2025 WOC & JWOC Team Trials Announced

The National Team Executive Steering Committee is pleased to announce that the WOC and JWOC Team Trials will be held together at BAOC’s event next March 1-2. The weekend events will take place in Calero County Park, with a middle race on Saturday and a classic on Sunday. There will also be a sprint on Friday afternoon, with the location pending permit approval. The sprint will likely be an NRE; the weekend events definitely will be (and will also serve as the Western State Championships). There will not be a European trials event for WOC this year.

Petitions will be accepted for both WOC and JWOC teams, but Trials attendance is preferred.
For WOC, the Saturday and Sunday events will count for the WOC Team selection. For JWOC, all three events will count for JWOC selection.

While the event is earlier than usual, we hope that knowing well in advance will allow athletes to train adequately. For the northern tier athletes this can be difficult if it’s a snowy winter; we understand but believe that our top athletes are up to the challenge.

More details will follow. The website doesn’t have a lot of information yet, but BAOC is looking forward to hosting the Team athletes and others who want to try out for one of the teams or be there to support them. The concurrent Western States Champs will include all courses and classes for the non-Trialers.

Please see the JWOC 2025 Selection Criteria for details on how the JWOC team will be selected. The 2025 WOC Selection Criteria will be published in early December.

November OUSA Forum: Sprints!

Please join us this Tuesday, November 26th, for a presentation and discussion about sprints orienteering. Senior team member Alison Campbell shares her views on how sprints differ in the USA to Europe, how to train for sprint races, and more! After the presentation there will be time for questions and discussion.

This presentation will be great for competitive athletes, course designers, and anyone interested in learning more about this fast and furious orienteering format!

This session is now available on YouTube.

US Ski-Orienteering Team Selected

The US Ski-Orienteering Team’s Executive Steering Committee is pleased to announce that it has selected the team for the 2025 World Cup based on past results and potential. This is a rebuilding year for the US Ski-O Team so only two people have been selected to the senior team. This year the World Cup races will take place in Norway, Germany, and Finland.  The US Senior team has opted not to race in the races in Finland this year.  

Chris Burnham

Chris Burnham of Stowe, VT was named to the team. Chris comes from a strong skiing background including an impressive 2nd place finish in the American Brikebeiner classic ski marathon in 2022. He is back to international ski-orienteering after taking a two-year break to focus on setting back-country distance skiing records like last year setting the record for the fastest time skiing the largely ungroomed 300km Catamount Trail in Vermont in 6 days, 10 hours, and 31 minutes. When not skiing, Chris is an underwater robot programmer. 

Adrian Owens

Chris will be joined on the team by veteran ski-orienteer Adrian Owens of Craftsbury, VT who also orienteers for Green Mountain Orienteering Club. Adrian was the US’s top performer on the US senior team last year at World Championships. Adrian hopes to use his many years of ski-orienteering experience to ensure that he has clean races. Adrian, who is an outdoor enthusiast and has great concern for the environment even living in an environmentally-friendly home, excels at producing consistent stable race results even in difficult conditions and having good endurance.  

For additional information contact: Carl Fey, US Ski-O Team Coach at: carlffey@nullgmail.com 

US Youth Ski-Orienteering Team Selected for 2025 European Championships in Finland

The US Ski-Orienteering Executive Steering Committee is pleased to announce that the US Team for the 2025 European Youth Ski-Orienteering Championships has been selected based on past results and perceived potential. The races will take place March 19-23, 2025 in Posio, Finland well north of the Artic Circle. One must be 17 or under to race in European Championships and since there are no World Championships for youth, this is the major international ski-orienteering event for people under the age of 17 world-wide. The 2025 team to European Youth Ski-Orienteering Championships consists of: Erik Fey (16 years old), Mark Fey (13 soon 14), Liam Browne (16), and Euell Browne (14 soon 15). There is great excitement in the US ski-orienteering community since most expect that this team will be the strongest youth ski-orienteering boys team that the US has ever fielded.  

Erik Fey at the 2024 Open Nordic Ski-Orienteering Championships in Estonia

Erik Fey will be looking to improve upon his 14th place at European Championships last year.  He will be joined on the team this year for the first time by his younger brother Mark Fey who hopes to have solid results. Erik and Mark both have extensive ski-orienteering experience and currently live in Oslo, Norway and do orienteering and ski-orienteering for the strong Nydalens Skiklub which has other strong ski-orienteers as members such as 2024 Middle Distance and Sprint Relay World Champion in Ski-Orienteering Anna Ulvensøen. They also actively do cross-country skiing for Hemming IL. Their US club is Rochester Orienteering Club.  

