HOC Juniors took 2nd place in the Yvette Baker Shield final last Sunday. Steve Blackmore reports:

A hardy team of 8 juniors led by junior captain Craig made the long journey down to Capite Wood, East Sussex for the Yvette Baker Shield final.  Seb (junior club statistician) had crunched the numbers and was confident of a podium finish…

Capite Wood was a good venue for the final – mostly runnable woods with the bracken well marked (especially the 8 foot tall stuff!) and a fun atmosphere provided by music and jokes from the SO DJ.  Who knew there was a song about orienteering – we all certainly did after about 8 plays of it!

With two runners in each age class, we were well represented.  The Fox twins, Jake and Danny had storming runs with 2nd and 4th place finishes respectively – Jake was back before most of the rest of the team had started!

The Orange was a testy little course but Joey and Gina battled well and both finished with highly respectable 4th places.

We naturally had high hopes for Seb and Sam in the light green race after their strong performances at recent JK and majors and both delivered. Sam had a lung-busting run for third and despite dropping 6 minutes on an early control, Seb refocused with a strong finish to come in 2nd.

That left our two oldest runners in green and again, the lads really came through with impressive performances. Craig smashed his way around the course for a strong second whilst Peter took any technical challenges in his stride for an impressive 3rd place.

With the top 5 to count, our record of 3 second places and 2 thirds left us in a strong position. Unfortunately NGOC just pipped us though with some wins in the younger age classes. However second was a great result and one that the team enjoyed.

One final point – the YBT rules allow runners to run down to a lower age class if they’ve not hit championship times at majors. This meant there were a lot of M18s and W18s running down as far as Orange.  Given the quality of our juniors, this wasn’t a real option for us and everyone ran their true age classes. This makes the performances all the more impressive!

Full results and report from hosts Southdowns Orienteers, including a link to event photos, here.