A year on from record medal haul at Commonwealth Games, what lies in store for sport in Scotland?

There is the feel of a school assembly to the morning’s proceedings in the conservatory of Stirling Court Hotel. Names are called out and one by one, young people rise to their feet to be acknowledged before sitting down again. This group of 27 isn’t your typical one, though. Aged between 14 and 18 years old, they make up a Youth Team Scotland squad set to fly out to Samoa for the fifth Commonwealth Youth Games a little over a year on from their senior colleagues claiming a record haul of 53 medals in Glasgow.

Jason Epton, a 14-year-old weightlifter, will be among the contingent. He started attending the Gladiator weightlifting club in Easterhouse aged 11-and-a-half after a lunchtime visit to his school. “I remember the exact date I went into the gym,” he says, “it was December 8, 2011.” Jason, one of four weightlifters to make the squad, is not long back from competing in Barcelona and has been in Austria three times since taking up the sport.

Though only 14, he knows that perceptions of Easterhouse, which will also be represented by fellow youth lifter Daniel Richardson, have not always been wholly positive. “There are people like us who show the pessimists about Easterhouse and Glasgow that it isn’t true, so we need more people to show them that they’re thinking a lot of rubbish because it is a lot of rubbish.”

Latest figures, however, suggest that Jason now finds himself within a smaller sporting pool. The GoWell study, commissioned to track physical activity levels as well as wellbeing in the east end of Glasgow, found that participation in sport was lower in the months after last summer’s Commonwealth Games than before. Researchers interviewed 1,015 adults in the summer of 2012, 56 per cent of whom said they had participated in some form of sporting activity in the previous month. Between October 2014 and February this year, 414 respondents were re-interviewed, with the figure down nine percentage points.

“I’d probably have been more surprised if there’d been a rapid peak and rise in sports activity,” says University of Glasgow’s Professor Ade Kearns, principal investigator on the study. “If that had been a very immediate effect, that would have surprised me because we haven’t seen that before in past events.” The GoWell figures come with caveats, though, as the authors acknowledge. First, the second wave was conducted in winter rather than summer. Second, it is “entirely plausible”, notes Kearns, that local residents had not yet settled back into patterns around use of facilities previously inaccessible on account of the Games.

The full set of figures are interesting, though, for what they suggest around the so-called ‘demonstration effect’. The theory is a simple one: watching renowned international athletes or home-grown talent excel stimulates people to play sport. Figures released by Sport England showing the number of people playing sport at least once a week declined by 222,000 in the six months to March – this after an Olympic Games in London costing 16 times as much – demonstrate the challenge, though.

“This demonstration effect, as some people have said and I think we’re finding, is working more on people who are already playing sport, so people who are already playing sport tend to say, ‘yes, I’m trying some other sports or I am doing some more sports because of what I saw in the Games’,” adds Kearns.

“It seems to me that the demonstration effect of getting people to play sport is not going to be the silver bullet that gets people either doing more sport or doing more physical activity.”

However, three separate factors might, he suggests: access – and a community perception of access – to facilities not necessarily just of a sporting variety; cultural change – “we’re a bit further behind with the promotion of physical activity to people as something that would fit into their lives than we have been, say, about diet or smoking”; and support for people facing hurdles such as poor health, a lack of confidence or dependent children. “If one accepts that quite a good job has been done in either providing new or refurbished sports facilities and leisure facilities, then I’d say more needs to be done on the people side of this issue,” says Kearns.

Different statistics lend themselves to different stories. Membership of the Glasgow Club – a network of 22 gyms and 12 swimming pools across the city – increased by just over eight per cent, to 40,000 in the seven months following the Games. Likewise, membership of the 17 Commonwealth Games sports’ governing bodies (SGBs) has risen 11 per cent over the past four years, with large percentage increases reported in netball, triathlon and gymnastics.

