'adventure sport'?

Show Profile  Greg Posted: 10 August 2003, 9:19 PM  
Jamie this is orienteering if you want to plug multi sports go to there websites and wank over there.


Show Profile  Malcolm Posted: 11 August 2003, 3:39 AM  
There is no need for a name change.

As most of you know I am a brass band geek. A couple of years ago the New Zealand Brass Bands Association became the Brass Bands Association of New Zealand because they decided BBANZ was better for marketing than NZBBA.
What difference did it really make? NONE
How much money did it cost? SHITLOADS

If people want to do orienteering, whichever breed of it they prefer, calling it something other than NZOF won't make a single bit of difference.

P.S. Greg, go and ask Simon about the difference between their and there. It's not hard.

Edited by - malcolm on 11/08/2003 10:40:35

Show Profile  Jamie Posted: 11 August 2003, 7:24 AM  
Malcolm, your post amounts to a suggestion that 'marketing' as a disclipine is utterly pointless.

I agree to the extent that bad marketing is pointless, ie a simple name change unrelated to any change in the culture of the organisation or better representation of the product.

I believe the name change I have suggested captures better the essence of the sport we are participating in, a navigation sport, and is inclusive rather than exclusive of other disclipines that share similar values, issues and technical skill base as traditional orienteering.

Is there a national 10km road race federation?

I don't believe orienteering is a suitable generic term (compared to say athletics) to carry us forward. And I do believe absolutely in the benefit for traditional orienteering of developing new forms of 'navigation sport'. It is through these new forms and a re-association with the adventure community that orienteering has the potential for dynmaic growth.



Show Profile  mark Posted: 11 August 2003, 9:05 AM  
>Is there a national 10km road race federation?

Is there a national classic distance orienteering race federation?


Show Profile  Alistair Posted: 11 August 2003, 4:35 PM  
Jamie, a few points...

The NZOF is an organisation which is there to administer sporting activities which involve orienteering regardless of the means of traction. That's why it's called "orienteering" not "foot orienteering".

Adventure racing may just be a trend in the same way that triathlon was in the 80s - who knows what people will be attracted to in the 2010s? The NZOF has been around for longer than that and I believe the fundamentals of orienteering are pure enough to warrant a federation with the name and form that it does today.

From a marketing point it would be better to instead invent new products to market - say in the same way that the Super 12 is maybe marketed. The NZOF only has to maybe endorse such a product and it's name then appear in the small-print. Initially it wouldn't really even have to do that.

So Jamie - why don't you invent that sport including some sort of navigation which you think is a winner - convince a few club members to help you and try and sell it - call it whatever you think is tough/hip/trendy (and not geeky) and if it takes off and is big then maybe an existence under the auspices of the NZOF may be advantageous. Save creating yet another administrative body.... And with luck it may attract a few people to "foot orienteering" too...

Go and put your cat in someone else's pigeons.

Long live the NZOF

Edited by - alistair on 12/08/2003 06:39:39

Show Profile  Greg Posted: 11 August 2003, 6:50 PM  
so basicly Jamie everyone one is telling you to piss off

malcolm ere is closer than eir when you are typing with 1 hand

Show Profile  Jamie Posted: 12 August 2003, 2:11 AM  
I appreciate Alistairs comments Greg, i.e more than one line.

I think he is slightly out of touch with the reality of orienteering in New Zealand, and were he here I am sure he would be, like me, searching for strategies that might be employed to improve orienteering in our specific situation.

He misinterprets my suggestion a little bit facetiously however, as I have no intention of creating a new sport, I simply want to better represent what we have, and I fail to understand his adventure racing point.

I put this post forward to have a decent debate which I think is worth having, it is a shame to see close minded milk tasters belittling it.

How do we get the young people, ie 20 - 40 year olds back in the clubs...by giving them what they want, a sense of adventure, not solely orienteering's strict rules and procedures. We can't abandon the technical progress made by orienteering but neither can we exist with only this part of our sport emphasised.

Orienteering has come to mean something different from that which it meant 20 years ago,
and the bulk of the younger generation simply aren't interested, we have to be inclusive.

Show Profile  maskofsomething Posted: 12 August 2003, 8:40 AM  
Can anyone remember a few months back at the AGM for hvoc a name change was proposed but evenutally fell through. Instead was a marketing name put forward of OHV or orienteering hutt valley. Why not keep the NZOF as the official name but change to ONZ as a marketing tool?

Show Profile  Greg Posted: 12 August 2003, 5:55 PM  
Jamie as I said this is Orienteering keep it this way, why is it something new with you everymonth, bleeding are we??

My other hand is broken

Show Profile  Jenni Posted: 13 August 2003, 11:20 AM  
My two cents:

I think I know what you're getting at Jamie and appealing to the multisporters out there is a good idea however
1. We don't want to be the federation in charge of multi-sport events, at least I can't see why we would.
2. We want to concentrate on the sport that is called orienteering in other English speaking countries (and the Scandinavian ones too). As much as I like doing multi-sport type events the sport I love the most is the one where you run almost as fast as you can for around 30mins-2 hours and find controls quite often with a map whose scale is 1:5-15000. (So I'm talking about foot-orienteering rather than the other variants of orienteering you do on a bike or skis.) Maybe the name orienteering is a bit unfortunate because it doesn't have the same immediate connotation as it does in Scandinavia where it originated but it now has a meaning and it is the sport that I summarised above, which the IOF is the governing body for and the World Champs were just held for. When I say I do orienteering and people say oh yeah I saw that on TV and they're talking about multisport type races I point out the differences between the sports. There is a big difference between them!
3. If multisport is more popular than orienteering so be it I don't want to change orienteering into multisport. It's fine that there are two separate sports and people can do a bit of each if they want. There are orienteers who do a bit of multisport eg Rachel, Lisa F, La, Darren and Phil (maybe the latter is now a multisporter?) and there's multisporters who do a bit of O eg. Steve G, the Murrays, John Howard.


