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Diablo Valley College

Event #3 of 7 in the BAOC 2025 Summer Series

Date: (Sat.) Jul. 12, 2025
Location: Pleasant Hill, CA
Event Director: - 510.407.1876
Course Setter: Matej Šebo
Type: C; This is the third event of the 2025 Summer Series. Everyone is welcome, including beginners and non-members, with free beginner instruction to explain orienteering. Participation in other Summer Series events is not required. (DATE WAS 7/6)

Course Setter's Notes

By Matej Šebo

Diablo Valley College might be the most intricate Sprint map in the Bay Area. Twisting corridors, an extremely confusing multilevel area, and complex building geometry combine to create a literal maze in which the best route choices are rarely obvious at first (or second [or third]) glance.

Map

The map will be printed at 1:3,000 for all the courses for legibility. The contour interval is a non-standard 10 feet. Except for the contour interval, the map conforms to ISprSOM 2019-2 (8.0MB PDF), including the multilevel addendum (2.6MB PDF). See my notes for the 2022 U.C. Berkeley event for some photos of how multilevel areas can be interpreted by a mapper. If you're a mapping nerd like me, you may also find the 2025 IOF Sprint mapping recommendations (6.2MB PDF) fascinating; I've tried to follow my own interpretation of them for this event.

The map has been thoroughly revised and updated. Construction should be accurately represented, unless it shifts in the two days prior to the event.

Courses

All the courses are slightly shorter compared to other Summer Series events. For the Short and Long (advanced) courses, the terrain should more than make up for this.

Beginner is a straightforward course suitable for anyone starting out orienteering. It's comparable to a White or Yellow course. You will not need to understand multilevel symbols to complete this course.

The Short (advanced) course is set to M/F-21E Sprint standards (i.e., expected winning time of 12–15 minutes for the best U.S. runners). It's fast, technical, and makes rich use of the multilevel areas on the DVC map. Route choice and efficiency — not raw running speed — will determine the winner, and many optimal route choices are not obvious. This is a great course to run if you're trying to test your Sprint navigation on truly world-class terrain.

The Long (advanced) course is a more route-choice-focused Sprint-style course. It intersperses highly-technical, multilevel navigation with longer route choices, forcing you to think about a full plan for each leg well ahead of committing to a choice. Be judicious with when to speed up!! This terrain can be deceptively fast at times, leading to easy overshoots.

There is no significant overlap between the Short and Long courses.

The final course statistics are as follows:

    Course      Length    Climb  Controls
    Beginner    1.8 km     25 m     16  
    Short       3.0 km     50 m     21  
    Long        5.6 km     85 m     28

Course lengths are measured along the shortest legitimate route — this is particularly relevant at DVC, one of our most mazy and intricate terrains.

No water will be provided on these courses.

The Long course will use two map sheets in one map case, and have a map-flip halfway, at control #14 (Start–#14 will be on one side, #14–Finish on the other). The Beginner and Short courses will have a one-sided map (i.e., no map-flip).

It is extremely important to familiarize yourself with Sprint symbols (namely ISprSOM 2019-2) before this event, especially if you are competing on the Short or Long course. Many symbols are marked as impassable, and crossing them will lead to disqualification. See the map notes above for more information. (A one-page presentation of the Sprint map symbols is available here (600KB PDF).)

I would also like to remind all runners to carefully read the map when approaching a control. Remember that not all of the controls you see will be on your course, so remember to check each control code before punching.