Double Dumfries delight at Scottish Curling Championships

There was double delight for Dumfries curlers in the Hendrick’s Gin Scottish Curling Championships at the Ice Bowl on Saturday.

Fay Henderson’s team lifted the women’s title, with Ross Whyte then claiming the men’s crown just a few hours later.

Henderson went into the competition on the back of winning last year’s World Junior Championships.

The Dumfries skip has formed a new team this season with Amy MacDonald and Katie McMillan and 2022 Olympic gold medallist Hailey Duff.

They topped the round-robin section with nine wins out of 10 – their only defeat in their second encounter with the rink of reigning champs Rebecca Morrison, which also featured Sophie Jackson of Dumfries and Olympic gold medal winner Jen Dodds.

The teams met in the final and Henderson’s team was always in control, taking the title with a massive 9-2 victory.

And that meant a first senior championship for 22-year-old Henderson, who was playing at the venue where she took up the sport.

She said: “It sounds amazing to be able to say we’re Scottish champions and hopefully it’ll be the first of many. We played really good shots out there, played a lot of them and after getting the three early on which definitely helped, we just controlled the scoreboard and made a few clinical shots out there which ultimately won it for us.

“We definitely found our form this week and knew we could win.

“We’d managed to beat Becca once in the round-robin and while we had one loss to her as well we were alright with that because we didn’t really want to be all the way undefeated, because sometimes that doesn’t work out in your favour. We then managed to play a really, really good game in the one v two match and being two-one up on them in the three