Category: National Team

JWOC 2025 Recap

June 26-July 3, 2025

Last updated July 4

Team USA was represented by 12 athletes at this year’s Junior Orienteering World Championships, held in Trentino, Italy. Here are photos, maps, and results from this year’s event!

Sprint Relay

The Mixed Sprint Relay is a race between teams of four athletes–two women and two men—in a fast, head-to-head competition with a total winning time of under one hour. In the heat of the afternoon, Team USA athletes pulled off impressive performances, utilizing their speed and wit to race around the streets of Levico Terme. Although blazing temperatures made the race more challenging, the competitors raced hard and smart, enough to earn a promotion in their starting rank for next year’s JWOC, a win against their neighbors (and friendly rivals) to the North – Canada, and gelato for the team. 

Only the top team from each country counts for the official results, and in the case of the US that was USA 2: Paige Suhocki, Ben Cooper, Alex Eriksson, and Danny Buchholz, coming in 32nd.

Official Results
Map/Live tracking: Leg 1 Leg 2 Leg 3 Leg 4

Sprint

With starts throughout the morning, Team USA battled less heat, but more hills and a more technical city sprint on their second day of competition. Still, the juniors kept their brains sharp, navigating well through the cobblestone streets and tunnels of Cembra, and delivered strong performances (and photo finishes) throughout. 

Ben Conley (92nd) and Greta Leonard (125th) posted the top results for Team USA this day.

Official Results
Maps and routes on Livelox

Long

Team USA stared down daunting course statistics (8.0km with 410m climb for F20/10.0km with 500m climb for M20) to carry out super solid races in the woods of Fornace. After finding their way around fields of pits deeper than two Coach Dylans, taking strategic route choices across several impressively long legs, and using their strength to take on hill after hill, the team had a renewed excitement for forest racing … and for their rest day. 

Mori Finlayson-Johnecheck (104th) and Paige Suhocki (111th) clocked in with the fastest time for US athletes today.

Official results
Maps and routes on Livelox

Middle

Team USA took on a new forest for the middle distance race. While the course statistics looked less terrifying, these woods were significantly less forgiving, with blackberry bushes that tore into our athletes and bumpy hillsides that rolled Ian’s ankle (He wisely chose to DNF, but is recovering well!)

The athletes who made it out alive performed solidly, tackling hills, marshes, and an uphill finish chute to all land themselves well under an hour in the woods.

Official results
Maps and routes on Livelox

Forest Relay

With three full teams, and one mixed team with a South African friend/lead leg, Team USA took on the relay, on a similar map to their middle. Now knowing what to avoid (green vertical slash and marshes), our athletes bested even more slopes, the distraction of running with others in the woods, and any navigational challenges thrown their way. 

The team ended the competition cheering on their coaches in the coaches race, reflecting on their accomplishments, and preparing to enjoy themselves a well-deserved banquet!

Official results
Tracks and maps for Men LEG 1 – LEG 2 – LEG 3
Tracks and maps for Women LEG 1 – LEG 2 – LEG 3

Support Team USA this summer!

This summer Orienteering USA is providing support to 30 National Team and Youth Development Program athletes participating in events in Europe. Some, like Ali Crocker (CROC), are veterans competing for the last time at the World Orienteering Championships. Others, like youngsters Kendal O’Callaghan (RMOC) and Alex Eriksson (ICO), are part of OUSA’s first officially supported team to the European Youth Orienteering Championships. All of our athletes are training hard now and preparing for their summer competitions and training camps, and we’ll keep you updated on all the action.

Here’s a schedule of events featuring Team USA orienteers this summer:

In addition to cheering these athletes on from home, you can also lend a hand financially. Help these athletes reach their summer fundraising goal of $6,000 ($200 per athlete)!

Make a donation by using via OUSA’s donation page (select “4 National Team”) and then share the image above on social media to get others to pitch in!

April OUSA Member Spotlight: Keegan Harkavy

The OUSA April Spotlight is on National Team member (Elite Squa) Keegan Harkavy, from Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is a transcript of an interview with Keegan in April, 2025. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Cristina Luis: Welcome Keegan! I would like to hear how you got your start orienteering.

Keegan Harkavy: I had always known what orienteering was because I grew up next to Barb [Bryant] and growing up next to Barb, it’s kind of a foregone conclusion that you’ll know what orienteering is. I think somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I remember Barb always trying to get me and my two sisters to do it.

But it really started in sixth grade when she came into my school to teach us orienteering. And I can’t really remember what we did. I think we did some maze-Os, maybe some grids, but I remember really enjoying it. I was quite good at it and as a hyper-competitive sixth grader that was something that was exciting. I remember just having a good time and, Barb being Barb, she got really excited about this and pushed to get a team from Cambridge Street Upper School to go to Junior Nationals. 

She started coaching us and she brought us to Junior Nationals. She put a lot of work into us. She would drive us places. She would feed us pizza. I remember a lot of games of Catan. And it was a very wholesome, welcoming community. And then we went to Junior Nationals and I think we did quite well. I ran Yellow and thought  it was so hard and I remember getting to trail junctions and going the wrong way and being so upset with myself. But I really loved it and Barb made it super easy to continue. Once she stopped working with us, Ethan Childs was there. It was an easy way to enter orienteering, especially as someone whose family didn’t do it.

Barb and I share a driveway [in Cambridge, MA]. It was always easy to go do things. And one of the early meets I remember most specifically is when she took us to a Harriman [NY] training camp. That was the first time I think I remember actually orienteering. I did a control pick with Dave Yee following me and I think I missed every single control in the control pick. [Editor’s note: you can even read a blog post that Keegan wrote back then about the training camp.]

