Orienteering is one of the lesser known sports at Rindge, but that doesn’t stop the CRLS team from success. The team came away from the 2018 U.S. Junior National Championships with a varsity victory and individual achievements.The tournament took place in Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, from April 28th to 29th. Eleven CRLS students attended, eight of them placing nationally. Runners from the varsity, JV, and freshman teams competed.

Among those that attended were sisters Anika and Priya Landrigan, both in their first year of the sport. Sophomore Anika Landrigan said that joining the orienteering team this year and being able to have such quick success was an amazing experience.“It’s really fun and it’s really interesting,” she said. “It combines mental and physical activities.”

The sport consists of navigating through checkpoints called controls throughout a course, and at Junior Nationals, that course was the DCR Mount Tom Reservation. Runners had to navigate to each control with only a compass and a map—and get there as fast as possible. The CRLS varsity runners did this the fastest out of their group and won with a combined score of 542.13.

The courses ranged from three to five kilometers, but factoring in the landscape of the course can make lengths longer. Keegan Harkavy, a freshman on varsity, said that he ended up running over seven kilometers during his five kilometer course. Runners are scored according to the number of minutes it takes to get to each control, and teams are scored by combining the best individual times. The team with the lowest combined score wins.

The freshman team, consisting of Alex Rosenberg, Adeline Vidolova, and Julia Rasmussen, placed silver in their group with a score of 407.78, only .59 points above the winning team.

Individually, the freshman Falcons took home some hardware as well. Rosenberg placed gold for the boys category, Vidolova placed silver for girls, and Rasmussen placed bronze for girls.

Although orienteering is a much smaller sport in the United States than in other countries, schools at Junior Nationals came from all over the U.S. Teams from Washington State, California, Georgia, and Florida were among the many schools represented at the competition. Overall, there were about 200 student athletes at the tournament, according to Harkavy.

“Winning was cool. It was definitely fun,” Harkavy said. “Being able to win there was really nice, especially for varsity. I’m really looking forward to winning in the future and trying to make it more of a tradition, not just a one-off thing.”

This piece also appears in our May print edition.