Coaches in orienteering are leaders in developing our sport; they mentor, motivate, and pull a whole lot of their own experiences together to share. Orienteering coaches play a unique role as connectors and ambassadors, bringing inspiration, expertise, and humility to the sport. Here’s what Tane Cambridge, Nathan Borton, Briana Stevens, Gene Beveridge, Llew McGivern & Jean Cory Wright share about their coaching journey:

Tane Cambridge
I like to think of my coaching style as calm, composed and supportive – as the NZSSOC team described the “chill” coach. I bring a lot of experience from Orienteering and Running as well as other sports, such as Adventure racing, Rogaining and Multisport and I enjoy passing that hard earned knowledge on. With this background in high-performance sport at an elite level, I value listening first and giving athletes space to share what they think and how they feel.

In New Zealand there are not many specialist coaches who cover the full spectrum of orienteering: technical/tactical navigation, physical running skills, and mental preparation. I like to tailor my advice to each athlete so they can reach the best possible state for competition. Major events aren’t always all sunshine and rainbows – emotions run high, and everyone responds differently. I have spent many years learning orienteering, and I feel strongly about using that experience to guide the next generation.

I believe we don’t do enough structured evaluation after events. Tools like Livelox are essential for reviewing races and really listening to athletes’ perspectives. One-on-one debriefs help identify how mistakes can be reduced and what alternative strategies could be used. Some of my most rewarding moments have been hearing an athlete say, “I used the techniques you taught me,” or seeing a young orienteer bounce back from previous disappointment to win their grade the next day. Those moments are incredibly satisfying.

For anyone considering coaching, my advice is simple jump in; learn the learning skills and techniques. Don’t be afraid to try new things out and don’t be afraid to drop it if it’s not working either– if something doesn’t work, adapt and try something else. Some athletes learn best by doing, others by watching, so finding the right approach for each individual is key.

My coaching theory is built around four interlinked pillars of high-performance orienteering, which together define the complete orienteer:

• Technical – developing core navigation skills and techniques
• Tactical – preparation, research, and choosing the right strategies for the terrain
• Physical – running, strength, hill work, and movement skills
• Psychological – race planning, race procedures, and mental strategies during competition

Coaching has strengthened my own orienteering. I feel a responsibility to model good practice and apply what I teach. Running in the same terrain as the athletes I have found to be valuable too as it helps me better understand how navigation decisions are influenced by the environment and where mistakes can occur. It also allows me to support athletes with translating terrain to interpretation and vice versa. As a coach, you are part of the team – sharing the journey, the learning, and the outcomes together.

Nathan Borton
My focus in coaching is for the participants to have fun and enjoy themselves. It is about making friends, getting outside and enjoying running with a map. Orienteers will not go far if they do not genuinely love what they are doing.

I like to remove the emphasis on place or performance, but find out more about how each orienteer feels about the course or event. What did they think they did well or didn’t do so well? I encourage orienteers to learn to apply their focus at the next event. By removing the focal point further from day-to-day performance we can look toward longer-term improvements, with more enjoyment and longevity in the sport. Long term goals can be hard to comprehend when you are young. 3-5 years in the distance is a huge step to think about at this time in your life. I remember the discussion of JWOC when I was in school and it always seemed so far away, but if you make a big goal like that and just keep chugging away it,  I have full faith that anyone has the potential to achieve it.

Giving feedback can be tricky as bad results are always tough, and every individual athlete requires something different to move on with. It is a matter of learning what their connection to the sport is, and allowing them to decompress in their own way, before moving onto other goals. 

My biggest challenge in coaching so far has been planning the 2025 Junior camp. Since I was now working full time but did not want to pass up the opportunity. Since I now work full-time it was difficult to manage my time to complete all the planning and prep work but I was very grateful to have a great team of coaches and manager Susy. I  did not want to pass up the opportunity. 

