Below are the Team Results of the Compass Sport Trophy, (The Small Club Competition for clubs with a membership of 125 or less.), from Sunday 13th March at Rushall Woods.

Individual results can be found on the BKO website.

Hosts and winners, BKO fielded a total 45 runners. Second placed Sarum fielded 28 runners. SOC were Third and had 27 runners representing the club.

NWO were Forth with 22 runners and BADO with only 12 runners were Fifth.

Any number of runners may compete for a club however in the Trophy competition only 13 scores count towards the team score and  a maximum of two can score in each of the twelve categories.

However having more runners in each category does help a club to maximise their score as like in any sport misfortune can occur. A runner may make an navigational error or take a poor route that slows them down resulting in a slower run. There is also the possibility of a runner miss-punching or sustaining an injury, so having more runners in each category to cover any of these circumstances will help the team.

Then there is the added incentive for clubs to field as large a team as possible.

If a club can bunch several runners near the top of the leader board in each category they will prevent other teams from gaining points. An example of this can be seen in the table below.  The SOC runners in Blue Men had two scorers on 99 & 98 points and backed them up with two more runners earning 95 & 93 points thus preventing some of the other teams from scoring higher points.

So we can see that fielding a large team can benefit a club as does fielding runners in all 12 categories if possible as this gives a better chance of scoring high points totals.

Again this is shown below. BADO with it's small number of runners could not field runners in all the categories but had more than two runners in one category. This resulted in BADO only having 11 runners that counted towards their score.

The competition aims to rewards healthy clubs.

Clubs that have a good range of male and female members across the many age ranges.

Clubs that have a good team spirit with members wanting to represent their club.

Clubs that work hard to bring in new members to keep the population of the club vigorous.

Clubs that have good coaching opportunities for beginners and established orienteers to help everyone improve.

The SOC team was made up of members who wanted to run for the club, not necessarily our best orienteers. Although we did have a good number of our most reliable orienteers, on this occasion it was not enough for us to succeed in qualifying for the finals. Lets hope that next time we can encourage more club members to turn out and represent their club.

In the table below the Red scores are the scores that counted. The Blue scores are the total points in each category and the overall total.