Event spotlight: CompassSport Cup Final – Holcombe

Written by PFO Club Chair Hannah Dabinett who organised this year's event. 

When we first sat down to plan the event, we had a few areas in mind, however settled on Holcombe Ranges for it’s great terrain and it’s relative little use in the past, added to this thanks to good relationships with the National Trust we could add new terrain onto the map unused before. Previous events at Holcombe came before my time, however, in the gap since out last event there in 2019, MOD policy had changed, and they now have a ‘no penetration’ rule for safety in the majority of their areas. This was only made aware to us around three months into the planning stage for the event and only a few months before the event itself. This meant that no control stakes or similar could go into the ground(!) hence a few weeks of panic/head-scratching and ideas being floated around. Thanks to Club Secretary and all-round handy man, Andy Ellis, we managed to figure out a way to craft self-standing controls using the bases of traffic cones – we just now needed to make more than 50 of them and get them all onto the moor for the event!

As the weeks passed, it seemed we kept getting more curveballs about access/parking and anything else, but as always, we figured a way around them with a bit of creativity and through our positive relationships with the local community. As a club we knew we wanted to make the event as enjoyable and stress-free for everybody, and so we worked until the very start of the event to ensure this was the case. This meant things such as members clearing out and sweeping the indoor hub for people to use for warmth/food/drink, cutting back vegetation and having a very soggy stamping hour so that there was enough usable space for a maze, spending around 10 hours the day before clearing, prepping and setting up, and a good few hours setting up the sound system both around the run in and also the indoor hub. Many of our members regularly go to the City Race Euro Tour races on the continent and say how music help builds an atmosphere as well as commentary and so we purchased a license to play music at the event, spent a few hours on a playlist and roped in a confident club member to do the commentary on the day who was an ex Primary School Teacher and so knows how to talk for hours at a time!

As those who competed would know, we were battered by stormy winds and rain for the first few hours of the event, only to finish in a brilliant summer’s day. This meant that many of our members and especially our Start Teams (both low and high) were exposed to some horrendous weather for hours, however I’m so proud to hear that they met people with a smile, welcoming competitors - who were very complementary about the start teams and their warmth despite what they were stood in! Thankfully the weather passed around lunchtime to ensure that people could get dry and warm in time to be cheering the rest of the participants in after their courses, which were planned in the minutest detail by Judith Wood and John Britton. Both spent untold hours for months on the moor, with many spreadsheets, notes and made a formidable team together we would say. Immediately after the event they both then went up to Glen Artney to start putting out the controls for The OMM – which I and many other PFO members will also be volunteering at as the Start Team – something the club have done for many years.

As we always say – we are not the biggest club, however, we truly are a club where everybody knows each other, genuinely gets along and enjoys being part of it. We want people to come to a PFO event feeling welcomed and having enjoyed it, and we hope all went home on Sunday feeling that. There were many a stressful moment, many emails, meetings, WhatsApp’s, a lot of head scratching, not to mention the thousands of volunteer hours that went into the event, and I think we pulled it off in true PFO style, a bit different, but always with a smile.

The event was a cumulation of hard work from a small but dedicated membership and shows the fantastic camaraderie and ethos we have in the club and one that I proud to be Chair of.