It was probably a 3k course that took me an hour and a half. I did not understand Harriman at all, but it was awesome. And again, we played board games when we got back. We cooked food. And to this day, that kind of intense training camp of three or four days, with food, board games, and orienteering is still what I live for and I think it is the most fun thing you can do over a weekend.

Yeah, that’s something I think we should be pushing our youth to do. You don’t have to go super far, just have a weekend like that. 

Yeah. And to me, especially at that age, the maps didn’t matter. It was all just being with people. It was about the community. I love board games. So, the fact that we were playing Catan 24/7 was huge. 

I came out to Southwest Spring Week in eighth or ninth grade and it was me, Ethan Childs and Erin Shirm living in a house together. We played every variant of Catan we could think of for a week straight. And it was again excellent orienteering. I remember that was when I learned how to do contours. We did a contour thing on the open terrain of Arizona where it was rolling yellow grass and being able to see them out in front of me was the first time I was like, “I can actually use these to navigate. They’re not just like a fun little thing on the map there for extra…”

Not just decorations!

Yeah, and I remember coming home from that and as we were driving I would see contours on the terrain around me. I would visualize the lines going across it and think I was some sort of superhero or something. 

Yeah, I think you’re talking about the Route 83 areas. We call them the grassy yellow maps and you’re not the first person who has said that that’s where they first had contours pop for them and really see it. So that’s cool.

Yeah. Yeah.

It’s harder to see that stuff in New England woods. 

Okay, so that describes your entry and school years. Were you able to keep orienting once you hit college?

Yeah, college has been an interesting experience. I think I’ve both been most attached and farthest from orienteering throughout college.

When I’m in school, I find it very hard to train. This is kind of on me. I think there are training opportunities. A lot goes on in Boston. I have access to a car. I could do a lot of New York events, but just like you get into a bubble of school, you do work, you do all the things. And it’s hard. Throughout college, I really have not done much besides go to big events. However, at the same time, I’ve felt myself really wanting to compete hard at certain points throughout college and really wanting to see how far I could push it. And every summer, I’ve actually been in Europe training. And that’s kind of how I’ve stayed mostly on top of orienteering skills in particular. Or things have gone well because I’ve kept in shape throughout the year. I’ve been running with a running club. I’ve run marathons. I’ve run half marathons.

I haven’t gotten exponentially faster, but I have continued to improve and I’ve continued to at least hold steady. So when I have had time to do really intense orienteering in the summer, I’ve had decent results. And also in particular in my sophomore year, I decided I really wanted to see how good I could get. And I was coming up to my last year of JWOC and I had an opportunity to study abroad. I picked Edinburgh where Thomas Laraia is training and where there’s a great team. I got to spend six months in Edinburgh training with the team. And that was by far the most I’ve ever trained. It was probably the best shape I’ve ever been in. It was not flawless because I got injured about halfway through from overtraining, but it really gave me an opportunity to try orienteering at a much higher level than the US provides.

One of Keegan’s training maps from 2018 JWOC in Hungary.

There were much more frequent trainings, much higher level competition throughout. And again, while I was there, it was the most engaged in orienteering I’ve ever been and the most dedicated to results. I think in the US, it can be kind of hard to keep that fire alive. At least it has been for me. When I’m at school, no one knows what orienteering is. I’m surrounded by world-class athletes, and that can be motivating sometimes, but at Harvard they’re very separated from us. So, I find it demotivating a lot of the time. But there it was like, “I have a chance”. I’m racing against really good foreign orienteers in general. I’m holding my own. I feel like I’m getting faster. I feel like I’m getting better. And as a result of that, I did very well at JWOC that year, even being injured. That mindset of all or nothing that I was feeling really propelled me to do well there.

And when you’re getting good results, when you’re training and it’s feeling good, it’s really easy to keep wanting to do that. 

And so now that you’re about to graduate you’re setting yourself up to do that? To be in a place where you can just train and compete and focus on orienteering?

Yeah, as I was looking at what to do next, I realized I had an opportunity to try training at an intense level for a year or two. I know from being at Harvard that when I’m working, especially in the US, I don’t have the right motivation or mindset for orienteering. I’m not amazing at splitting focus between work and orienteering. 

So I began looking for ways to really orienteer hard for a year and see what I could accomplish, similar to what I did when I went to Edinburgh. But this time instead at the senior level. That idea was helped by the fact that [fellow National Team member] AJ [Riley] was also looking for basically this exact same thing. AJ was pretty sold on grad school. I applied for grad school but it was not really what I was looking for. I don’t think I know what I want to do in my life well enough to go spend money on grad school, and I haven’t worked in the same way AJ has to save up.

Harvard has a limited number of travel fellowships for graduating seniors, meant to help you develop professionally and as a person. Generally the travel bit of it is to give you deep cultural immersion in another country. They want you to be in one place and they want you to be learning a culture and learning about yourself in a way that you don’t really have to worry necessarily about the money you’re making or your career. This was quite exciting for me. This is something that I thought would give me a very good opportunity to both orienteer, grow as a person and be in a foreign country.  

So, I submitted an application to teach orienteering in Sweden. I’ve done a ton of education work with orientering through Navigation Games. I have taught civics and taught at my religious school since 8th grade. They liked the idea, so I got a fair amount of money, and help with getting a visa.

Next year I’ll be Gothenburg, Sweden, living with AJ. The grant is for education, and I do have to write some reports on that, but the goal is really to see what I can do with orienteering and see how far I can push it. Also, to understand what orienteering, education, and the outdoors means to me going forward. Is this a thing that I want to continue at a high level? Is this a thing that I want to just go to the big meets, but not continue to train at a high level? Where does education fit into this? These are all questions I’m struggling with.

I don’t expect to answer all of them, but it will be a really cool opportunity and I’m excited to see what I can do. And we chose Gothenburg because really it seemed like the best place in the world to orienteer. 

