Orienteering USA

Clinton Morse is posthumously awarded the 2024 Silva Award for his decades of service to the sport of orienteering in and around Connecticut and especially across the nation. Clinton’s untimely death in July has been a sad and terrible loss for his family, friends, and the local and national orienteering community. He was always eager to take on significant projects and assist others with thorny issues, especially technical ones. His absence is leaving a gaping hole for so many.

Photo by Nadim Ahmed

Clinton became active in orienteering and WCOC over 20 years ago. He did the field work and drafting for several local maps including Gay City State Park, Crandalls Town Park, Coops Sawmill, and the University of Connecticut (UConn) sprint map. He was currently working on completely re-mapping and expanding Brooksvale Park near New Haven, CT. He had plans to help the club revise some of their other outdated maps. He was the manager of much of WCOC’s event equipment and set courses for numerous local events, including a Billygoat. He also organized national events himself. In the spring of 2024, he single-handedly put on the Sprint Team Trials for the US World Orienteering Championship team at UConn—an event that had Clinton as mapmaker, course setter, registrar, and meet director. Clinton was living proof that one person can put on a national event, especially with some helpers on event day. It was a resounding success.

Clinton has been the Orienteering USA Communications Manager since he retired from UConn in 2020. In that capacity, he was the OUSA webmaster, published the monthly OUSA online newsletter, published the much-heralded Year in Review, and coordinated social media for the organization. His work has raised the bar for OUSA’s media and communications and set wonderful precedents for those who will come after him. He traveled to a majority of the National Ranking Events held during his tenure to take photographs, write up event summaries, and participate in the competitions. He drove countless miles (actually not countless, he did track them) in his converted camping truck to attend these venues, often crossing the country in only a few days to get to an important event. When he attended these competitions, he often helped do whatever he was asked to help with. For example, at the World Games in Birmingham in 2022, he assisted with equipment setup and doing whatever people needed done even as he was photographing and managing the publicity for the orienteering events.

In his capacity as OUSA Communication’s Manager, Clinton Morse was best known as a photographer and a dedicated and passionate advocate for all clubs hosting events and all orienteers finishing them. He quickly got his own course out of the way to photograph others finishing. Clinton’s tasking was only to provide general content for OUSA’s social media, but his passion for photography and his fellow orienteers led him to create a tremendous photo library expressing the immense joys of our sport.

Clinton stepped into a role that was defined on paper as a communication role, and made it his own, with an infectious knack for sharing the best of our community and our sport, in photos, video, newsletters, and simply sharing ideas with others. In that role, Clinton also became a valuable sounding board for anyone in any club that was facing communication challenges and needed some wisdom and perspective.

Clinton defined what it means to be a community builder. Always happy to connect with other orienteers about their events—past, present, and future—he not only helped promote those events but also drove across the country many times to be a part of national events all over the country. There are stories of Clint, as a spontaneous volunteer, going out on snowshoes in negative 14 degree weather at the 2023 US Ski-O Championships to take epic photographs of activity that would otherwise have been missed in the cold.

When the year was over, he produced an annual retrospect of the year’s top events and promotions for the coming year. These have become keepsakes for many OUSA members, reminding them of what US orienteering is at its best. They are now also a reminder that Clinton Morse represented the best of orienteering in everything he did.

Clinton was a fixture at most recent big NREs for his work as OUSA’s Communications Manager, taking photos of orienteers in-the-woods and finishing. But at many NRE’s, he volunteered for various duties well beyond his official duties. Because he needed to pre-run courses, he reduced the hosting club’s need to find prerunners to turn on the SportIdent SIAC-enabled units. He set up his truck-camper for use as download, using an awning that was part of the camper conversion. He volunteered on many occasions to help pull controls after a day’s events.

Clinton Morse exemplified the true spirit of orienteering. His enthusiasm, dedication, and passion, and friendship can never be replaced and he will be sorely missed.

Also see 89 tributes and memories on AttackPoint discussion thread “Clinton Morse”