When Rhona Martin led her Scottish team to a gold medal for Great Britain at the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in 2002 the sport of curling was celebrated across Britain.

Since that glorious night in Utah the British team have not repeated Martin’s feat despite enjoying a string of successes as European and World level, but a new group of athletes are coming through in the sport with aspirations to do just that.

Cate Brewster is the Assistant High Performance Curling Coach at the Scottish Institute of Sport and, herself a former Scottish ‘mixed’ champion twice, has helped to establish a programme that is bringing through the next generation of female curlers.

“Rhona's retirement from competition left a hole that we needed to fill. We have to look to the future, as there will come a point when the current group of players will say that they've had enough,” she explained

“After the Olympic Games in 2006 we discussed what was going to happen and couldn't see anyone coming through at the right level. So we took five girls, all top end players, all skips apart from one, from four different teams.”

The thinking behind the idea, a one-year program called the Olympic Futures squad, was to send the curlers back to their clubs at the end with new skills and to help to broaden the knowledge base of more clubs.

"I took them to their first competition in Oslo where they played against people like [Canada's] Shannon Kleibrink, an Olympic bronze medallist, as well as World Championship medallists and national champions. That put them slap bang into world-class play.

"We could see how they were thinking, give them pointers and add in the element of professionalism that we need in this sport.”

The five girls in the initial program also benefited from some intensive coaching in Canada before returning to their own clubs. The rewards of the program were felt almost immediately as two of the athletes became part of the team that won gold at the World Junior Championships in Eveleth, Minnesota.

And while the one-year Olympic Futures programme is over, the Institute is now helping eight young women with medal aspirations.

"We have broadened their education. They were getting the basics from the clubs and the governing body but we look at the technique and take it on a stage further. We simplify things, look at specific areas that need tightening up and work on coping strategies,” said Brewster.

“I want each and every one of them to be able to tell me what the stones are doing on the ice. If they can feed it back to me then they can feed the same information back to their skip. We are bringing an element of professionalism to their play.”

One athlete who has benefited not only from the technical coach but the lifestyle advice provided by the institute is Sarah Reid, part of the gold medal-winning team in Minnesota, who is also studying nursing.

Her workload was balanced with training and competing to allow her to do both successfully.

The 22-year-old from Beith in Ayrshire was the skip of the Scotland team that stole the gold medal from Canada in a nail-biting final in Eveleth, but she did not have to compromise on her studies to achieve that result.

Brewster says this is an element that has been missing from the sport in the past and that hopefully the athletes coming through now will have unprecedented levels of support to keep Scotland at the forefront of the sport.

“As a coach I can see athletes who've had to overcome problems getting there and it can be difficult balancing working and training. A lot of people have said to me ‘if only we'd had it when we were young’.”

AW

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