It is close to Norway, so, at least close to the best place.

Yeah. Yeah. We looked at Norway. We were thinking Sweden was a little bit cheaper,, maybe not quite as good a terrain, but pretty high level terrain…

I think in Gothenburg you’ll be able to train all winter in the terrain, which is harder to do in most of Norway. And the terrain in western Sweden offers good variety. 

It’s cool. It’s like a university town as well, it seems like. So, a lot of young people.

This sounds like an awesome opportunity. Is this something open to anyone graduating student at Harvard?

There are a couple of different fellowships. It’s actually pretty competitive. This one is the URAF Postgraduate Travelling Fellowship. It’s just a few people who get it each year.

You mentioned something a little earlier about when you did your semester abroad in Edinburgh. You said that you got injured because you hadn’t been training as much before. Just this morning I had a conversation with a coach about this, where American orienteers go to Europe, which is great, and then they’re not ready for the training. So, when do you leave for Sweden and how will you prepare yourself physically?

Yeah, that’s a great question. If we rewind back to Edinburgh, I think why I got injured was twofold.

It was one, yes, the level of training was really high, but it was secondly that I was in a new country, in a new place, a little bit antisocial, I didn’t really know how to make friends super well. I wasn’t in school all that much. So orienteering became my whole social group. And not just that, it was when I wasn’t doing that, I had all this time on my hands and I just went, “I have time, I might as well train.” And there was definitely a personal side there of I just was going on long runs. I was personally putting in too much work and feeling good about it and seeing good orienteering results. 

Mhm.

Coming into this year, I think there are two things I have to my advantage. One is that the year-long thing makes it a little easier. Back then I was training super hard for a race that was six months out and I knew that was all I had and I was like, “I want to be as good as I can for JWOC. I want to push as hard as I can.” 

Secondly I was like, “This is all I’m doing.” In Sweden I will face the same issue. However, I think I have it a little bit easier because I have a year there. I think more time is good. I’m also less race dependent here. I’m not like training to do really well at WOC.

Keegan finishing the Long at the 2024 US Nationals. Photo by Evalin Brautigam.

I’m just training to see how good I can get in general. so I have a little bit more flexibility in my training. I think also I am at a place in my life where I’m much better at making friends, much better at entertaining myself outside of orienteering. I think moving there with AJ will also help this. I will not be alone.

I will have a partner, someone going through a very similar situation. We’ll be able to keep each other dedicated and on a strict training schedule. Also on the social side, helping me go out and find things to do so running doesn’t become my only source of joy and how I deal with all of my emotions. Secondly, last time I finished my semester at home and went right to Scotland. And while at school I do train, it’s not at a high level. This summer I have most of the summer. I’m going to be traveling for some of July, but I’ll be back by August 1st and I won’t be leaving until at least the first week of September.

So, I’m hoping a designated training block of just base building, getting to a nice place, and then two or three weeks of getting my feet under myself there will help me stay a little bit more stable in the long run.

Mhm.

I’ve been injured a couple times now. That was my first injury and since then I’ve been injured a couple times. I think I know a little about how to take care of myself. I know a little bit better about what gets me injured.

I say that when I’m going to be running a marathon tomorrow on no training and I’m probably going to injure myself. [Editor’s note: Keegan ran a 3:03 marathon that day and did not injure himself!] Do as I say, not as I do. But I’m hoping that combination will be good. I also am hoping to rely on AJ quite a bit because I think he’s a very intelligent…

He’ll be your safety rail.

I think he thinks through his training pretty well, yeah.

Yeah. It sounds like you are being very thoughtful about how you’re approaching it. 

Yeah..

There’s a little bit of experience and wisdom that comes into that. So you’re not going to race anything this summer?

I’m not racing this summer. And I’ve kind of taken the spring off. 

So you really have nothing getting in the way. 

Yeah.

Awesome. Sounds really good. 

Okay, let’s do some rapid fire! What’s your favorite board game?

We’ll say Settlers of Catan. I don’t actually know if I still like to play it, but historically most hours in it.

Okay. What’s your college major?

Physics.

Favorite place you’ve orienteered?

Most interesting terrain I think was… Oh, I’m going to get ridiculed for this. Hungary 2018. I thought that JWOC was super cool. And then Uppsala, Sweden. 

Oh, and Edinburgh for sprint. Edinburgh for sprint is the best in the world. It’s awesome.

Keegan running in the Sprint Qualifier at the 2024 World Orienteering Championships. Photo courtesy the International Orienteering Federation.

Your favorite food.

Ice cream.

Give me your pet peeves.

…

I’m sure I have some.

Maybe you’re just a really chill person and you don’t have any pet peeves.

Yeah…I don’t have a lot of pet peeves, no. 

I’ll give you a funny one. I don’t like when the finish is far from the area that you have to rest in, a remote finish.

That’s cool. An orienteering pet peeve specifically.

Not a fan.

That’s a good one. Read any good books recently?

Ooh. I’m reading Empire of Silence. It’s the first one. It’s the Sun Eater Chronicles. There are seven of them. I don’t actually know if they’re Chronicles. Very good.

How about TV shows? Are you watching any TV?

I haven’t watched anything good in a while. 

Okay, that’s good then. Favorite sports teams? Do you watch any sports?

All Boston.

All Boston, that’s the right answer.

Yeah, I’m a fair weather Bostonian fan, which means I follow the Boston sports team that is doing the best at the moment. 

So, right now it’s the Celtics. 

Yeah, been that way for a couple of years.

And your proudest orienteering result?

The JWOC Relay 2023, in Romania. Or the Long that year. 

Favorite hike?

My favorite mountain is Lafayette [in NH], taking the Old Bridle Path. You hit Lafayette and Little Haystack in Lincoln. I think it is stunning.

