Robyn Munro and Ross Craik will finalise their preparations for this season’s Scottish Junior Championship in senior company as they lead their teams into action on the Continent this weekend.
Along with their vice skip Lisa Davie, Munro, Holly Wilkie-Milne and Laura Watt find themselves in the same field at the Danish Open as the skip who led them to the World Junior title earlier this year, with Fay Henderson leading her new line-up into action. 
Munro believes they are benefiting from exposure to more experienced competitors.
“We have two separate teams for women’s and junior events and getting some experience at the senior level has been a great learning curve for our new team,” she said.
“We were able to take a lot of what we’d learnt from our first three ladies events in Stirling, Oslo and Basel into our recent third place finish in our first event with our junior team at the Prague European Junior Curling Tour (EJCT) event last month.”
That junior line-up features a full quartet of World Juniors with Amy Mitchell, who was their alternate when they won that title, replacing Davie, who is over age for juniors.
“Our preparations ahead of the Scottish juniors has been great with Amy and we’re looking forward to that,” said Munro.
“However, first Laura, Holly and I will be hoping to have a good performance this weekend with Lisa and then look to keep that going into the juniors starting next week.”
Henderson has meanwhile spent this season adjusting to playing on the senior circuit full-time with Olympic gold medallist Hailey Duff as her vice-skip, along with Amy MacDonald and Katie McMillan.
“We’ve had a few good competitions, a lot of them going two and two, though, so not quite managing to get to the play-offs, missing out on draw shot challenge which has been a bit gutting,” said the skip.
“There have definitely been areas we’ve been able to work on, though and hopefully this weekend we’ll be able to get across the line.
“We’re gelling well as a team and doing really well with our communication, which helps us work on things, as well as letting us make more shots through games.”
She consequently believes they can make an impact this weekend, on the back of a testing recent trans-Atlantic trip to Canada.
“We definitely want to make the play-offs,” said Henderson.
“We’ve got a bit of a difficult group, but we can definitely beat those teams, so we just need to put out good performances.
“Thanks to our trip to Canada I feel we’re definitely more ready.
“We were really challenged there and had to play 75 to 80 per cent games on every occasion to even have a chance of getting to the last end or even converting a win.
“That’s definitely raised our consistency and our standard of play, which will hopefully stand us in good stead for this weekend.”
Ross Craik, Scott Hyslop, Struan Carson and Jack Carrick contest the men’s event in Denmark, on the back of their successful defence of the European Junior Curling Tour event in Oslo last weekend, which saw them experiment with a re-shuffle of their line-up which saw Craik continue to call the game, but Hyslop play skip stones.
“That worked really well for us going undefeated in that event,” said Craik.
“It all felt quite natural and this weekend is another chance to embed everything, so this event is a great test, but we don’t want to change too much as we really see this weekend as a warm-up for the Scottish Juniors next week. 
“We are really excited about that, it is a key target for us this season and we want to achieve what we couldn’t quite manage last year and it feels like we have everything in place for that.”
Across the Continent, on the back of reaching the semi-finals at last weekend’s Grand Prix Bern International, Team Waddell will meanwhile seek to follow in the footsteps of British Curling colleagues Team Whyte who won the Swiss Cup last season, in a field which also includes fellow Scots Team Bryce.