My advice to aspiring coaches is to take every opportunity you can get. Start with your club and organise club coaching days. Help is often welcome at the year 5-8 junior camp and junior camp. Become very familiar with all the ONZ online resources and speak to many of the other coaches. I was always thinking about what I could do next as I really enjoy giving back to the sport. Orienteering has given me so much, and I have found it useful to share what I know, so others have the same opportunity. Briana Steven  
I’ve always enjoyed orienteering and all the preparation that goes into big competitions myself so I try to excite that same enjoyment in the athletes too. It’s much easier to coach people who are motivated through a love for the sport so helping them find and maintain that love and excitement makes the job so much easier. A lot of it also comes from my own experiences and both positives and negatives I’ve had from my own orienteering experiences in teams.

How I have been coached: I’ve had team coaches, i.e. for the schools team and for JWOC. Back when I was going to Australia the coaching aspect was much more focused for during the event, and Jean Cory-Wright’s practices and techniques have very strongly shaped how I coach today! My JWOC coach, Devon Beckman had some great training week ideas and tools which I have tried to incorporate in my own coaching too. And of course, the awesome Junior Camp coaches I had played a great part in showing orienteering coaching was fun and exciting to do. But I’ve never had (and I’m not sure anyone really has?) a personal orienteering or running coach who works with me one-on-one.

I’ve mostly just picked up new tricks and tips along the way that has built my coaching style, but I think I have stayed the same at the core with the same beliefs.

Disappointment can be really tough to handle, especially if you have another event the next day. Mindset is a big part of orienteering so I would want the athlete to feel their feelings and have time to process through it for a bit. But my message is to try and leave it all behind at the event centre and refocus for the next day by distracting yourself for the afternoon and then looking forward. 

Seeing how someone is progressing in orienteering is very tricky, and mostly self-assessed. So I encourage pretty heavy analytical reflection of your mistakes after some time has passed from the competition (this is never something to do mid-race week or directly after where the emotions might still be riding high). Any orienteer should be aiming towards feeling good crossing the finish line before they know what number place they have come, and once you get that consistently then it’s time to either get physically faster or start to become more efficient moving through the terrain. 

As for my most rewarding orienteering coaching experience – it’s really hard to pick one! Every time I get to be at the finish area receiving athletes after they pop out from downloading is always great, and even better if they come out smiling because they had a great personal race. Nothing sounds better than having the first words they say to you be “that was so awesome!”, regardless of what their time or position is. 

A big challenge was definitely sitting in front of 12 faces staring back at me in disbelief as Jenni read the message from the Portuguese government about the forests closing for fire risk at JWOC 2022. We had done so much training and preparation together for those 3 races that to see the chance to race taken away from them was pretty upsetting for me, and I wasn’t even the one racing! Quite a novel experience for a first-time coach to adjust to.

My advice for aspiring orienteering coaches is – just go for it. Everyone starts from somewhere, and that first bit of experience will set you up for the future. It really helps to know what the athletes are going through yourself, so coaching teams or groups you were once part of is really great.

I’m sure my own orienteering ends up better somehow when explaining techniques, going through mistakes with other people and all that. But I really just enjoy the whole process, and especially when your athletes do well and achieve their goals! Nothing better than living vicariously through younger orienteers at competitions you are too old for now as well. 

Gene Beveridge
My high-performance background gave me a specific perspective on orienteering, but it wasn’t until I tried to share my ideas as a coach that my understanding became more nuanced. As a competitive athlete, my orienteering became highly detailed and analytical. But as a coach, I learned that not everyone connected with this approach to developing their orienteering. Ultimately, a deep and thorough understanding is required to get to the very top, but bombarding developing athletes with ideas that they do not have the experience to integrate can be very frustrating. This is known as the curse of knowledge bias, and it is present wherever there are expertise and teaching.

Regardless of age, development starts by working through the fundamentals step by step until everything is clear in the mind of the orienteer. Techniques need to be repeated to be understood and no amount of theory, no matter how well explained, can replace this. Using a range of exercises to develop a technique is also important, because different athletes process and apply skills differently. The outcome is a robust, reliable process. Everything should feel deliberate, and maybe even slow, but when skills become second nature, athletes can then apply and adapt them confidently in competition. “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training” is especially true here. It’s all to easy to imagine orienteering being easy, but the truth is there are far more wrong ways than right ways to execute a route in red-level orienteering.