The favorite hike I’ve done is a week and a half backpacking trip with a friend of mine freshman year around Mount Blanc in Switzerland. The vibes were pretty immaculate.

That’s pretty awesome. Yeah. So, maybe this is going to be the same thing, but I was going to ask you what your most epic outdoor trip was.

That was the most visually epic. It wasn’t very challenging, we were staying at hotels every night.…

That’s awesome.

Yeah. Okay, when I was 11, I did the Long Trail, which was kind of crazy. 

Who’d you do that with?

My mom. Yeah, she dragged me for 300 miles along that trail.

How long did that take you?

We did three weeks of it when I was 11 and I don’t think we quite finished. Then we went back a year or two later and finished it. 

I did Owl’s Head two weeks ago and that was 12 and a half hours of hiking, five in the dark, snow everywhere. That was probably the most physically demanding hike I’ve ever done.

Awesome.

Okay, this is the last thing. What advice would you give to any young readers that want to get better at orienteering? What do they need to do? Other than live next door to Barb.

Yeah, that’s a good one.

I’ll give two pieces of advice. I think finding a community is the number one thing to do. And that kind of gives rise to the second piece of advice, which is just training consistently. I think you get excited about training by having a community. What’s kept me involved for all these years is every race I go to, I know I will love the people there.

And the other thing, I think is something that I do very well. Even though I don’t necessarily train as consistently as some of my peers or don’t do as much armchair stuff, I think I have a good mentality of racing. I get that through every time I see my peers and my friends. I want to compete with them. So I think having a good community of people that you’re not just friends with, but you’re in a little healthy rivalry with can be really good. I think it can be very easy in the US to not train hard, to go out to the woods and run for 45 minutes and do a training. Or go out on a run and run for 45 minutes just to kind of stay in shape.

And I think one of the things that really separates Americans from the Europeans is that they are attacking every single control out there. If you look at tracks you’ll see that they’re not statistically that much straighter than ours. They still make mistakes. And if you look at track times we have some pretty fast track runners. Not the fastest–top end JWOC people are crazy quick. At least on the men’s side some of us are fit enough to kind of compete there and I think the big difference comes down to that they train running high speed. They train bashing through the forest, which I think a good community helps you with. One of the things I was loving in Edinburgh was that any race I went to I knew I was going to have to push really hard if I wanted to do anywhere decently.

And the prevalence of sprint races helped there as well. With sprint races the navigation is easy enough that you can learn to do that. But I think back to me racing in JWOC when I was getting my best results that summer, I was not actually in much better shape–I’d been hurt for three months. I was definitely in better navigational shape, but I think the thing that I was really in the right mindset for was I was finishing every race as exhausted as I’ve ever finished a race. And I think in the US a lot of times I finish a race and I’m like okay I could go run another 10k because I’m held back by either my navigational skill or I’m just held back from being like that’s a big hill. I don’t want to run it.

And the best way I have of overcoming that hurdle, I think, is just finding people who you want to beat and racing them a lot.

Totally agree! Thank you for taking the time to chat today, Keegan, and good luck in Gothenburg!

March OUSA Member Spotlight: Ali Crocker

Ali Crocker running at 2022 Masters Nationals.

This is a transcript of an interview with Ali in March, 2025. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Cristina Luis: Ali, I would like to hear about your athletic background, from the beginning, and how that melds into orienteering. 

Alison Crocker: From the very beginning? Okay.

As early as you want to go. It doesn’t have to be the very beginning.

Okay. I think at my earliest ages I was dragged along to running races with my parents. Totally loved doing all the kids’ races. So I was active from the beginning, and then probably the first serious sport I did was cross-country skiing, up through young juniors. I went to a ski academy for one year–where Alex Jospe currently coaches. I just went there for the winter trying to take skiing really seriously. But then I went to a boarding school where there was more snow than at my house so I could ski but still do academics. And it was there that I discovered two new sports. First, I discovered rowing, which I took seriously for quite a while during all of high school.

And then I also actually discovered orientering during high school with a math teacher who told us what orientering was at morning chapel. I thought it sounded super cool. I signed up and I went a few times to NEOC and UNO meets and totally loved it from the very beginning. But on my third or fourth meet, I was running down some woodsy hillside and my shoulder fell out of its socket. I couldn’t row for the rowing team for a week while it healed and my rowing coach told me I couldn’t do any more of that orienteering thing, whatever it was that got me injured. So that was the end of my early days orienteering. But I knew I liked it from that experience. Through high school I was super competitive in cross-country skiing, super competitive in rowing, and was on the junior world teams for both of those.

I went to Junior Worlds once for rowing in Lithuania and two or three times for cross-country skiing, and then competed in U23s in college. In college my first year I did both skiing and rowing. But it turned out that that was too much, because rowing has a competition season in fall, skiing does in winter and then rowing does again in the spring, and my body was just totally not happy after that. So I quit rowing after the first year.

I just focused on cross-country skiing and didn’t do any orienteering at that time because there was no time and I didn’t know many people who were doing it. I did do a lot with the outing club, which was really fun. I was on the woodsman’s team, and we competed in that which was super fun, we ran up trees with spikes on our feet…

And this is Dartmouth, for context.

Yeah, this is Dartmouth. It’s basically like Colby and Dartmouth and a bunch of agricultural colleges seem to have Woodsman’s teams.

Tell me more about the woodsman’s team. What activities did you compete in?

So you compete in different events–in chopping, in splitting, in fire building, in running up the pole. All those different events. Crosscut sawing. I didn’t do the chainsaw events, but those were part of it.

Was there any axe throwing?

Yeah, there was, but I usually was not our team’s axe thrower.

Yeah all right, but lots of wood manipulating in other ways.

