SHE was skip of the team in which Scotland's best-known curler first announced herself on the global stage but, as they rejoin forces at the start of a new Olympic cycle, Sarah Reid is about to offer Eve Muirhead a very different kind of lead.

Following Claire Hamilton's decision to retire following this year's Winter Olympic campaign which brought them a bronze medal, a vacancy appeared in the team that has established itself at the top of the Scottish game and Reid, a 29-year-old, who originally hails from Kilmarnock, has been asked to fill it.

She is thrilled by the opportunity. "I didn't know that was Claire's intention at all and I'm not sure if the other girls did, but then all the women in the programme knew there was a position to be filled in Eve's team," said Reid.

"So I just kept training hard and working hard for the summer.

"We were told selection would be in July and, because we didn't have championships after February, our season finished quite early. It was just a case of training all through the summer and waiting to see. It's always individual selection so you didn't even note your interest [in being involved] this year; you just either got asked or didn't. It was a case of waiting for the phone calls to see what we were being offered."

She admits that it felt like an accolade to be the player selected to fill the gap and was also pleased that she was not kept waiting as long as she might have been before Rhona Howie offered the invitation.

"It came earlier than expected," Reid noted. "When I noticed I had a voicemail from Rhona I wasn't expecting to call her back and get that offer, so I was quite surprised. It wasn't something I had to take any time to think over. I think I said to her 'You're asking me but you obviously know the answer.' "

While Howie, the 2002 Olympic gold medal-winning skip, has since resigned her post as head coach of the programme, Reid can draw confidence from knowing it was a decision into which Muirhead and team-mates Vicki Adams and Anna Sloan would have had input.

"In team sport the team dynamics are very important so, if they weren't involved, there would be some questions asked," Reid observed. "There has to be input from Rhona and the coaching staff, and from a panel that had people from British Curling on it, but it's got to be the team's decision as well."

Muirhead's first taste of top-flight international action, when Reid skipped their team to the gold medal at the World Junior Championships seven years ago, would doubtless have factored into that. The memory of that achievement has clearly remained vivid and inspirational for Reid in the interim, throughout which she has remained involved in the GB Curling programme.

"That was the first year Eve and I played together: my last year in juniors when she was obviously quite young and new on the circuit. We spotted some talent and asked her if she wanted to join our team," she recalled.

"Winning that medal in juniors is what's kept me going because it's been a number of years since I've been at some of the championships.

"What's kept me going is [the desire] to get back there, to get on the podium and to be in that team that's playing right at the very top. It's always been something that I've hoped [for]: to get in the best team and be doing that."

Since that success was the first of four successive world junior wins for Muirhead - she has gone on to become both European and world champion at senior level as a skip - Reid knows that opportunity now beckons. Joining them has given her the chance to focus full-time on her curling, following years spent juggling her training and competition schedule with work as a paediatric nurse.

This time around, her role in the team will come not at the decision-making end, but in sending down the opening two stones as lead, though she is confident that she can take to what is a specialist role well, having extended her versatility in the years since she and Muirhead first worked together. "I think it's quite easy to slot in," she said. "I've known Eve from juniors and we've kept in touch and I've been with them to a couple of events as well.

"In 2010 I went with Eve's team as fifth man to the worlds, and then I went to the Europeans with them in 2012, with Anna and Vicky in the team.

"It [her new role] is a new challenge; I'm really looking forward to it. It will be good to get started after all the summer training we've been doing. It's very exciting.

"I've seen Eve and the girls be full-time for years but until you're in that team and that environment you don't really know what it entails day-in, day-out."

Their new season gets underway in Ottawa today at the Shorty Jenkins Classic before they head for another international competition in Stockholm next week, although their main targets are earning the right to contest the European and World Championships.

After a hard summer's work, though, there is excitement at just getting the chance to compete again.

"We're all really looking forward to getting into it and getting games played," said Reid.