Junior camp a perfect warm-up to Oceania Orienteering Championships

Running an annual junior training camp before the Oceania Orienteering Championships are held around the state, Nankervis said strong national results have helped grow the sport.

"It's always hard in Australia, there's so many sports, so many different things people can do but I think orienteering presents quite a good opportunity to work the body in it as well as be engaging from a mental point of view," he said.

"We've had lots of these camps in the last few years and some really good junior results on a world stage and I think that helps inspire the next level through.

"Hopefully this can be a good jumping board to these athletes but also a bit of an advertisement of what orienteering is and we can get some more people involved and get them into the great community that we have."

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The Oceania Sprint Championships are at Newnham's UTAS campus on Saturday before competitors converge on St Helens, with a field of 550 orienteers expected to take part.

"Tasmania has hosted some really big events in the past and they do a good job of putting them on and it's always awesome," Launceston-born Nankervis said.

"I've had the opportunity, and it's been great for me to race on home terrain, a few times, but it's always so special.

"It's a great opportunity for the orienteering community in Tasmania to put on the event and a great opportunity for people from all over Australia and New Zealand to come and visit Tasmania - it's such a great place to be."

One of the international orienteers taking part in the championships is 19-year-old Rachel Duckworth from the United Kingdom.

A junior world championships representative, Duckworth arrived in Tasmania last week and imparted her wisdom at the training camp's opening day at the Windsor Park precinct on Tuesday.

"I've obviously gone through the grassroots and through the development in the UK, so it's really cool to see it on the other side of the world," she said.

"When Brodie gave me the opportunity to plan and help organise the camp, I thought it would be a really cool thing to do and it's really interesting to see how their system works compared to the GB system."

Duckworth will be taking part in the Oceania Championships as an under-20 competitor despite a less-than-ideal lead-up to the event.

I'm so excited because it's totally new - new forests and stuff like that.

"My prep, like it's not great, because the season at home is like centered towards our summer, which is June, July so I'm in my midst of long-distance training at the minute.

"I'm probably not the best prepared that I could be but I'm still fit and excited to race."

Nankervis encouraged those interested in learning about orienteering to come and watch Saturday's sprint championships on Saturday.

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