Over years of practice, there will emerge significant variation in how orienteers tend to approach navigation. If orienteers what to become competitive, I encourage them to understand what they are doing at every moment, why they are doing it, and how to make smart decisions given their own strengths and weaknesses. I encourage orienteers to find their confidence. That is, I want them to see navigation through a lens of seeking confidence and avoiding risk. This will help them choose the best route for them and which select the best techniques to apply. It will also help them relax away from hasty decisions; Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. To complete this stage of an orienteers’ development, they must further know confidence as an emotion, because the feeling of low confidence so often precedes navigation mistakes. Feeling a lack of confidence is the first alert that something is not right with one’s process, and this can usually be felt before moving speed drops and well before navigation gets seriously off track.  

To evaluate orienteering performance while coaching, I often assess techniques subjectively by running behind athletes and observing:

• The cadence/rhythm of looking up at the terrain and back to the map – this indicates map contact and proactive, rather than, reactive navigation.
• Compass checking frequency – maintaining direction is the foundation of good orienteering in most terrain.
• Straightness through terrain – even small wobbles barely visible on the GPS track indicate of low confidence.
• Actions once it is clear a mistake it occurring – this is the easiest place to see chinks in the armour. 

For athletes looking at high performance, the journey becomes even more individualised. Those wishing to race at the highest level will have to find ways to trim back their navigation while keeping risks under control. This is counterintuitively the opposite of what most orienteers should be doing and it only makes sense to start stripping things back in this way for athletes who have very robust techniques and rarely make mistakes costing most than 2 minutes. For these athletes, fast is fast, and a little roughness around the edge can be tolerated (although not desired) as long is the throttle remains open. In practice these athletes tend to have a higher dependency on the compass for direction, a keen eye for which features on the map will be the most visible in the terrain, a commitment to keeping eyes up to look as far into the terrain as possible, and ignoring almost everything else. 

Much of my early development was under the guidance of coaches, and I would suggest this is where the vast majority of us need to spend our time. But getting to the next level was largely self-directed. I refined techniques through practice and had to look within to understand the mental and emotional factors. I trained with others in a tight and often intense way and it helped me get clearer on what was working and what wasn’t. This second part was quite a long journey for me. I like to say things finally clicked when I was about 24 years old, despite competing at an elite level since I was 18. Doing the techniques well in training exercises was only half the challenge.

Llew McGivern
My priority is engaging with orienteering students and having fun is at the heart of my coaching philosophy – when athletes are enjoying themselves, “the mind comes along for free.” Sport must be enjoyable – of course there are bumps in the road, but if we are not having fun as an Orienteering community – something is not right.

On a practical side, my coaching is grounded in a skills-based approach, progressively building capability by layering skills and working step by step towards more advanced concepts. It’s important you are grounded in the basics first, then incrementally add and deepen skills.

Skills / methods: After events, I encourage individual course debriefs on the day – feedback is critical to learning. Going over courses with peers or people more advanced than yourself is a great way to learn, and Orienteers are great people, who love to help.

Preparation before events is also important: always read bulletins carefully to get an understanding of the terrain and mapping. Google maps can also help for details in some cases. Going over recent big races, such as EYOC or JWOC is a great way to deepen understanding and broaden perspective.

One of the most challenging aspects of Orienteering is setting expectations. I deeply empathise with athletes who give their best yet don’t achieve the result they hoped for. Building a supportive community is essential, where students can learn from each other, and lean on each other through both successes and setbacks. Peer support is powerful – athletes learn just as much from one another as they do from coaches.

What I find most rewarding is seeing orienteers grow and improve, not just as competitors but as people. I take a holistic approach, getting to know he athletes and their families. As a parent myself, I value the relationships within the wider community and often discover skills and strengths that help grow the sport. Building that community – working with students, families, schools – it all takes time – sometimes years, but I invest personally because I enjoy the challenge, and it’s worth it. 2025 King’s Birthday weekend, we travelled with 25 students and booked out an entire motel – we had a great weekend, and a real highlight of what an Orienteering community can look like.

