Chairman's Chat

Brilliant! That's the best way to sum up the start of the New Year. As I mentioned in the last Points East, Kim and I spent 3 weeks over New Year in New Zealand, partly to compete in the World Masters Orienteering Champs but mainly as a holiday to see the country. For most East Anglians, who are use to running in brambles, nettles and brashings, the orienteering was like a dream come true. The model event and 2 qualifying days were in the most open, runnable forests with intricate sand dune type terrain, you can ever imagine. That's just a taste of the experience, look out for a full report in the next issue of Points East.

No sooner had I arrived back and got over the jet lag than I was into the first EAOA committee meeting of the millennium, followed by the BOF Council meeting the day after. The EAOA meeting produced further discussions on the proposed BOF event levy. I was mandated to report to Council the concerns of all the EAOA clubs with regard to the damaging effect on attendance figures at colour-coded events, which would be detrimental to the development of grass roots orienteering.

I reported this at Council together with the concerns that the setting of the event levy should be carried out at the BOF AGM and not by Council decision. Most regions, however, had accepted the revised levy figures and it was generally felt that the 50p-60p increase in event levy for Colour coded competitors is quite a small amount. BOF Council did agree to review the levy at the September meeting to see if it was having any effect on the level of participation.

The amount of levy would be reduced if there was an increase in participation (i.e. BOF's budget is for a fixed sum of money). This puts the emphasis on you and your club to do as much as possible to increase the participation levels.

From 1 April 2000 the BOF event levy has been set at Ł1.10 for seniors and 25p for juniors with a rebate of Ł50 for non-age class events (i.e. Badge events and above do not get the rebate). As an example this would mean that for a schools league event with juniors only, you could have 200 junior competitors without paying any event levy to BOF.

On a similar theme the good news is that at the EAOA meeting, the committee agreed to reduce the club capitation fees for 2000 to Ł2.70p per membership unit. This is a result of revised membership figures being supplied by clubs, which show an increase in total membership from 666 units to 743 units.

Finally I am pleased to see that several clubs are now planning to stage a Short Race event some time near to the SMOC event on 27 May. As another idea, is anyone interested in putting on a Mountain Bike orienteering course? I thought it might be interesting to put on an MBO course after the EAOA AGM event on 4 June and would be pleased to hear from anyone with any previous experience of MBO.

Happy orienteering. Remember open forests do exist- just let them open your mind.

Tim Eden (NOR)