Sport in Scotland. Curling:

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Dominick Fletcher
6 years ago
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1 Sport in Scotland During the weeks of BBC School News Report our six intrepid S2 elective students at Elgin High School decided they d like to focus on sport in Scotland. Why? Because our national teams don t tend to be so successful these days. It s been twenty years since Scotland football team qualified for an international tournament after all! But it s not just a question of football: there are other sports that Scotland participates in with mixed success, and there is plenty of sport going on in Scotland. So what s working and what s not working? What s being done in Moray to encourage young people into sport and to push them to the professional level? These are some of the questions our junior journalists aimed to address in our eight-week elective. Could their discoveries hold the key to Scotland s sporting success? I guess we will have to wait and see. Curling: We started off by thinking about sport that is played locally. One sport that Scotland has been relatively successful with in the last fifteen years or so is Curling. It wasn t long before we realised we actually had successful international curler in our midst in fact, a next door neighbour to one of our reporters! Despite his hectic schedule preparing himself for the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Paralympic curler Gregor Ewan took the time to visit us and tell us a little bit about curling and what sport means to him. What better way to take the investigation further than by seeking his expertise? Gregor wasn t always a curler: he got addicted to curling in 2008, a year after he was confined to a wheelchair

2 Gregor Ewan told us the best thing about curling was meeting new friends from all over Scotland and the world. Most of the Scottish curling team train in Stirling, so he regularly commutes there and back. He also told us about his gruelling training regime. He said that he trains for 12 hours a week in the gym using weights and hand cycling; he said that he had to get his heart beat up to 150 bpm. Gregor told us about some of his more difficult games but the one he found most difficult was in Sochi 2014 when he got beat by Russia. Curling also doesn t come without its risks though.when you come off the ice in a wheel chair you need a ramp. During the world champion ships his ramp collapsed and his chair flew off to the right he was out injured for two weeks. Bodybuilding After Gregor, we thought about how we could find out some more about sport locally, so we wracked our brains and tried to think a little bit out of the box. And we arrived at bodybuilding. Bet it wasn t the first sport you thought of right? Doesn t matter we found out some fascinating things about the world of bodybuilding. It may not be the most popular of sports in Scotland, but as Robbie told us, it s an up and coming activity that has been growing in recent years! To tell us a bit more about this fledgling sport, we called in a favour from another local boy Robbie Collie, amateur bodybuilder, police officer and former pupil of Elgin High School. His hobby of bodybuilding is now becoming something more serious as he regularly competes in competitions, even bringing along some of his

3 trophies. He told us about what got him into body building and what motivated him to stay fit and eat well in order to build muscle. You might not know about all the different categories in body building like juniors, female and male? When you are on stage you do a 60 second routine with music and are judged on the poses you pull and the muscles on show. It s not something you can make up as you go along though. Being a bodybuilder requires A LOT of dedication and is essentially a lifestyle choice. Every meal has to be planned out in meticulous detail so you can have the best shot at the competitions. Some people may assume that to get a bodybuilder s physique many competitors may want to cheat and take drugs to build their muscles up. Wrong, says Robbie. Although any sport can have drug issues, bodybuilders are rigorously tested for drugs to ensure there aren t any cheats out there. Football: This is definitely the most obvious choice of sport. Everyone knows football is one of the most popular of sports in Scotland. Yet, our national team haven t been hot for the last twenty years. Is it because we prefer to be spectators rather than play? Or is there something wrong with Scottish football at grass roots level? To investigate further, we visited Borough Briggs, the home stadium of Elgin City football club. Robbie Hope, manager of the Football Academy, was able to tell us quite a bit about their youth programme and what Elgin City does for football in Scotland.

4 We discovered that our local team has an extensive football programme running for 7-19 year olds so they can get into football. Funding for the football academy comes directly from the SFA, although funding depends on the success of the Scotland team (therefore it keeps declining). Elgin City do try to identify all the players that have potential so they get the best out of football. They give them the best opportunities for the future. Another source of information was Miss Grant our deputy head teacher. Miss Grant had a very successful career in football and was capped for Scotland 99 times. Miss Grant is also a local lass and former Elgin High School pupil, so if anyone is able to comment on sport in Moray and Scotland, Miss Grant is most definitely qualified! After starting playing football in p4, she joined her first team 1 she joined Rose Hill Ladies at the age of 12. She then played a game and took an attacking position of left wing and impressed two scouts and managers. During her career she played the following teams Rose Hill Ladies, East End Ladies, Cumbernauld Ladies, ibv, Arsenal, FFC, Frankfurt, Karmanic Ladies, hibbs ladies, FKB, Celtic and Hamilton. Later in her career she suffered a massive injury which put her out for 8 months. This made her game suffer, but after the injury she did recover with some success. Her favourite team was Frankfurt and she won the golden ball award during her time. So what did Miss Grant think could be done to improve Scottish sporting outcomes? Discipline and determination of course! Now, where have we heard that before?

5 So where does this leave us? Well, I don t think we have quite cracked the problem, but we have had fun trying. We ve found that there is quite a lot of sporting success locally, even though it might not seem there is at first glance. There s also a lot of different sporting activities happening locally (even more unusual ones), and some of our local boys/girls have made it big internationally. We have also got a trip to the BBC Studio in Inverness happening next week, so we could maybe learn a few reporting tricks there. Maybe in a few years time we will be writing about some more Moray national sporting heroes watch this space.

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