Eve Muirhead is already among the leading contenders for the Women's World Championships that get underway in Japan today, but with the right support structures right she will only get better over the next decade according to Scottish and British curling programme's new head of coaching.

Tony Zummack's appointment is itself a result of a re-structuring that has happened in a bid to further strengthen a system that produced medals in all three disciplines at the Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi last year as the sport becomes increasingly professional.

The departure of Soren Gran, the head coach who oversaw the improved performance following Britain's failures at the Vancouver Olympic, is a consequence of that overhaul, but the departing Swede also acknowledged last weekend, after Scotland claimed medals in both the men's and women's events World Junior Championship, that another level must be reached to rival the Canadians who picked up all three gold in Sochi last year and both in Estonia last week.

Having spent the last four years in Scotland, working with the Paralympics team, after more than 20 years as a professional coach in his native Canada, Zummack would, then, appear to have the combined understanding of the domestic set-up and of what is required to match the sport's dominant nation and he is excited by the opportunity.

"There's a huge impetus right now to carry on from Sochi which is a huge opportunity to expose the game and grow it a little bit more," he said.

"Bringing back three medals, when the only other nation to do that was Canada, we could say we are doing something really good here and it's great to be involved in that."

The 47-year-old has already proven himself something of a visionary in realising when in his early twenties that the way the sport was developing offered the prospect of a career in coaching.

However he is confronted by ahe current domestic scene which throws up a curious contrast. In the women's game, the curlers funded by the British programme dominate, spearheaded by Muirhead and her team of Anna Sloan, Vicki Adams and Sarah Reid. However in the men's, the Olympic silver medal winning rink, skipped by Dave Murdoch, has been beaten to places at both the forthcoming World Championship by Ewan MacDonald's team and, earlier in the season the European Championships by Dave Edwards' rink, both of which are unsupported by the system.

Zummack recognises the challenges that provides, but believes the key thing is to ensure that the support is in place to provide the best available talent every opportunity to excel and he thinks much of that is already in place thanks to the Sportscotland Institute of Sport.

"We've really got a Ferrari garage, as I like to call it and we're getting closer and closer to actually getting Ferraris in that garage," he said.

"I really want to be part of getting to that next level right now to get the athletes to the level they need to be at to take advantage of all the opportunities that the programme is surrounded with."

To continue the metaphor that also depends upon getting sufficient Ferraris onto the track and curling is in many ways an exaggerated version of what blights much of Scottish sport with an over-dependence on a tiny percentage of the population.

It is not Zummack's job to address that directly since his principal job is to work what talent does emerge but he is man enough to acknowledge the issue.

"Curling in general is replicated that way around the globe," he observed.

"If you look at Canada where there are a million curlers among 33 million people, it's the same names today that are coming up that were coming up years ago.

"It's very much a generational hand-me-down. We're still not attracting a whole bunch of new curlers to the game but again the professionalism of the sport, taking it to the level where athletes can look at it as a career, is going to make a huge difference."

In terms of capitalising upon that opportunity Team Muirhead currently represents the gold standard in every sense, given that she won the World Championship the last time she was allowed to take part in it and Zummack is clearly delighted to have such role models available since it is his belief in their determination to keep learning that convinces him they will get even better.

"I don't think you can get a 24-year-old who's going to know this game inside out and backwards," he said.

"Eve's a very intelligent girl. She's a great skip and she's got a lot of experience, but I think in 10 years time she's going to be an even better skip because you can only get 10 years experience by being out there playing those games."