Orienteering is usually an adult sport of weekend events. The Washington Interscholastic Orienteering League, WIOL, is one of the few places in North America where it is a school sport with a season, standings and a championship. It began in the mid-1980s and is run today by Cascade Orienteering Club in the Seattle area.
How the season works
The league runs from late October to early March, with a meet roughly every second Saturday in parks and forests around Puget Sound: Lake Sammamish, Saint Edward, Bridle Trails, Fort Steilacoom and others. Each meet is also a public event, so club members and families run the same day. The season ends with a championship meet and an awards ceremony.
Courses and scoring
Students compete in divisions by grade: elementary, middle school, junior varsity and varsity for high school, with separate boys’ and girls’ standings. Courses grow in length and navigational difficulty with the division, from a beginner course of about two kilometres on trails to a varsity course of five or six kilometres through open forest. Points are awarded by finishing position at each meet, and a runner’s best results over the season count toward the individual title; schools score as teams from their best runners. The scoring keeps a first-year seventh-grader and a state champion senior in the same event without either being bored.
What it teaches
Map reading, pacing and route choice are the obvious lessons. Coaches point to others: making decisions alone under time pressure, recovering from a mistake in the forest, and a rare sport in which small and unathletic children can beat athletes by thinking. Summaries of past seasons, with names of the young winners, made up much of the early web presence of orienteering in the Pacific Northwest.
Elsewhere
Similar school programmes exist in a handful of US regions and are common in Scandinavia, where orienteering is a compulsory part of physical education. The US national body, Orienteering USA, publishes the interscholastic championship rules and a list of school leagues.
This site is an independent orienteering reference and is not the league’s official page.