Keeping a competitive edge over rival teams at the top end of high performance sport is a tricky business.

When a team does well, opposing sides follow their lead and each new innovation soon becomes the norm. After the success of the wheelchair curling squad winning silver at the Olympic Games in Turin 2006, and the bronze they won in the World Championships in 2007, the sportscotland institute of sport wheelchair curling coach, Tom Pendreigh, identified a need to tackle the increasing challenge of competitive advantage with other international teams who had also formed dedicated teams of experts around them.

At this point, Tom began discussion with Senior Sports Psychologist John Marchant, and Head of Sports Science and Innovation, Malcolm Fairweather on ways in which they could gain an edge over their competitors.

They agreed with the players that the best way to do this was to closely assess the stone delivery position in wheelchair curling. Wheelchair curlers traditionally throw from up front at the hog line, closer to the target. Able bodied players push off from the hack, a position that is further away from the target, but allows them to deliver a wider repertoire of delivery solutions. The idea was to move the wheelchair curlers from the hog line, to the back of the rink near the hack. Taking this new delivery option into the wheelchair game would theoretically give the team an opportunity to develop their playing choices by assessing where best shots could be made from.

With two years practice and game development opportunity ahead, the players and Tom took on the associated challenges and set to work immediately. The radical decision to play from the back (as well as the front) meant the wheelchair curling team had to learn an entirely different set of skills in order to be able to play stones with the same power and accuracy as before. Physiotherapist Kirsty Sinclair and Strength and Conditioning Coach Paul Coyle were drafted in to profile the athletes’ physical condition and to work with them specifically on strength and muscle development.

The challenges associated with the development of new skills include short term performance dips experienced by the squad as they adapted to the technical changes in their game. The predicted dip in performance was fundamentally woven into the periodisation process and once the athletes were technically comfortable with their new position, their performance began to gradually improve along with their confidence.

In conjunction with their physical improvement, it was important to also work on the team’s psychological adaptation especially taking into consideration the effect of the performance dip on the athletes’ mental attitude to their own performance. John Marchant worked with psychometric profiles for each member of the squad to support the changes they faced. This personality type indicator tool helped to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses that each individual athlete had to contend with. John then collated the information and shared it with the group to aid and improve team cohesion and dynamics on ice. Although changing the mindset of established athletes wasn’t easy, the profiling facilitated a greater understanding of how they could work as a unit to maximise their potential and ensured that the athletes’ maintained confidence and belief in their long term goal, which is Vancouver 2010.

The coaches and experts working with the wheelchair curlers throughout this project have begun to see their hard work paying off, with a team who are more unified, happier and more performance focused than ever before. The goal for the team is that when they head to Vancouver in March that they transfer their innovation mission into new success.