Scottish Disability Sport (SDS) is now working with 30 SGBs around the inclusion of disabled athletes – “that’s unheard of, it’s massive, absolutely massive, we’ve never worked with that many before,” says chief executive Gavin Macleod – in part after an equality standard for sport was introduced.

Though the Scottish Government has not strictly met its commitment to ensure every pupil receives at least two hours of PE in primary school and two periods in S1 to S4 per week, 99 per cent of primaries and 93 per cent of secondaries – 99 per cent if S4 is excluded – are doing so. Investment in the Active Schools network is to be maintained for the next four years, with the Games said to be having some effect on participation. High Life Highland, for example, reported a 12 per cent increase in the first term of the 2014-15 academic year compared to the same period a year earlier.

Having awarded government and partners a “gold star” for work on PE in the curriculum, Kim Atkinson, Scottish Sports Association chief executive, suggests an increase in the number of hours devoted to it in initial teacher training is where the next opportunity lies. “If we’re looking at people living longer, healthier, happier lives then we need to equip them not just with the competence to do PE but the confidence and the enjoyment – ‘this is something that is fun and you will enjoy throughout your life’. But we need to make sure that we’re giving the competence and confidence to our teachers through initial teacher training to make that happen, and again particularly within that for young people with a disability.”

SDS, for example, is delivering disability inclusion training to education staff within all 32 local authorities for a fourth year running, though – based on work with the University of Glasgow – is now seeking more formal input in tertiary education to get teachers at source. “We’re also starting now to find demand for more specialist courses,” says Macleod. A module is being developed around severe disabilities for those in additional support needs schools, another around autism.

One recurring theme both pre and post Games has been the 150 community sports hubs that sportscotland is working with local authorities nationwide to deliver by next year. At present, there are 142 with 833-plus sports clubs involved. Sportscotland head of school and community sport, Jacqueline Lynn, hints that a similar target will not be adopted post-2016, with the focus now – after an independent evaluation last October – more on expanding their reach beyond clubs and into the wider community.

“From a sportscotland context, we were never obsessed by the number,” she says. “It is a target that we have to achieve but it really was more about the quality and the importance of that quality. That’s why when people are saying, ‘can we make it 200 and 300?’ we’ve said, ‘look, it’s about the quality of this’ because we know if it’s quality, people will come back, people will use it. If it’s just a one-off to get a number and tick a box then it will never work.”

The issue of facilities, of course, is not wholly resolved. Analysis published by the agency in December reported that the general trend in prices for facilities nationwide has been a rise since 2010, albeit with below inflation increases. However, in 2014, eight of the 19 activities and facilities sampled – notably swimming-related activities – rose at a faster rate than inflation, even if increases appear modest in real terms. According to David Smith, who, as chairperson of Drumchapel Community Sport Hub, gave evidence before MSPs in March, the key issue remains the “postcode lottery of access to sport” with wide variations across neighbouring local authority boundaries.

Two days after that evidence session, Audit Scotland – amidst a highly positive report on the running of the Games – warned ongoing pressure on public sector budgets will pose challenges for government and local authorities in terms of legacy projects and programmes attracting the necessary financial support. City of Edinburgh and South Lanarkshire councils were both cited for including proposals to increase charges or reduce hours in leisure and culture services in their 2015-16 draft budgets.

Investment in the performance end looks more secure, at least for the timebeing. As well as the range of facilities that came on stream ahead of the Commonwealth Games, including the refurbished Tollcross International Swimming Centre, which will play host to this month’s IPC Swimming World Championships, a National Performance Centre for Sport is expected to cater for the likes of Basketball Scotland and Scottish Volleyball, as well as the Scottish Football Association, from next year. Scotland’s first dedicated para-sport facility is also to be based in Largs. Meanwhile, sportscotland last month unveiled a funding package for the next four-year cycle, up almost £3m on 2011-15. Boxing, cycling and netball were among the main beneficiaries as ten of the 17 Glasgow Games sports enjoyed an increase. Table tennis, wrestling and weighlifting/powerlifting all saw their cloth cut significantly.

