Arlington High School’s AFJROTC Orienteering team recently traveled to Junior Nationals in Bridgeport, Texas, at the Sid Richardson Scout Ranch, placing 4th in the overall competition.
The team consisting of Josiah Christoffersen, Levi Christoffersen, Eric Garberding, Devon Gilstrap, Isabelle Kovarik, Mike Mcdonald, Matthew Pollick, and Bryce Southern left on March 20, 2025, accompanied by their coach Major Mike Blue. The Orienteering team is one of many AFJROTC’s competition teams, and they specialize in navigating through the woods while timed, and use a map to make it through the forest without modern tools such as cell phones, or a GPS. Teams came from all over to compete like California, Florida, Texas, Canada, and Alaska.The AHS team were given the opportunity to showcase skills they’ve been building up since the beginning of the year.
“It’s a competition team that is internationally recognized, and we are under the orienteering USA. And then we have a club that we work with here called the cascade orienteering club,” Blue said. “It’s basically students who are interested in being outside and want the challenge of getting a detailed map. It’s a topographical map that has all the features like hills, tree stumps, buildings, all that kind of stuff.”
The team climbed the obstacle of figuring out how to get to nationals, including training and raising money for the travel costs.
“We wanted to go to Nationals, so we started fundraising at the beginning of this year, and we also started doing a lot more training to make sure that we would be prepared and ready for junior nationals in Texas,” Mike Mcdonald (‘27) said.
While some may imagine this experience to be intimidating, people like Isabelle Kovarik (‘25) find this untrue. Kovarik, the only woman on the team, navigates the unfamiliar terrain head-first.
“It’s never been scary. You sometimes get a little bit disoriented, but you always have your compass and your map with you, so you can generally find, like, a marker and figure out where you are, so as you’re never, like, lost or really in a dangerous situation,” Kovarik said.
The students took away skills from the unique experience, and plans to continue learning from challenges they faced.
“I’ve learned a lot about navigation and how to tell where things are without using a compass and using the sun and your surroundings,” Mcdonald said. “It’s just a really fun experience that I’ve done for two years now.”
At the end of the competition, the team received acknowledgement for their dedication, particularly Kovarik.
“The Junior ROTC teams in the JV category, took fourth place in the nation. And then our team captain, she’s the only girl on the team. She placed first place in Air Force JROTC teams, and second place in all flavors of JROTC,” Blue said.
Overall, they had the chance to see the areas that need improvement, and already have installed a plan to do even better next year.
“So we’re gonna actually go out and try and schedule practices during the season so that we can improve on the things that we noticed we weren’t doing as well as we saw other teams doing,” Blue said. “Because it’s like, if you ever played basketball, soccer, tennis, or whatever, if you stopped for a while, six months, you lose your skills right? So we’re gonna maybe do a couple little things throughout the whole year instead of just in the winter.”