Yep.

Really cool. How does competitive fire building work?

You have a team of two people, and you’re given a single cedar log, three matches, and a pot of water. The first team to boil water wins. I remember there was this one event, it was really windy, and we used up our three matches so I had to run over to get more. But I had been using a knife to split the log and I didn’t put it down. So I was running as fast as I could towards the official, with this knife in my hand, and they were like, “Woah, drop the knife!” 

So, definitely relevant to orienteering. And you continued skiing, this is the off-season from skiing?

Yeah, that was off-season. 

For skiing, my senior year of college I took the fall quarter off and tried to really seriously train for the Olympics. And I did very seriously train for the Olympics, and then there were Olympic trials and I don’t know… In my best event I did not have good skis. The year before I’d come in second in the US national cross-country like five or 10k classic and then that year for team trials I was eighth or something, and so I was up there but not close enough to make the team. So I’d tried hard to make the Olympic team.

But I did get a Rhodes scholarship that year and I was going to defer it if I did make the Olympics. I didn’t make the Olympics so I went to Oxford, which does not have snow.

It’s not a good skiing destination.

Nope.

And then I really knew I had to finish–in England PhDs are only three years. Most people do Masters before them. I didn’t. So I knew I was going to have to work really hard to finish a PhD in three years. I was just going to forget about sports. My life was taking me in other ways, and that worked well for two months. And then I ran in the intramural cross-country race and came in really high in the results and the cross-country team was, “great, you’re racing for our JV team against Cambridge two weeks from now.” I was like, what? I didn’t know this was part of the deal. And then I was the top Oxford runner in that.

And so I ended up being the backup for the varsity team and then someone did actually break their nose and I ended up running on the varsity cross-country team three weeks later. And so I got very involved very quickly in cross-country running. And then it turned out the orienteering team captain was one of the cross-country runners and he told me I should come and try orienteering. And that’s where I met [former US Team member] Boris [Granovskiy] on a bus to a little rinky dink area near Oxford. When I went orienteering for the fourth or fifth time in my life and kind of rediscovered it and liked it again immediately.

I was not super fast my first time because there was a lot to figure out about the map. And afterwards I just started orienteering a ton with the university team. And did that for the two and a half more years that I was at Oxford. 

What year was that you first went to an orienteering event in Oxford? 

Early 2007.

You had your adult introduction to orienteering in 2007 and then in 2008 you ran a World Cup race with us, at O-Ringen in Sweden. That’s where we first met.

Yeah. 

Just getting a timeline here because that’s fun. That’s pretty quick. Clearly your endurance background helped immensely. And then how about the map reading part, how do you think you developed that? As someone who was fit coming in, were you outrunning your navigation a lot early on?

Yeah. At the beginning a ton. I was like, “what do these squiggles mean?” I just needed to look at them. So I have all these memories of when I would definitely consistently make five minute errors and I’d run fast and get a lot of the time back. But I would be genuinely very confused and lost quite frequently in a race and I’d be happy when the navigation was simple because it meant I could run harder. It was pretty friendly to learn in southern England, to be honest because it’s not super detailed and complicated and so it was a friendly place to start to learn how to navigate. And then I remember the first national level meets in England that I went to and they totally kicked my butt because they were on more complicated maps in the north. And then having to adjust to that and study those. 

Ali at the 2022 Middle Champs. Photo by Clinton Morse.

But the Oxford Orienteering Club did great training. We went to the Lake District and other places and I really learned a lot from my teammates. We’d meet up in the pub after the meets and really talk through the race and they’d be like, “Why didn’t you go that way,” or, “could have looked at this?” And was like, “yeah, I could have.” And so I learned a lot from doing those analyses with teammates and from our training camps. One of the varsity races was in Uppsala and that was my first time trying to navigate in that really detailed vague terrain.

In the wilderness.

Yeah.

The O club was really active it sounds like.

Yeah. We went to meets on a lot of weekends, just like the local meets and then we’d go on further trips. But yeah.

And I guess there were other pretty competitive volunteers. Were there any British team types around?

Yeah. There were people on the team at the same time as me who had been on the junior team and who later went on to be on the senior team at least once. So there were people who were good orienteers.

A good crew of people to learn from.

Totally. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great. Since then, so you’ve been to, I don’t know how many WOCs, do you know off the top of your head?

Alison Crocker: Yeah, not really.

Okay, I looked it up, nine World Orienteering Championships. But you’ve been trying to balance racing with a career in academia, and now a family. How do you choose how much time you can put into things, and prioritize?

Super busy. Yeah, it’s very busy and I think part of the academic career that worked well–less well for ski orienteering–but my summers are more of my own time. I do research with students but I can kind of escape and go to different meets and go to WOC without it being a problem. So that’s one good feature. But during the school year, it’s really hard to find the time to train. It’s even harder now with kids that I can’t just like…if I go running during the day, I can’t just make it up by doing some work at night because there’s all these things I have to do with the kids. So I don’t know. It’s hard.

You earned a personal spot at the North Americans by winning the long and the middle, right? And you’re running all three events at WOC  this year. Is this going to be your last world champs?

That’s my plan. I think I’m in good shape this year.

Ali at the 2025 US Team Trials. Photo by Evalin Brautigam.

I did a lot of training with a local cross country team throughout the fall and winter. I found that it is fun in cross country to start being a master’s athlete and compete against people my own age. And I think that I’d also have more fun now in orienteering if I start going to master’s world champs and things. So, I think even in the future if I did earn a personal spot, I probably wouldn’t go just because I think for me it’s the time to go do different things.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And I’m glad that you’re not in my masters category. 

Looking back at WOC, you have had some very good finishes over the years. Do any stand out to you that you’re particularly proud of?

