Olympic gold medallist Hailey Duff will head into this week’s first event of 2023 – the Perth Masters (4-7 January) - with revitalised confidence after ringing out her momentous old year in style.
The 25-year-old enjoyed a breakthrough season in 2021/22, forcing her way into the line-up which brought victories for Scotland and Great Britain at the European Championships and then those Olympics in Beijing.
However, she admits that after coming through the nine player squad system which produced that winning team, making yet another fresh start was not without difficulty.
The victory she enjoyed at the Euro Super Series Mixed Doubles event in partnering world Mixed Doubles champion Bobby Lammie for the first time consequently provided a vital lift at just the right time.
“The season’s been quite challenging,” she acknowledged. 
“It’s quite easy to get a bit down and lose confidence in my ability and what I was doing coming off the back of such a great 2021/22 season, so to get that win with Bobby just gave me the confidence and motivation to keep going forward, knowing that my training is working.”
That has been supplemented by some hard work after she got back together with skip Beth Farmer as well as their other teammates Kirstin Bousie, Amy McDonald and Katie McMillan, who had to cross the Atlantic to compete without Duff in November as she took on the role of alternate for Team Morrison during their European Championship bronze medal winning campaign.
They are now looking to build on what almost represented a second pre-season training opportunity, their first one having been disrupted by a series of changes after Olympic gold medal winning skip Eve Muirhead retired from the professional game and another of their Beijing teammates Jen Dodds chose to focus on Mixed Doubles.
“Our team had a testing start to the season,” said Duff.
“Obviously there were a few changes, but we eventually got our team together and the girls were out in Canada while I was at the Europeans and since we’ve got back we’ve had a good four or five weeks of training with all five of us, working on the things we needed to.
“It’ll consequently be good to see how we go into the second half of the season and the Perth Masters is a great way to start.
“It’s always been a great competition at an ice rink that quite a few of us play in regularly. I play there every week and the ice is always good.
“It’s always great to get the chance to play in an event in Scotland, so we’re keen to see if what we’ve been doing is working, or if other things crop up.”
She also now knows she has two realistic opportunities to pursue in terms of aiming to return to the Winter Olympics.
“The Euro Series win has definitely given me motivation coming into the New Year to keep striving for what I want to, with this new team and in the mixed doubles with Bobby,” she said.
“Winning that event was a great way for us to start our partnership, but we’re still a new team, we’ve not played that much together compared to a lot of other pairings.
“I’d love to see how well we can do at it. I think the mixed doubles is another opportunity for a medal, another opportunity to represent Scotland and represent GB at the Olympics.
“That’s not something to be taken lightly, so we’ll see just how we get on, hopefully have a good Scottish Championship and then see what happens from there on out for the remainder of the Olympic cycle.”
Further evidence that the British Curling’s women’s and mixed doubles programmes are shaping up encouragingly in the post-Muirhead era was offered by the bronze medal success achieved by Rebecca Morrison, Gina Aitken, Sophie Sinclair and Sophie Jackson at the Euros and they are similarly excited by the prospect of getting back into action as a quartet in Perth this week.
“We had a brilliant finish to 2022 together, getting the bronze medal at the Europeans and we couldn’t have asked for much more from that championship,” said skip Morrison.
“Our goal for the week was to get a medal and we came away with that, so we’re just absolutely chuffed with that. 
“Achieving that has given us the confidence we needed going into the second half of the season. We’ve got a lot of goals for the remainder of this season and what we achieved at the Europeans has really set us up for that.
“We’re looking to climb the world rankings which is one of our main goals for January. We’ve got three tour competitions this month, starting with Perth and we really just have aims to get as far as we can in all three and get as many points as we can on the board.”
They are also building towards a key title defence as they bid to make up for the disappointment of missing out on the chance to compete properly at last year’s World Championships when the camp was struck by COVID after they had travelled to Canada and the event was underway.
“Next month we’ve got the Scottish Championships, so it feels like they’re fast approaching and everything we’re working towards this month is to go and help us retain that title in Dumfries,” said Morrison.
“That just means that over the next month, during each competition we play we’ll be working on our team skills so that we can make more shots.
“All-in-all we’d love to finish our season representing Scotland at the World Championships in Sweden in March, so every competition between now and then is preparation for that and we just want to show that we have the ability to be there and do Scotland proud.”
All four women’s teams on the British Curling programme will be in action in Perth this week with Teams Henderson and Blair also in amongst a strong international line-up which includes teams from the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Ukraine.
Please click here for the draw and more details from the Perth Masters.
Images: Team GB / David Pearce & WCF/Ansis Ventins.
