IT IS good news for some team sports that sportscotland have binned their funding template which until now matched that imposed by UK Sport.

The quango will no longer adhere to the principle of cutting funding for unsuccessful sports. This will mean significant increases for under-performing team sports when details are announced later this month.

It has involved "tough decisions", according to Mike Whittingham, sportscotland's director of performance at the Scottish Institute of Sport. The novel idea of rewarding failure can't have come easy to a distinguished former athlete with an even more distinguished coaching record.

Until now, medals have been the yardstick for future resources at UK and Scottish level. Performance-related funding has been the hard-nosed philosophy which has improved standards, delivering record medal hauls for both Britain and Scotland at the 2012 Olympics and Glasgow 2014. Failure to achieve targets have seen high-performance directors fired, or falling on their sword. Most notably UK Athletics, which delivered four gold, a silver, and a bronze in London, yet lost performance director Charles van Commenee.

The new strategy, revealed in yesterday's Herald, will be confusing in the extreme for some sports. For in a complete reversal of policy, funding will be increased for sports which, despite millions of investment, failed to deliver any medal in Glasgow.

"We started a discussion with our board on team sports: do we want to treat them the same and follow down the same road as UK Sport?," said Whittingham "And the answer was no."

So having failed at any Commonwealth Games to win a medal - or indeed to qualify for any match in which victory would have earned Scotland a medal - rugby sevens, Twenty20 cricket, hockey, and netball are now in line for increases.

Qualification targets are, according to Whittingham, top six at a Commonwealth Games or being among the top 20% of the world rankings. That currently means only the Scotland men's football team (29th).

It's a matter of debate whether the public purse should fund professional sports such as men's rugby and football. Women's football, despite having slipped from 19th to 21st, have a chance of qualifying for the World Cup finals. Their success, and the profile of somebody like Kim Little - short-listed for World Player of the Year - presents an opportunity to tempt women into sport and exercise. There is an excellent case for them being funded. But in the past, one place outside the target, or a hundredth of a second outside a qualifying time, would have meant exclusion.

Providing a shop window to showcase a sport is, of course, what a joined-up-thinking national sports policy should do, but there has to be equity and consistency.

Whittingham told my colleague, Mark Woods: "Team sports are different, but they're important to Scotland. It's not about one medal. It's about 15 medallists. Say Scotland's women get to the [Commonwealth hockey] semi-finals in 2018 and win a bronze medal. The impact of 15 or 16 medallists is enormous, because we then use them to inspire and generate more interest and participation. It's not about performance outcomes. We see team sports as a mechanism to improve the health and well-being of the nation."

Whittingham was his own boss at the institute, solely pursuing elite performance before it was subsumed into sportscotland by Scottish Government diktat. Now he is answerable to sportscotland, a central plank of whose philosophy is getting more people more active more often. Conflicting agendas can be mutually exclusive. Think getting the public into swimming pools, and international swimmers often training at 5am.

There is, of course, a link between more participation and exercise benefits, but the new policy is confused, confusing, illogical, inconsistent and irrational.

Some sports which achieved and surpassed medal targets in Glasgow will get no additional money. Innovative sports, with attractive proposals, and increasing participation, such as table tennis whose record in working class Drumchapel is a model to which every sport should aspire to, and squash which has "invented" a new version with enormous potential, have been shabbily treated by sportscotland. Both play a team event at the Commonwealth Games.

Scotland is eleventh of just 37 netball nations worldwide, and eleventh in the Commonwealth, yet despite not measuring up to top 6 or top 20%, they will receive backing for a World Championship campaign with possible further resources for the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. Netball Scotland is advertising for a new ceo at £50,000 per year.

Gratifyingly, almost all Games sports show increased membership since last year. It makes sense to reinforce legacy, but I believe investment can be better channelled than to under-performing team sports.

If sportscotland is reappraising how it spends our money, it should think outside the box as it did with team sport. They should consider disciplines which are not Commonwealth or Olympic ones, in which Scotland has world-class performers who are as much a credit to their community and role models for society as our team-sport also-rans.

In recent times, Scotland has had world and European champions and medallists who were not supported: Catriona Morrison (duathlon), Ruaridh Cunningham (mountain biking) and the Eccles sisters, Joanne and Hannah (equestrian).

We wait to learn the long-overdue figures, but fear sports like canoeing, rowing, and sailing in which Scotland has contributed significantly to recent Olympic medals and titles, could fall through the cracks. They are all de facto "team" events.