As it was announced yesterday that Rhona Howie is switching sports to take charge of Scotland's international bowling squad the woman who delivered "the stone of destiny" declared her past sporting success irrelevant to her new job.

Yesterday's announcement that the gold medal winning skip at the 2002 Winter Olympic curling had been appointed as Bowls Scotland's high performance manager has by no means met with universal approval throughout the sport.

However Howie, who was high performance coach on the British women's curling programme when Eve Muirhead's rink won their bronze medals at last year's Winter Olympics last year, explained that with John Price, the former world champion bowler taking over as high performance coach, is not sport specific.

"At the end of the day I'm not here because I won an Olympic gold medal," she said.

"I am in this job because I've been involved in high performance sport, in a sport where there was no high performance plans in place."

She suggested that her experience in curling as it has moved towards being a full-time professional sport in the past decade, would allow her to help bowls develop more rapidly.

"I was there as an athlete, competed at the Olympic games as an athlete, I then have gone through the sport process of implementing a high performance plan with a sport that had some resistance (within the sport) and it still does.

"My experiences over the years, it wouldn't matter if it was bowls or another sport, high performance is high performance in sport and that is what I'm going to implement.

"It is about making sure that what I bring in can help each athlete and not make it standardised and say you do this or this.

"I want to see where are we at with bowls, what do they do right now, speak to bowlers and get to know them and see if they can have an individualised plan that can drive them forward."