IT will be 40 years this winter since a callow, fresh-faced Frank Dick took over as Scotland’s national coach.

It was on the run-in to the 1970 Commonwealth Games that he replaced John Anderson. Brought up in the Gorbals, feisty, with a formidable reputation, Anderson would be tough to follow.

A ferocious motivator, Anderson had laid firm foundations. Some considered his replacement, a former Royal High School athlete, something of a poseur in his purple Loughborough tracksuit. But Dick made them eat their words. Organised, methodical, analytical, he built on Anderson’s work. The Edinburgh Commonwealth Games proved a stunning success. How big a part young Dick had actually played was hard to evaluate. Still around, Anderson was a mentoring and perhaps brooding presence.

Dick has since become a pillar of world coaching. In 1979 he became director of coaching for the British Athletics Federation. He spanned the era of Seb Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram, Allan Wells, and Daley Thompson through to that of Colin Jackson, Linford Christie and Sally Gunnell.

His regime lasted some 15 years, until coaching budget cuts from which we’ve never recovered.

The jibes of the jealous: “Frank Dick head coach . . .” were silenced by irrefutable evidence of a golden age for the sport, one never regained by either Scotland or Britain.

Now Dick is back, as the new chair of scottishathletics, at a time when the nation’s stock is low. Scotland has also just appointed a new national athletics coach . . . Canadian Laurieu Primeau. This is his first full week in the role.

With the Delhi Commonwealth Games next year ahead of the 2012 Olympics in London, then the 2014 Commonwealths in Glasgow, athletics in Scotland will never have been under greater scrutiny.

“A very tough time,” agreed Dick yesterday. “You can see from the statistics.” Most damning, perhaps, is that just one Scot is in a Commonwealth medal position in the 2009 rankings: Mark Dry (hammer) yet he’s ranked 94th in the world.

“On the positive side scottish-athletics does have a pretty positive strategy in place,” says Dick. “Whenever I walked out of an Olympic Games, I was always looking at our results in the European juniors. Where were we with the rest of the world?

“We have athletes breaking under-20 records, reasonable success down through the age groups. I know that guarantees nothing, but at least we’ve got that.

“We have a new young national coach, and this is where I guess he is going to earn his stripes. It’s a tough call, but he has a level of support I never had, from UK level. The building blocks are now there.

“Do we have athletes? Of course we have. Do we have athletes of potential? Of course we have. Maybe not in the rich abundance as appeared to be the case back in 1970, but they are there. If we don’t squeeze something out in the short term, for sure there’s the potential for a lot more come 2014.

“The new national coach will look very closely at the additional technical support he will require, and resources already there. But I want us to grow our coaches and athletes. In the short term he may need help from UK or even abroad.

“People are always critical on these forums, but I have to wonder if we’re looking at the same organ-isation. There’s a robust strategy. Why won’t they buy into it?

“I want at least one town-hall meeting in every region of the country in any given year. Give clubs the chance to buy in, express needs and frustrations. Let’s have eyeball-to-eyeball communication, not e-communication or written. We need the whole country to buy in. If we don’t step up to the plate, nobody will do it for us.”

Dick is a millionaire motivational speaker, president of the European Coaches’ Association. He invented the world athletics body’s coaches’ academy. He’s on the board of FA Learning, and interrupted a session with coaches at Wembley yesterday to speak to The Herald. “I’m working with David Sheepshank and Trevor Brooking, looking at how to license FA coaches.”

Might Primeau not be intimidated by his reputation, even though such experience should be a strength?

Dick rejects negative influence: “He should have time to take stock before taking big decisions. I don’t want him to feel bullied, frustrated, or driven to do that by anybody. I want him to take his time so we get it right. This is an important window, and if we don’t get it right it will take a lifetime to do so.

“I hope nobody thinks I don’t want this young man to be the most successful coach we have ever had. I want that to be the case. If there is anything I can do to help him in that, I hope he’d feel able to ask.

“I would not want to be perceived to be looking over his shoulder, because nobody gets a chance to grow like that.”

Yet it evokes memories of Dick being in Anderson’s shadow all those years ago. And it did no harm.

Dick insists we must learn from every available source. The International Coaching Festival over which he presided in Glasgow last weekend had four world record-breakers: Seb Coe, Wilson Kipketer, Sergey Bubka, and Thomas Dvorak, plus some 400 coaches, including the very best in the world. “I want to make this an annual event, and make Glasgow a place that coaches from all over the world come to in the first week in November.”

Dick is fond of quoting on subjects such as the mechanics of success, and cites Shell’s former head of strategic planning, Arie de Geus. The Dutchman said the only sustainable competitive advantage one has is the ability to learn faster than the opposition.

“You can’t learn faster only by having access to your own experience and knowledge,” insists Dick. “It’s a no-brainer. You need access to the experience of everybody. But in our sport, everyone is brought up to be an individual, and fight with everyone else. In a team sport it’s not as difficult to get people to work together. That’s a cultural shift that has to take place in athletics.”

If it can be brought about, we may have struck oil.