Totally. Yeah, the one I’m really proud of–I think my best sprint placing was a little higher–but my long in Finland, I think it was 18th. Is that right?

Yes, that’s right.

And I think that’s probably the single race I’m most proud of. I raced really hard, kept the navigation together, and in particular, there was a route choice that I made that was kind of right, at least for me, which was a long runaround leg, and I remember doing it and just being like, I hope this is right. But–and I think the analysis shows that it was a smart choice, at least if you were a fast runner. And so yeah, I’m really proud of that race and it was fun to be there and running fast through the woods and finding things where I wanted mostly.

Ali’s route at the 2013 WOC Long. You can see her gutsy choice to run wide left from 10 to 11. Click on the image to see all the GPS tracking from that event.

And you get to go back to Finland this year, though it’s different.

Yes, I think it will be different terrain. But back to Finland this year.

You can channel that good feeling and result.

Is the sprint in Switzerland what you were thinking of, which was a 20th place, is that right? I remember the sprint in Switzerland because it was really technical and it was really tricky and you still were right up there.

And I think that one I was also finishing with [many-time WOC champion] Simone [Niggli] and got hit on the head with Swiss flags.

That’s a memory.

What about Scotland? Did Scotland have a sprint? I feel like that was …

So, yeah, 15th in the sprint in Scotland.

And it was still a sprint but it was mostly parky. And so it helped being able to run fast, keep my head straight, but it wasn’t as dense as an old European city that I find really hard to train for in the US. It’s just such a different type of orienteering.

Of all of your travels for orienteering, including WOCs  and whatever else you’ve done, what are the favorite places you’ve been?

Partly Finland because I raced well there and liked it.

You have good memories.

I mean some of my most memorable orienteering is really places I just would never ever have gone. So the ski orienteering in Kazakhstan, that was something I will always always remember.

Because it’s not a place… I even talked to my colleagues in the Russian department here and they’re like, “you were in the middle of nowhere,” and I was like yes we really were. So that was super cool.

Ali skiing at the SkiO World Champs in Kazahkstan.

That was a trip. And we didn’t talk about ski WOCs, but your best finishes, placing-wise, are from ski WOC. You have an eighth in the long, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, but I guess the depth of competition makes the WOC ones probably feel more…

And they’re more recent so I can remember apparently.

Yeah. 2011, eighth in the relay as well at Ski WOC. [Editor’s note: this was despite the interviewer’s inclusion on the team, not because of it.]

Ali (center) with relay teammates Cristina Luis (left) and Alex Jospe (right) at the 2011 World SkiO Championships.

But yeah, I mean I totally love skiing. The only reason I haven’t done it [Ski WOC] recently is I can’t get away from teaching at that time of year. So that’s just a bummer. 

Another memory I have, which was just really cool because it intercepted life and orienteering, was still when I was at Oxford. I was still a very very new orienteer. But I had an observing trip to a telescope in Japan. And Boris asked Rob Plowight, who is an Australian living in Japan and coaching their team and mapping there, if I could get some maps of places near the observatory. And I got hooked up with these maps and just took the train from the observatory and went to this forest in Japan and ran around on a map.

And it just felt so powerful to be able to run around in the forest, where I was on this map. I can’t even read a street sign, but I can navigate using a map in this totally foreign country. And so I remember that being just a super cool experience.

Yeah. That is cool because without orienteering you wouldn’t have done anything like that.

Nope.

Probably would have just gone wherever the tourists were recommended to go instead. 

Yep.

You’re a physics professor at Reed. Do you find that your physics background and that way of thinking is connected to liking orienteering?

I mean, I think there is and I didn’t believe… actually orienteering taught me that there probably are just different types of brains that kind of like this sort of thing. When I discovered orienteering in Oxford,  everyone was doing STEM-y type things, like everyone right. And that’s kind of rung true as I stay in the orienteering world, it’s basically everyone is in really sort of quite logical or science or math types fields, so I definitely think there’s an overlap between the brains that find physics fun and the brains that find orienteering fun. And I have such a brain that’s why I find both things really fun.

What do you think made the biggest difference in improving your orienteering?

I mean it was really a series of steps, from having friendly terrain at the beginning, so it was encouraging and not discouraging to start, and then having training camps that kept pushing my boundaries of orienteering. And then my orienteering really improved in leaps and bounds when I moved back to the US and lived in western Massachusetts and had the gang of five, Peter and Gail Gagarin, Phil Bricker, and me and Alex [Jospe].

The five of us just pushed each other and set up trainings and just got a lot of and just were encouraging and kept orienteering in the forefront of what we were doing. and so that was really helpful. And then also Western Mass is awesome because while there’s a good set of maps just around there in town that you can train on, you can also go to UNO meets, you can go to NEOC meets, you can go to Central New York meets, you can go to HVO meets, you can go to Western Connecticut meets. So you have a menu of awesome meets you can orienteer a ton every single weekend.

Mhm.

And it’s not five hour trips, it’s two hour trips at most. So yeah, orienteered a lot from Western Mass and definitely improved a lot.

So just doing a lot of orienteering and having other people around to help push and talk about things. And for most people that doesn’t happen after moving from Europe to the US…

Mhm. Yeah.

…but for you, I mean England is different than Scandinavia, but for you I guess the Western Mass-ers was the key element part of that probably.

True.  Yeah. 

The last thing I want to ask you is, what advice do you have for American orienteers who are aspiring to compete internationally? What should these young orienters who are hopefully reading this do? They can’t all go join the US junior cross-country ski team, right? But there’s probably things they can do even so.

