Carson High NJROTC orienteering team headed to third straight nationals

Navy cadets on the Carson High School Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (CHS NJROTC) orienteering team know where they're going.

Equipped only with magnetic-north compasses and maps, these cadets have found their way to the Navy JROTC Orienteering Championships for the third straight year.

CHS NJROTC Chief Dan Ingram said his cadets have proven themselves successful and competitive in one of the most widely used skills across all branches of military, but also one of the nation's more obscure sports.

"A lot of people don't know or understand what orienteering is," he said. "When you say orienteering, it's like a foreign language to them."

Orienteering is trying to find one's way over land from one point to another, he said.

Ingram himself is a veteran of the sport, having served 23 years in the United States Navy as an operations specialist in its combat information center.

He's been right in the middle of coordinating ship-to-surface warfare tactics, including naval surface fire support.

"That's where orienteering comes in for someone who's on a ship in the Navy," Ingram said. "They need to have that skill of getting from one place to another with just a compass and a map."

Now retired from active duty military, Ingram became an instructor in the CHS NJROTC program three years ago. And he has been at the helm of the program's national championship-caliber orienteering team each year since.

"I came here from New York where we did orienteering," he said. "Here they didn't do orienteering by the U.S. Orienteering rules. It was a real steep learning curve for them."

But learn they did, and quickly.

The team travels next week to Cartersville, GA, where it will compete in the U.S. Navy JROTC National Orienteering Championships for the third consecutive year.

The two-day competition is held Feb. 18-19 at Red Top Mountain, where NJROTC programs from all over the nation will vie for the highest scores and bragging rights as the country's best orienteering squad.

"The area's a lot like Spooner," Ingram said. "The map terrain looks similar, but it will be humid, so it will be an adjustment for our runners."

Carson High's orienteering cadets train a lot at Spooner Lake State Park, he said, because it offers diverse terrain suitable for beginners to advanced athletes.

Training starts in the classroom, Ingram said, where cadets become familiar with the topographical maps used in orienteering.

"The first thing we do is bring them into a classroom," he said. "We introduce them to the difference between an actual orienteering map and the topographical maps that are used by our military and geological services."

They then go out into the field, usually in or around the school grounds, to learn how to use the maps and a compass.

"We train them to know their maps and we get them out to work a compass so they can orient themselves to their maps, to magnetic north, and decide which way is the correct way to go from one point to another," he said.

On an actual orienteering course like Ingram lays out at Spooner Lake, the landscape is marked for easy, intermediate and advanced levels of competition.

But course difficulty is not determined by topography, Ingram said. The landscape is what it is.

"Sometimes it looks like an easy course, but it ends up being a hard course," he said."The straightest line is not necessarily the easiest way to get there. They may run into a cliff that they can't climb, or that they can't go down. They may find themselves in a situation where taking the long road is the best way and the least restrictive."

Instead, Ingram said orienteering relies on the placement of controls to measure course difficulty.

Controls, he said, are orange and white-colored flags placed along or off course trails. The object is to locate each control on the course and do it in the shortest amount of time.

"You really can't miss them," he said. "A control either has a pin-punch or an electronic key type, a finger stick to put into the control. When it beeps, it logs when you got there."

Recording a control is critical to the competition, Ingram said, because it logs an athlete's time and shows that they actually located to the flag. If an athlete misses a control or records them out of order, however, he or she is disqualified.

"It's a very intense competition," said Ingram. "They go from one point to another point, and to another point in succession."

Athletes generally have three hours to complete a course successfully, he said, but the idea is to get through the course with the fastest time.

As such, accuracy and speed are equally crucial to orienteering.

Easy level courses are designed for beginners, Ingram sad, with controls physically located on the trails. The flags are located off the trails on an intermediate course. Controls on advanced courses are located far off the trails, increasing the difficulty level of orienteering onto and off of a trail to record one's location.

Higher level courses are also longer and feature more control flags on them, requiring athletes to incorporate time management into the skill sets the take into the field.

"The critical thinking about how they are going to get from one point to another is also a key skill on their part," Ingram said. "They have to be able to read the map and identify topographic features of the terrain and decide the best path."

But the field of competition is only one of the challenges that CHS orienteering cadets face throughout a season. Another is actually finding competitive venues, Ingram said.

"In this area, there are no leagues," he said. "There's only one orienteering club and that's in Truckee."

This means the team has to travel up and over the mountains to compete so they have a chance to record times and scores for nationals qualification.

"What we have to do to compete is we have to go to the Sacramento area and the gold country orienteering club," Ingram said. "We go to their meets."

The team also travels to meets in the San Francisco Bay Area, he said.

But things are expected to change later this year, Ingram said, when the Gold Coast Orienteers start a league that Carson High will be a part of.

With more meets during the school year, Ingram said, it will mean more opportunities for the team to post high scores and fast times.

Because the regional NJROTC selects the top three teams from its area to compete at nationals, the more competitions Carson High cadets can participate in will increase their chances of qualifying for nationals, Ingram said.

"Our area manager takes the scores from all of the meets and decides which of his three teams will represent the area at the NJROTC nationals," he said.

Besides Nevada, schools in California, Washington and Hawaii are all part of the same region, so a selection to nationals is a big deal for the CHS orienteering cadets.

The team has most of the school year to prepare, Ingram said. Training begins during the spring months, he said, followed by competitions in the fall and winter. Nationals are typically held in February or March, he said.

"It's almost a year-round sport," Ingram said.

Orienteering is also an ageless sport, he said, featuring competitors from youth to seniors.

"They can go until they just can't move anymore," Ingram said. "It keeps people in shape and out in the fresh air."

Ingram himself still competes. The Navy, he said, has a category for coaches called the "old fogies," who run their own course at competitions.

He finished fourth in his class at nationals last year, hoping to place higher this year.

"I'm hoping to move up and maybe get a trophy this year," he said.

The trip to nationals, though, is costly. Each cadet has to pay $400 apiece. This amount does not include the help the team is getting from Carson High School to cover the costs of lodging and rental vans.

The Navy, Ingram said, is covering the cost of food as well as a portion of travel. The cadets are footing the rest of the bill.

"The cadets are picking up a large portion of their travel," he said.

The program, he said, is accepting donations from the community. Anyone would like to make a donation can write a check to the Carson High School Navy JROTC program and either mail it attention to the CHS NJROTC or drop it off in person at the Carson High front office.

Ingram asks that donors make a notation that the funds are for the NJROTC orienteering team.