ORIENTEERING: Time and volunteers

At times, I wonder how our sport survives, let alone progresses, in New Zealand. And other countries for that matter, but I'll restrict my comments to Godzone.

New Zealand has about 1600 "registered" orienteers, that is 1600 people who belong to an orienteering club. It's not a huge number, but I do wonder when comparing to other countries and other sports whether we have actually reached the level of membership that we can realistically achieve given our status and resources.

Certainly compared to other (anglo-saxon) countries, our membership is quite good. Reflect on the following:

New Zealand - pop. 4 million, 1600 orienteers
Australia - pop. 20 million, 5000 orienteers
Great Britain - pop. 60 million, 6000 orienteers
South Africa - pop. 48 million, 400 orienteers

Looking at other sports in New Zealand, higher-profile sports do not have necessarily have huge memberships. Examples (of individual sports):

Badminton - 9,000
Boxing - 1,800
Equestrian - 9,000
Kayaking - 3,000
Rowing - 5,500
Table Tennis - 5,000

Is it an unrealistic dream to have 5,000 orienteers in New Zealand? That would put us on par with Australia with only a fifth of the population. Perhaps we have already reached the saturation point our sport is going to achieve?

Maybe I am being pessimistic, but my assumption is it is more likely Orienteering will continue to experience static participation/membership than any growth. If my assumption is correct, then how does our sport survive in the immediate future, in our internal environment where workload and a strain on resources are major issues?

Let's do an exercise. For a sport to exist, it requires resources, both financial and human. I'll save the money talk for another day; here I'll concentrate on labour, and more specifically, volunteer labour.

There are over 300 orienteering events in New Zealand each year. Each event requires a planner, controller and co-ordinator. Others help out on the day, too (collecting controls, putting up tents etc.). The time spent on organisation obviously depends on the level of event, but let's make a stab in the dark assumption that on average, a planner and controller spends 10 hours and a controller 5 hours in their respective roles. There's 7,500 hours per annum right there, just in event organisation.

NZOF has over 20 volunteer positions. Again, the level of time required for each position depends on the role, but if the average time spent by an NZOF volunteer is less than 5 hours a week I'll run naked through the neighbourhood. Clock up another 5,000+ hours there.

There are 20 clubs in New Zealand. Each club has a secretary, treasurer, other committee members; making another wild assumption that it takes 5 people 2 hours a week to run a club, the time spent in club administration = 20 x 5 x 2 x 52 = 10,000+ hours.

So we're up to say 23,000 hours per annum to run our sport in New Zealand. I'm not going into mapmaking (which is still partially done on a volunteer basis) or other areas I've possibly overlooked, or count the hours that are paid for. But to maintain our current level of event organisation and club/national infrastructure requires a volunteer effort of IMO at least 23,ooo hours from a base of 1600 members. Return to my opening statement.

Our greatest challenge is if we want to grow and develop our sport, we need to expend extra effort, additional to that outlined above. And that effort would need to come from the people who are already putting in more than their fair share of volunteer labour. Or find the money to pay them to do it. Not an insurmountable challenge, but pretty close.

What has prompted these musings is a remit shortly to hit the NZOF doorstep from my club wanting a national competition structure. In other words, adding to an already overloaded infrastructure, and requiring clubs to put on A-level type events in the autumn (in addition to the ones in the spring). For that reason I don't think it will succeed (will clubs readily commit to putting on those extra events?).

As my own personal time has become more crowded with family responsibilities and trying to make a few bucks so I can retire at 50, I've become a lot more sensitive to the pressures of time and the impact it has on accepting volunteer roles. Looking at our sport as a whole, I wonder if it isn't time to (in the words of the late David Lange) "sit back and have a cuppa". In my opinion, while trying to grow our sport is important, we also need to get a lot smarter in the way we handle our existing infrastructure. The last thing we need to do is add to it (without good reason), otherwise like an ever-growing house of cards we might find one day it all comes crashing down.