Totally. And I think it really breaks down into the two categories of sort of the pure physical, working on running through terrain, if you can. The more cross country, the more mountain trail running probably the better. But really working on the physical running speed side of it. And then working on the technique side, which is dependent on where you are. I think the running side, there’s going to be runners everywhere, right? There’s cross country. You can figure that out. But the technique side can really be hard depending on where in the states you live, and how many maps you have available and how active the club you have around you.

I mean I think my experience with the Gang of Five in western Massachusetts is it doesn’t take much to be a critical mass of people…

Mhm. Right.

…who are interested and can set trainings for each other and make a go of whatever few maps they have around locally. So if a junior can even find a few other local people or even network with people who can at least set the training and then one or two local people who can  flag and just make trainings happen for each other, that can really really help.

Yeah. Is Portland a place where people could do that? Do you think there are enough people around Portland?

Yeah. And it goes out of just how much effort people are able to put into it. …

So one more thing. With your busy life, what does your training plan look like between now WOC?

I mean, it mostly looks like trying to do as much good running training and aiming at the more traily off-roady hilly type stuff. Even Finland’s not going to be crazy hilly, so I’m not running up like ski slopes like I was for Switzerland. But still just the off-road nature is more demanding. And then trying to get to as much orienteering as I can. Still TBD if I get to one of the East Coast meets. But I know that that would be good. And then going to the meets that both my club and Cascade are hosting that seem like I can get there and would be helpful. I’ll probably run the men’s categories if there’s longer races…

If there’s a blue, you’ll run it. Yeah, that makes sense. I will most likely be watching WOC from some other country when you compete  this summer, but I’m looking forward to seeing what this last WOC looks like for you.

I am too. It’ll be fun.

Thank you, Ali! And good luck at WOC!

2025 JWOC Team Selected

The JWOC Selection Committee is pleased to announce the team to represent the US at the 2025 Junior World Championships (JWOC), which will be held in Trentino, Italy, from 26 June to 4 July.

Men:

  • Ben Brady
  • Ben Conley
  • Ian Dunlap
  • Alex Eriksson
  • Mori Finlayson-Johnecheck
  • Ludvig Hagwall
  • 1st alternate, Ben Cooper
  • 2nd alternate, Lenni Kallela

Women:

  • Danny Buchholz
  • Anna Campbell
  • Anna Green
  • Greta Leonard
  • Paige Suhocki
  • Zariah Zosel
  • 1st alternate, Kendal O’Callaghan
  • 2nd alternate, Sophie Howes
  • 3rd alternate, Kate deBlonk

Congratulations to all the athletes! We wish them the best of luck in the European forests.

Peggy Dickison, National Team ESC Chair & Chair of WOC Review Panel
JWOC Selection Committee: Jon Torrance, Brenda Blacklock, Ethan Childs, Will Enger, Tyra Christopherson, and Julia Doubson

2025 WOC Team Selected

The WOC Review Panel is pleased to announce the team to represent the US at the 2025 World Orienteering Championships (WOC) in Kuopio, Finland, from 7 to 12 July. Regional champs in the Middle and Long races—for North Americans, last summer’s NAOC races—earn personal starts in those WOC races. Joseph Barrett thus earned a long start at this year’s WOC, and Ali Crocker earned both a middle and a long start.

2025 WOC Team

Men:

  • Joseph Barrett
  • Ricardo Schaniel
  • Anthony Riley
  • Thomas Laraia
  • 1st alternate, Greg Ahlswede
  • 2nd alternate, Anton Salmenkylä

Women:

  • Ali Crocker
  • Lily Addicott
  • Alison Campbell
  • Evalin Brautigam
  • 1st alternate, Bridget Hall
  • 2nd alternate, Siri Christopherson

Congratulations to all the athletes! We wish them the best of luck in the European forests.

Peggy Dickison, National Team ESC Chair & Chair of WOC Review Panel
WOC Review Panel: Glen Tryson, Jeff Saeger, Ioana Flemming, Peggy Dickison

Western States Champs / US Team Trials

Feb 28-Mar 2, 2025

Host: Bay Area Orienteering Club

Venues:

  • Friday: Presidio, San Francisco, CA
  • Saturday & Sunday: Calero County Park, San Jose, CA

This event served as the Team Trials for the Junior World Orienteering Champs (Fri, Sat, Sun) and the World Orienteering Champs (Sat, Sun). Additionally, combined scores for the best two of three days were used to determined the winners of the Western State Champs, an informal competition for orienteers residing in one of the western states (those states with a peak above 10,000′).

Photos by Evalin Brautigam and Cristina Luis

Results, Photos, and Maps

Announcing the 2025 US National Orienteering Team

The Selection Committee (Peggy Dickison, Matt Smith, and Will Enger) is pleased to announce the 2025 US National Orienteering Team.

The committee received 55 applications and 45 athletes were selected to the National Team, earning a place on one of three squads: Elite, Performance, and Junior. Those athletes on the Elite Squad are those who we would expect to make up the WOC Team if the trials were held now. Performance athletes are those who in any given race can perform at the Elite level and may develop into an athlete capable of competing for the WOC Team. Junior athletes, those under 21, are only eligible for the Junior Squad. They are eligible to compete for the WOC and the JWOC teams.

We welcome six new members to the Team, one returning member, and one promotion from Performance to Elite. 

Look for these Team members in the US Team Blog, helping at NREs and local events, and coaching. All are fine representatives of orienteering, and we look forward to seeing what they are capable of this year.

Congratulations to all the members of the 2025 National US Orienteering Team!

