Matthew navigates his way to Sweden
Hillcrest High School has chosen Matthew Siepman as its SPAR Star of the Month.
THIS month’s Hillcrest High School’s SPAR Star of the Month is Matthew Siepman, a member of the South African Orienteering Federation (SAOF) youth squad, who was selected as an athlete with elite potential, to attend the 2016 Youth tour to Sweden from 21 April to 2 May.
Orienteering is a competitive international sport that combines racing with navigation. It is a timed race in which individual participants use a specially created, highly detailed map to select routes and navigate through diverse and often unfamiliar terrain and visit control points in sequence.
Matthew (19) loves the outdoors and unusual sports like adventure racing and orienteering. He said he particularly liked orienteering as it requires not only physical fitness but mental alertness and skill.
“It is a fairly new sport in South Africa and in particularly in KwaZulu-Natal. I have been doing orienteering for about four years now and have always been first in my age category,” he said.
He was invited by the SA Orienteering Club to do a mapping course and felt it really benefitted him. He raced in the SA Orienteering Championships last year for the first time and came third.
This year, Matthew was selected to be part of the SA Orienteering Youth Squad and will be travelling to Stockholm, Sweden on an advanced training camp and to compete.
“It is such a privilege to represent my school, my province and South Africa. I am the only one going from KwaZulu-Natal. This will be a wonderful opportunity to learn more about advanced orienteering. The opportunity to represent South Africa and train in another county is going to be an awesome experience and will give me the opportunity to tell people about our beautiful county,” added Matthew.