For those interested in coaching, my advice is to engage with the whole person. There are many good people already involved and yet many more you may not yet know – take the time to connect with them. Plenty of people would welcome mentoring, so look for someone who could benefit from your support, and get familiar with the NZ coaching notes online.

As RNZ broadcaster Jesse Mulligan said last year, Orienteering has “a lot of what is right about sport.” I find that students teach me just as much as I teach them, and it’s a privilege to watch them learn and grow. Hearing one student say, “When I come to events, I don’t know what to do, or when or where to start,” was heartbreaking – and a reminder that there is always more work to do.

Going forward an important project I am currently working on is the development of a four-day syllabus to be embedded within the school system, rolling out orienteering as part of the new junior strategy. My goal here is to see Orienteering recognised and valued as a formal sport within schools PE syllabus.

Jean Cory-Wright
My coaching approach is grounded in positive psychology, which I use as both a coaching and teaching tool. When giving feedback, I always aim to highlight something positive alongside constructive guidance. Learning only happens when athletes feel emotionally safe; if the emotional part of the brain is threatened or distracted, effective learning can’t take place. Orienteering needs to feel good – when athletes are enjoying themselves, they can stay focused, avoid guessing or being distracted by others, and instead rely on their own decision-making and navigation skills.

A key message I reinforce is the importance of using the thinking brain rather than letting the emotional brain take over. Athletes need to know where they are at all times and be actively planning how they will get to the next control. When things don’t go to plan, I encourage reflection on what wasn’t done and how to improve next time, rather than dwelling too long on mistakes. At the same time, being positive must be realistic – it’s not about saying “it’ll be all right,” but about identifying small, achievable steps for improvement. The language athletes use, both aloud and internally, matters. Progress comes from focusing on specific areas to work on, with a clear time frame and intent.

Feedback is usually delivered using a “sandwich” approach: starting with something specific that went well, followed by constructive advice, and finishing with another positive that acknowledges effort and leaves the athlete with confidence and direction.

As a teenage athlete in the UK, one aspect of training was physical training – drills, mileage, sprint sessions, and being told what to do.  But on training weekends and camps, we placed a big emphasis on technique training and practice – learning a progression of skills, practising them and then applying them in races. That experience led me to place greater value on the technical side of the sport and eventually to develop the Book of Techniques, which focuses on the cognitive and decision-making aspects of orienteering. I began coaching in the mid-1990s, well before JWOC had taken off, and it was already clear to me that how athletes learned was an area that could be improved. These techniques give athletes a shared language to describe their performance and identify areas to develop.

Rather than detailed leg-by-leg debriefs, I prefer to look for patterns and common themes, helping athletes build a personal “toolbox” of skills they can draw on in future races. Each orienteer needs to find what works for them, have backup strategies, and bring structure to their training and racing. This helps reduce distractions and encourages purposeful thinking on the course – saying “stay focused” is vague, whereas “use an attack point” provides a concrete action athletes can apply immediately.

One of the aspects I’ve most enjoyed in my coaching career is the sense of community, beginning with school teams and extending to working together as a New Zealand team. Orienteering becomes a team sport in this context, fostering collective responsibility and shared success.

One of my greatest personal challenges has been coaching my own children. I’ve watched them move from being highly coachable to fiercely independent as they developed their own ideas. I’ve learned to step back, letting them know I’m there when they need support. There have been countless rewarding moments throughout my coaching journey – conversations after events, seeing athletes gain insight, and watching them grow through both challenges and successes. I genuinely enjoy coaching and working with young orienteers, the things that are learnt are well beyond hurdles and mistakes.

Some tips from Jean:

• Teach a skill – be specific, and make sure there is a progression ( see the ONZ website)
• Don’t overload – just one or two things at a time
• Use the “feedback sandwich”– and get coaches to do their own feedback sandwiches – to self.
• Have fun – both you and your coaches!

Inspired by these coaches? What’s next? 
Orienteering doesn’t discriminate on age, so everyone can benefit by looking at the ONZ Coaching resources