SCOTS VOW TO LEARN VITAL LESSONS AFTER WORLD CHAMPS EXIT

Scotland’s Kuntai World Wheelchair Championships campaign ended in the quarter-finals with a heavy defeat to Sweden, but skip Hugh Nibloe believes the experience of the past week at The Ice Cube in Beijing has been invaluable for the squad as they now switch focus to next year’s Winter Paralympics at the same venue.

The team of Nibloe, Gregor Ewan, David Melrose, Meggan Dawson-Farrell and Charlotte McKenna had finished the round-robin stages of the event with a record of six wins and five losses that included one of only two defeats inflicted upon hosts China, who finished top of the standings heading into the play-offs.

The Swedes had finished third in the table and dominated the quarter-final from the off, scoring at all six ends played in running up an unassailable 10-0 lead at that stage.

“We’ve learned a lot about one another and we’ve achieved some goals this week. It’s given us things to work on ahead of the Paralympics and we’re definitely in a better space now than we were a week ago,” Nibloe said afterwards.

The Swedes had finished third in the table and dominated the quarter-final from the off, scoring at all six ends played in running up an unassailable 10-0 lead at that stage.

“I think we’ve done all right this week. They’ve not all been the best performances, but we managed to get some results and we managed to make the play-offs, which was one of the goals, but there’s definitely far more to come and over the next three months we’ve got to work really hard on all the little things in training that will improve those performances.”

He noted that their involvement will help the British Curling programme prepare a team for the Winter Paralympics in March.

“It was great to get into the venue that’s going to host the Winter Paralympics, to get a feel of the set-up, how it’s going to look and generally get a sense of the environment,” he said.

Paralympic Head Coach Sheila Swan acknowledged that there was technical work to be done over the next few months, but placed the overall campaign in perspective after what was the squad’s first overseas trip in more than 18 months.

“We have not been as sharp from a shot-making perspective as we’d like to be. However, this has been the first time travelling internationally for a year for this team which has tested them at every level, so they’ll have gained massively from that. There’s lots of learnings and work to be done,” she said.

“We now have a couple of weeks of training and an opportunity to review the championships, so that we can pin-point our biggest gains between now and March. We got to the quarters at this World Championships and we now need to build on that to prepare for the Winter Paralympics in three months’ time.”

Scotland Team,
Hugh Nibloe
Gregor Ewan
David Melrose
Meggan Dawson Farrell
Charlotte McKenna (alternate)

Results
Scotland v Norway 6-4
Scotland v Italy 10-4
Scotland v Korea 6-8
Scotland v Canada 7-4
Scotland v Switzerland 11-7
Scotland v Sweden 2-9
Scotland v Latvia 10-1
Scotland v RCF 4-8
Scotland v China 3-2
Scotland v Slovakia 3-8
Scotland v USA 5-8
Q-F
Scotland v Sweden 10-0

Final round-robin standings (W-L)

Q China 9-2
Q RDF 8-3
Q Sweden 8-3
Q United States 8-3
Q Canada 7-4
Q Scotland 6-5
Norway 5-6
Latvia 4-7
Korea 4-7
Slovakia 3-8
Italy 2-9
Switzerland 2-9

Results