“Everybody assumed that funding would fall off a cliff after the Games – it hasn’t,” says Michael Cavanagh, who stepped down as chairman of Commonwealth Games Scotland (CGS) in May following an eight-year stint. “And I think sportscotland deserve a lot of credit for that because it would have been a very easy thing to do to say, ‘well, this was a one-off, it was a home Games, we put extra investment in and in these tight financial times we don’t have the money’.”

Yet, with the Olympics just a year away, the overall funding picture for high performance sport UK-wide remains susceptible to change. Funding for Britain’s Olympic sports had been maintained for Rio 2016 after Great Britain finished third in the medals table in London. “Given how tight UK public sector funding is, it will be interesting to see what happens to GB performance funding after Rio,” says Cavanagh. Any reduction in UK performance funding has a knock-on effect on Scotland, he points out, given a number of Scottish athletes are part of GB programmes. “It’s a concern and it’s a frustration as well because, of course, it’s the one thing we’ve got no control over,” admits the former Team Scotland member who wrestled at the 1982 Commonwealth Games.

UK Sport’s attitude towards funding team sports – the agency has vowed to continue a ‘no compromise’ approach that prioritises medals first and foremost – is “all wrong”, according to Cavanagh. “Basketball is one of the bigger participation sports in the country. Having a GB basketball team at the Olympics is great to give kids something to aspire to. This thing about saying, ‘we’re only going to fund people if they win medals’, well, the field in basketball is already limited to 12 teams [so] to actually get there is an enormous achievement, never mind winning a medal. It’s things like that that I find frustrating about the way UK funding impacts on Scotland funding.”

Cavanagh is hoping Team Scotland see a share of the funds left over from last summer. More than £35m of public funds remained unspent from the Commonwealth Games, organisers confirmed earlier this year. Excluding a special reserve of just under £24m, close to £12m is left over. It is Commonwealth Games Scotland’s “hope and expectation”, Cavanagh says, that around a quarter of that is reinvested in Team Scotland.

“Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had great support from Scottish Government over the last year and we understand that there will be other pressures on any money that is left over,” he adds. “But our view is [that] Team Scotland delivered at the Games, we did exactly what we said we’d do, we made our contribution to those Games being great and I think it’s the right thing to do for some of that money to be reinvested to make sure we can continue doing that.”

His view generates a more nuanced response from the Scottish Government. “There wasn’t a surplus,” Minister for Sport Jamie Hepburn tells Holyrood. “We need to be clear that there was obviously significant public funds set out which were available to be spent on the Games [and] there was an underspend, that was not a surplus. We have already recommitted much of that funding, so going forward in terms of our commitment to elite sport, which is absolute. We invest a significant resource through sportscotland to that end and, of course, we’re committed to investing at the grassroots as well.

“We are also investing £25million in a new national performance centre for sport, we invested £6million in a new para-sports centre in North Ayrshire and we’re also looking at what else we can do to support other regional developments across the country, again through sportscotland. Our commitment to investing in our world-class infrastructure [remains] – we’ve already got world-class infrastructure, but we’ll continue to invest in that. I’m sure that Commonwealth Games Scotland and all those who have an interest in sport across Scotland would very much welcome that.”

Back in Stirling, the youngsters’ firm focus is on the final few months ahead of Samoa. Sixty-six of the Scottish athletes who have competed at the Youth Games have gone on to participate in the full competition, including Glasgow 2014 gold medallists Charlie Flynn and Hannah Miley, with several of this squad no doubt looking to the Gold Coast in 2018 or the Tokyo Olympics two years later as potential destinations.

Before that, though, Jason is just keen to get one over on his older cousin Gary, who won three bronze medals at the first Youth Games in Edinburgh back in 2000. “He’s quite competitive so I need to just show him who’s boss,” he laughs