Do you, Jamie, think there are multisporters who might do more orienteering if the name of the NZOF is something else? I don't. Sure it might a good idea to market our events as navigation events - that's what we do for the Night Navigation Series and it seems to work to get along people outside of the orienteering club. I've noticed there are a few people who have come each year for the last three years but haven't come to any other orienteering events, it must be on their calendar of events they do each year, like the Abel Tasman race is on my calendar of events I like to do each year. PAPO seems to have a reasonable success at attracting multisporters and younger people to their events, maybe it's because we hold rogaines which attract them in first, maybe it's because we already have multisporters like Steve G who tell people that orienteering is a great sport for navigation and for helping them to build their concentration-while-exercising skills up.

I expect there's more we could do to attract multisporters to orienteering but changing the name of the NZOF is, in my opinion, not one of them. And once again, I really don't think we want to be "in charge" of the multisport type events.

Edited by - jenni on 8/13/2003 6:23:27 PM

Edited by - jenni on 8/13/2003 6:24:28 PM

Show Profile  Jamie Posted: 13 August 2003, 1:22 PM  
who send anything about been in charge of multisport events????

my idea was to align ourselves with that culture by choosing a name that better represents our current activities

-foot orienteering
-MTBO
-SkiO
-Rogaining
-Mountain Marathons (the navigation kind)

I to love foot orienteering, but believe it does and will benefit from been aligned with these offshoots, at least in the NZ context.

I want to make sure this continues to be a reality. To do this we must incorporate these sports as equal partners into ......."Navigation Sport New Zealand".....

and together we can conquer the world...


Show Profile  addison Posted: 13 August 2003, 2:23 PM  
Jamie. I for one agree partially to what you are saying.

Foot Orienteering is just one component of the nowadays NZOF. I remember at the AGM of the NZOF last year down at Tekapo, was a discussion of a rogue Rogaine committee being set up to. The only reason they thought of doing this, was because they have to pay a % of the income they make to the NZOF. Being realistic what do rogainers get in return. They feel they get nothing from the NZOF, because the NZOF is for foot orienteering only. It shows little to no recognition of other forms of Navigation Sport.

Jamies name fixes this, and I believe it will bring lots of Navigation sports together, not seperating them like the NZOF is currently doing. Just my thoughts..

Show Profile  Jenni Posted: 15 August 2003, 5:30 AM  
It's just, Jamie, that in the tertiary education sector, 'align' means take over! (or to be taken over...)

Multisport events are navigation events, after all, and so isn't Navigation NZ too general if the organisation currently known as the NZOF is to control only the activities you listed.

Also I'm not sure that it isn't a bad thing that the rogainers have their own federation - it means more people will share the work. The NZOF seems to find it hard to fill positions so isn't it best that those that are in the NZOF don't have too much to do and best they concentrate on orienteering (foot, mb and ski).

It would be good though, if the rogainers coordinated the times of their events with orienteering events (unlike this year...)

There's nothing to stop orienteering clubs holding rogaines and if a club prefers to hold mostly those kind of events that's OK too but I hope that there will always be enough people to plan a regular programme of orienteering events. So mainly I would like to encourage more people to do orienteering and then go onto help plan and organise orienteering events. If advertising orienteering events as navigation events would help I'm for that but calling the NZOF Navigation NZ I don't think that will help with much.


Edited by - jenni on 8/15/2003 12:58:43 PM

Show Profile  Jamie Posted: 15 August 2003, 6:14 AM  
Jenni I know you're a genius in the physics sense but even an uneducated sloth like myself can look up the word 'align'...

As expressed in the shorter oxford english dictionary (surely you should know this having been to oxford), align is capable of meaning,

..."fall into line (with) " or Bring into relation of agreement with", these represent my meaning much more clearly than "taken over", which is more akin to conquer or subjugate.

You also seem confused over the definition of "multisport", of which all types are far from been navigation sports, unfortunately this is not defined in the above-mentioned dictionary. If you want to be finicky and not interpret language in context then at least get your's right.

Rogaines, MTBO etc are way for orienteering clubs to grow, a way for clubs to provide an improved service for members, a way to get members motivated.

What is the possible logic behind loosing through inaction the most dynamic, growing part of our sport? Where would test cricket be today without one-day cricket?

For those of you who can't see the strength of this analogy, look at cricket, look at athletics, look at swimming. These things are cyclic, having different dimensions to our sporting body will help us maintain momentum.

My proposal for the last time (unless people keep on quoting me wrong) is "Navigation Sport New Zealand", an umbrella term to take all current forms of orienteering forward into the future, to firmly align ourselves with the adventurous outdoor culture that is thriving in New Zealand.

Show Profile  fraser Posted: 15 August 2003, 7:45 AM  
Jamie,

If you are going to include new forms of orienteering then I think it needs to be from a natural progression and come from a club level. If orienteering clubs want to start organising adventure races then that is great.

But otherwise what are you trying to achieve? Are you just blatantly going to try and take over any sport which includes navigation? As every adventure race that I know of in New Zealand is run by a private enterprise I think 100% of them would tell you to get fucked.

Where do you draw the line for navigation sport? Surely Rally of New Zealand could be classed as a navigation sport.

Navigation isn't a sport, it is a skill. Orienteering is a sport.



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