Welcome to the UCL Orienteering Club's webpage! We are the latest sports club to be founded at UCL, and are excited to offer something new, different, and super exciting to our fellow students.
A question we know we are bound to be asked 1000s of times is - well, what is orienteering? It's a fast-paced adventure sport where you use a map to find posts ('controls') hidden along a course as quickly as possible. And don't worry - we will be organising taster events to explain the basics. It takes place in a range of venues, from university campus to forests, and some people even do it on mountain bike trails or ski resorts! Feel free to look at the videos below.
You might notice that London doesn't have too many forests, which means we will be organising lots of subsidised trips, for example, to Bath, Brighton, Edinburgh, and even further afield. But in terms of weekly training, the plan is as follows:
Every Saturday afternoon (1pm) - @ Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Golders Hill or Hampstead Heath
Monthly classroom-based sessions to learn the technical elements - @ on campus
Some members may want to join RAX (Running, Athletics and Cross-country) to develop their running speed - this is a society we have worked with closely and recommend!
We aspire to offer a rewarding sporting experience, where everyone from beginners to pros. To achieve this, we are working with local clubs, LOK and SLOW, and British Orienteering to offer training events for all levels. We are really excited about our pre-BUCS training sessions, which will take place with LOK. A great thing about orienteering is that there are different courses suitable for different levels, so everyone will be challenged... but still be able to develop their skills.
The advantage of the competitive membership is that your BUCS entry is paid for, and you will be able to borrow a compass for the academic year as part of the membership fee. We also have a snazzy running top for all competitive members to hire for the year!
We are also leading the way in growing LUCO, the London Universities and Colleges Orienteering, which means we have regular league events to practise your skills and meet students from other London unis, as well a London Championships - this event (which will have relays, parasport events, and Trail-O competitions) is a perfect way for us to beat other unis and develop a sense of camaraderie. There will also be socials linked to LUCO, which again will expand your network! We are also planning mountain bike orienteering events too!
Our major competition is BUCS, an event many other sports have too, which is a university-level British championships. The 2023 event was held in Edinburgh, which was a blast, and the 2024 event in Camrbdige saw us come in 6th overall! We are already looking forward to BUCS 2025 in Sheffield. In the spirit of orienteering, even BUCS has different events at different levels, so you can come and run a simple course (if that's your level) and basically just treat the entire weekend as a free holiday (but memberships please!)
As a society, we recognise the importance sport has in building communities. Our society and committee is a diverse group of people, and we hope our values transmit into the experience you have as part of the society. We expect all members to displace sportspersonlike conduct at all times, as we strive to create an inclusive, cross-cultural, progressive community centred on our shared experience of developing our sporting skills. This means we will organise events for post-grads (many competitions are child-friendly too!), a lot of alcohol-free events, welfare events, as well as coordinating a lot of dialogue with different cultural and faith societies to keep pushing the boundaries of progressive sport in our global institution.
Other activities we organise include collaborations with RAX, and trips to various places. We are also working with TeamUCL and British Orienteering to expand the provision of parasport opportunities with the sport, and organise a range of Trail-O events, which everyone can participate in on a level footing.
TLDR: join UCLOC because we go on fun adventures to random places, have opportunities for everyone, and we won't tolerate discrimination or bullying (homophobes racists just general bigots please just don't join thanks bestie xoxo)