2025 US National Orienteering Team

  • Elite Squad
    • Lily Addicott – Promotion – GAOC
    • Greg Ahlswede – DVOA, Escondite (Spain)
    • Joseph Barrett – NMO
    • Evalin Brautigam – WCOC
    • Alison Campbell – DVOA, STAG (Scotland)
    • Alison Crocker – CROC
    • Thomas Curiger – OLC Kapreolo (Switzerland), OK Orion (Sweden)
    • Sydney Fisher – EMPO
    • Bridget Hall – NEOC, MNOC
    • Keegan Harkavy – NEOC
    • Thomas Laraia – MNOC
    • Anthony Riley – DVOA
    • Danny Riley – ECO
    • Ricardo Schaniel – Bussola OK (Switzerland)
  • Performance Squad
    • Diana Aleksieva – QOC
    • Eric Bone – COC
    • Jessica Colleran – COC
    • Shawn Mather – USMAOC
    • Kirsten Mayland – DVOA
    • Alex Merka – QOC, OB Říčany
    • Dylan Poe – ICO, OCIN
    • Oriana Riley – DVOA
    • Mathew Rogers – New to team! – COC
    • Collin Thompson – New to team! – USMAOC
    • Grace Zoppi – SMOC, COC
  • Junior Squad
    • Ben Brady – GrizO
    • Danny Buchholz – COC
    • Anna Campbell – TSN, NEOC
    • Ben Conley – GrizO, COC
    • Ben Cooper – COC
    • Kate deBlonk – New to team! – GrizO, NEOC
    • Ian Dunlap – OLOU
    • Mori Finlayson-Johnecheck – NEOC
    • Anna Green – New to team! – SMOC
    • Ludvig Hagwall – Järla Orientering (Sweden)
    • Sophie Howes – COC
    • Min-Jae Kuo – New to team! – NEOC
    • Greta Leonard – COC
    • Kendal O’Callaghan – New to team! – RMOC
    • David Rogers – New to team! – COC
    • Jackson Rupe – COC
    • Adalia Schafrath-Craig – New to team! – BOK
    • Paige Suhocki – DVOA
    • Samantha Walker – QOC
    • Zariah Zosel – COC, GrizO

The Lookback: 1979 World Orienteering Championships

US Team for the 1979 World Orienteering Championships in Tampere, Finland. From left to right: Pat Dunleavy, Peter Gagarin, Steve Tarry, Linda Taylor, Jim Pugh, Virginia Lehman, Mikell Platt, Sharon Crawford, Eric Weyman, Beth Skelton, Betty Anderson, Gail Gagarin.

Shortly after sending out the December, 2024 OUSA Newsletter I received an email from Jim Pugh with the 1979 WOC team photo you see above, and the suggestion to include it in an upcoming newsletter. This seemed like a great idea. With a few more photos from Jim, plus some stories and maps from Peter Gagarin, this little look back into the past was born. Enjoy this peak into the US team’s past!

–Cristina

Map of the Individual courses for WOC 1979, annotated with routes for the top men and women.

Some memories from Peter Gagarin from the World Orienteering Championships in Tampere, Finland, in 1979 –

The team was selected at Team Trials in May at Quabbin (days 1 and 3) and Mount Hermon School (day 2) in Massachusetts. Women: Sharon Crawford, Beth Skelton, Betty Andersen, Linda Taylor, Virginia Lehman. Men: Eric Weyman, Mikell Platt, Steve Tarry, Jim Pugh, Peter Gagarin. Many of us lived in the Northeast and we got together on several weekends for training before heading to Finland in late August.

It was really hard orienteering. The forests were hilly with lots of thick vegetation; the ground was very soft and hard to run on. There were just two events, individual and relay, with the maps for both drawn at 1:20,000. And yet we had some excellent results, especially from our women. Sharon Crawford was 32nd out of 69 in the individual, certainly one of our best results ever, and the women finished 10th out 17 in the relay, which I think is our best ever. Eric Weyman was our best in the men’s individual, 53rd of 78, and the men finished 14th out of 19 in the relay. [Link to results on the IOF webpage.]

The women’s relay team was really something. Beth Skelton ran the opening leg, a good run for her, and then Sharon on the second leg had her usual good run. Third leg went to Betty Andersen, though that was in doubt until the last moment – she had taken a fall in the individual, landing on a stump someplace on her ribs, and was really hurting. But she wanted to run. I put her through some sort of test that morning to see if she really could run and she passed, and so when Sharon came in, off went Betty on the anchor leg.

There was no GPS in those days, no TV from the forest. I think there were a couple of radio controls, but at the finish you just wait, as the better teams keep coming in. And then there she was, 10th, first of the English-speaking countries, ahead of Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain, plus France and Poland for good measure. It was really amazing.

I ran just the relay, first leg, not perfect but a good run. It was raining. My map case wasn’t sealed, and the map got wet, and the ink for the courses wasn’t waterproof and it started to run, but it held up just well enough to tell where my controls were. The ink kept running for quite a while after I had stopped running, so it looks almost impossible to read now. It wasn’t that bad.

Map from the men’s relay at the 1979 World Orienteering Championships.

The map for the individual shows the routes of the medalists and my map for the relay is shown. Also, just for comparison, the next map I went orienteering on back home, Estabrook Woods in Concord, Mass. Quite the difference.

Map from a local event at Estabrook Woods in Concord, MA later the same month as WOC.

National Team applications now open!

Each year, the National Team represents the United States at international orienteering events around the world. From World Cup races to the World Orienteering Championships and Junior World Orienteering Championships, our athletes compete at the highest level and showcase the best of Team USA.

Athletes selected for the National Team are grouped into three squads: Elite, Performance, and Junior. Additional athletes may also qualify mid-season through team trials or a petition process to compete in specific international championships.

Apply Now: National Team application / Selection Criteria

The National Team application deadline is January 12, 2025—don’t miss this chance to compete on the world stage and represent TeamUSA!

As previously announced, the JWOC and WOC Team Trials will take place at the BAOC event Feb 28-Mar 2. For WOC and JWOC selection criteria and more information about the National Team, please visit the National Team page.