2011 Service Award Winners
Scott Thatcher
Where do you live? Honey Brook PA My kids ride bikes to Hibernia Park.
When did you join DVOA? I believe it was 2003
How did you hear about Orienteering/Our Club? I took an Orienteering Phys Ed course at Penn State Mont Alto Campus...1977-78 It is now a SVO map. The teacher (Maxine Hunter-Grace) took us to an A meet at West Point and Quantico. Got back into Orienteering when I saw an event at Warwick - wanted to take the cub scouts but it rained...I went anyway and met Mark and Mary Frank. Took the scouts to the next one.
Is your entire family active? Almost...my wife got lost once and is now sticking to riding her horses. All four of my kids have gone with me and Dayne Corey and Chase have all been national Classic champs in their class as well as obtaining other medals.
Your occupation? I am a Certified Arborist with Bartlett Tree Experts.
Hobbies? Hunting (on some of the Orienteering maps) and Orienteering of course!
Contributions to DVOA....course setter, coach for the Coatesville area school teams, A-meet finish coordinator, and volunteer for anything.
Petr Hartman
Lives in Bethlehem, PA
Joined DVOA in 2004.
I started orienteering as a teenager in 1974 in my home town in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). I was doing it for five years. Orienteering kept me out of trouble. Twenty-five years later I saw a DVOA schedule at the park office at Hickory Run. They told me about the permanent course. I gave it a try. I really enjoyed it. Superb weather, sunny, bright in the forest. Accurate map, reading every detail. Suddenly, I noticed something dark, black, black as black can be and I see now the shape. Head, ears and second later very bright almost white snout. It looked so cartoonish. I thought it was a plywood cutout. Thinking this was the first Smokey Bear without a hat I've ever seen. I thought it was a prank. When I was a teenager and we would've seen a bear cutout at the office, we would steal it and arrange it somewhere in woods. I have no doubts about that. ...No... today's kids are too lazy for fun like that. It was the ranger who put it here to scare the real bears away. That's it, makes sense now. The parking for the Sand Spring area is only three hundred meters away. While I was contemplating like this, my eyes finally focused and I saw sparkling glitters from sun all over the "cutout." Now what? It was standing on hind legs, motionless and strictly looking at me. I discarded the idea of climbing a tree or running away. This dude was BIG! If I walked to it, we would have eyes at the same level. So I made few steps backwards, away, of course. Stopped, few more and so on. Then the bear turned his head in different direction and I interpreted it the bear was calm and I wouldn't be served for a dinner and I had proof it wasn't Smokey Bear without a hat!
I decided to give orienteering another try. A week later, same place, I found a bunch of orienteering markers. Ed Scott was organizing Score-O for some school from New York.
Occupation: HVAC service technician
Name of company: Fritch
Hobbies: Besides orienteering, not much. Definitely NOT watching TV.
Contributions to DVOA: Event director, course setting at Illick's Mill, map revision, helping as needed.
Vadim Masalkov
Where do you live? Parlin, NJ.
When did you join DVOA? June 2003.
How did you hear about orienteering/our club? I was in the middle school when I first heard about orienteering. Orienteering was one of the activities of the backpack hiking club, in which I was an active member in addition to track and field athletics. There were about 12-16 public orienteering events per year around my home town of Vilnius, Lithuania, held on Thursday nights. All this was mainly just for fun; however, map reading and terrain navigation skills were very useful for backpack hiking. After graduating from the high school, track and fields athletics took priority, and there was long break from orienteering until I rediscovered it almost a decade later. Since then, orienteering has made its way to the top of my list of outdoor and sport activities. In May 2000, I moved to the US, to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for a startup company; later that year I joined Bay Area Orienteering Club (BAOC) and participated in local orienteering events. A few years later, in May 2003, a new work opportunity led me to the East Coast – southern New Jersey—and joining Delaware Valley Orienteering Association (DVOA) was an obvious and logical move. It took long five years or so to improve my navigational skills to the level I could compete with top runners in the club. There are so many opportunities on the East Coast to improve your navigational skills by participating in many national and local orienteering events held by various clubs; these are available with reasonable travel time and distance.
Is your family active in orienteering? I'm working on that and have hopes my future family will share my love of orienteering and the outdoors.
Names of family members, Ages Of Kids: I'm still single at the moment.
Your occupation: Software Engineer / Developer.
Name of company: Clients of First Business Solutions, LLC.
Hobbies? What do you do in your spare time? My main hobby is photography. It was my father who shared his love of photography when I was just a kid. It was many years ago, when black and white pictures were widely available and popular, and we did everything ourselves, from taking pictures to printing them in the dark room with red lights. Nowadays, digital photography has taken over.
Contributions To DVOA / USOF: (Mapping, Event Director, Publicity, etc.) Over the years I became more and more involved with DVOA as an organization, debuting as Event Director at the Batona-500 A-Meet in November 2006 and directing 2010 US Team Trials held at Harriman State park in May 2010. I'm one of the usual suspects helping with e-punching at most of the local events, picking up controls, etc. Currently, I'm a President of DVOA.
Anecdotes, comments: You either run with confidence in the wrong direction or hesitate in right direction. There is always room for improvement!
