Some juniors who want to develop their orienteering further might want to have 1:1 mentoring with an experienced member of the club. Mentoring will be different for everyone – the principle is that it is coaching tailored specifically to the needs of the mentee at that time. The mentor and mentee should agree the aims of the mentoring input and, if the arrangement continues in the longer term, a 6-monthly review may be helpful to ensure that both parties are content and to agree new aims. It can continue for as long or as short a period as is useful. It is important that this is organised in a way that safeguards both the young person and the adult providing the coaching.
Standards which should be in place would be:
- Mentor is a member of LVO and has a current (within 3 years) AccessNI check.
- The arrangement is in place with parental agreement and oversight, and all sessions are arranged with full knowledge of the parent.
- Sessions can be in person or online, but there should be some parental oversight.
- An in-person session might take the form of a discussion of a course immediately post-race, in a public space such as a car park.
- For online discussions it is important that a parent or guardian should be present and mainly in the same room so they are aware of what is being discussed.
- Meetings arranged by Whatsapp in which both mentee and parent/ guardian are included in the chat.
- Either party is free to end the arrangement at any time. While it is not necessary for the mentor to be a qualified coach, this might make it easier for them to structure discussions.
Club Safeguarding
The Club Safeguarding policy can be accessed on our website via Juniors > Safeguarding Children Policy.
Our Safeguarding Officer is Chloe Reed. She can be contacted if you have any concerns or questions.
What should mentoring look like? Ideas for mentor and mentee.
- Check in with athlete – how are they, any illness/ injury? Any issues unrelated to O such as exams coming up, or family related things?
- What has the athlete been doing? Running training/ Park-runs, running club, races etc
- Other sports related things? What orienteering have they done since last discussion?
- How to keep a diary of training, how to keep a record of how an orienteering race went. Discuss the Junior’s performance, but help them to understand how to analyse their own race. This is a skill which takes time and experience to develop.
- Mentor might be able to identify weaknesses – does athlete actually know the basics of control descriptions and map symbols etc! Encourage athlete to develop the vocabulary to be able to meaningfully discuss their orienteering.
- What events are coming up for the junior to target? And are there any problems getting to them? How to arrange lifts if necessary – this needs to be done with awareness of safe practice.
- Use of technology- how to benefit from Routegadget and Splitsbrowser – for juniors with a GPS watch and also without! Strava – for GPS watch – good to monitor level of training a junior is achieving but be aware of danger of inadvertently sharing your address – keep the track private!
- Set realistic targets – there are selection procedures for Irish squad representation eg at JHI and for JROS summer coaching camps. How to understand the requirement and ensure you get to these.
- Online fun and games: There is a wealth of online resources which are fun ways to learn and think about your Orienteering.
This list is intended to give ideas, it is not exhaustive, and everybody’s needs and ambitions are very different. You certainly will not cover all this in a session. The arrangement will probably work best if a small amount is covered fairly regularly, and 20 to 30 minutes is probably a suitable time to spend. Both the mentor and mentee can take the discussion to all things orienteering related but can include the wider subject of training for O through running and other sports.