This year the US team is full of brothers and the Feys will be joined for the first time by Liam Browne and Euell Browne of Kalispell, MT. Liam is a strong experienced cross-country skier who qualified to be part of the Intermountain Division Ski Team to US Junior Nationals in cross-country skiing last year. He and his younger brother Euell are members of the Glacier Nordic Comp Pro Team which ensures they have extensive regular training year-round. Great lovers of outdoor endurance sports, Liam and Euell were attracted to ski-orienteering thanks to a ski-orienteering race organized in nearby Missoula, MT by Boris Granovskiy and other members of Grizzly Orienteering three years ago. Since then, they have been excited about orienteering and ski-orienteering and rapidly gaining experience and strong results mostly in their area. They are now interested in taking their ski-orienteering racing to the next level and look forward to seeing how they stack up internationally. Look out world, here they come! They are now members of the relatively new, but rapidly becoming quite strong, Grizzly Orienteering Club which would probably win the award for the most improved orienteering club in the US in the last several years if there was such an award.  

Liam Browne at the 2024 US Cross-Country Skiing Junior Nationals

Unfortunately, it is expensive to travel to and race at European Championships. As such, donations to support our increasingly strong US Youth Ski-Orienteering Team would be greatly appreciated and can be made online at orienteeringusa.org. Please note that your donation is for the US Youth Ski-Orienteering Team if it is. For more information about the US Ski-Orienteering Team please contact Team Coach Carl Fey at carlffey@nullgmail.com.

OUSA Welcomes New Communications Manager

Orienteering USA is pleased to announce that Cristina Luis is stepping into the role of National Communications Manager. Cristina will manage content for OUSA’s website, social media channels, and email newsletter. The email addresses  webmaster@nullorienteeringusa.org and newsletter@nullorienteeringusa.org have now transitioned to Cristina.

We are excited to have Cristina on board and look forward to working with her.

We also express thanks to those volunteers who jumped in to handle these duties when Clinton Morse passed away. Barb Bryant took the lead in filling in for Clinton. Evalin Brautigam has been taking lots of photos and generating social media content and Matt Craig (technology VP) and Jordan Laughlin (Google admin) have provided tech support.

Many thanks to these volunteers and anyone else who may have helped Barb and welcome to Cristina!

2024 Silva Award Winner: Clinton Morse

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”

Clinton Morse

Photo by Nadim Ahmed

Orienteering USA is deeply saddened to announce the sudden passing of Clinton Morse, National Communications Manager, on July 12, 2024. He suffered a fatal heart attack after his morning run. Clinton was 62 years old. His untimely loss leaves a big gap in our hearts, and will be felt throughout the orienteering community. We offer our deepest condolences to his wife Ellen, his children Anna, Hayden, and Jackson, as well as to his extended family and friends.  

He was a wonderful human being who also did a great deal of OUSA publicity, including the monthly newsletter, Year In Review, social media posts, and anything else he was asked. Clinton is most famous as the guy with the camera who was running around like a maniac near the O-meet finish line to take your photo.  You couldn’t breathe, but suddenly you wanted to try to look good in the shot. He had a gift for highlighting our best orienteering selves, whether that was in words or in images.

Clint was a graduate of Cornell, and most of his career was in horticulture.  He was the manager of the greenhouse and botanical collections at the University of Connecticut until his retirement in 2020.  Besides his official OUSA role, Clinton was an enthusiastic orienteer, trail runner, and Rogainer, and was a mapper as well as a frequent course setter. Most recently, he single-handedly produced the Team Trials for the US World Orienteering Championship team at UConn, from maps to courses to results.

Photo by Nadim Ahmed

Nominations sought for 2024 Silva & Golden Service Awards

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Orienteering USA will be held virtually on Tuesday, September 24th, 2024. One of the highlights of the AGM is the announcement of the annual Silva & Golden Service awards to recognize individuals who have contributed to our sport both at the national and club level. Nominations are now being accepted for both of these prestigious awards and are due by Sunday, September 15th.

Photo of 2023 Silva Award winner Andrea Schneider at NAOC 2023 in California.

Applications open for 52nd CISM World Military Orienteering Team

The 52nd CISM World Military Orienteering Championships (the other WMOC) will take place from October 16-22, 2024 in Cartagena, Spain. This competition is open to active duty personnel from all branches of the military.

Services are now accepting applications for the US Team to compete in the CISM Orienteering Championships. Please complete your applications by July 31st, 2024. 

Reach out to your respective service sports office for more information on how to apply through their systems/processes.  Even though orienteering is not listed on many of the service sport calendars or websites, please apply if you are interested and available.  The services will send your applications to Armed Forces Sports and to the selection committee.

Information on the event:

Links below to the service sports sites and details on applying:

Please also email Maiya Anderson with your expression of interest so that she may reach out to the service sport office if she don’t receive your application through official channels.

MAIYA ANDERSON, Col, USAF, BSC, PhD 
Permanent Professor & Head, Physical Education Department
Director, AF Combatives Program, Center of Excellence
US Air Force Academy, CO
(719)333-9295/2818, DSN 333-9295/2818
Maiya.Anderson@nullafacademy.af.edu