WHAT a year 2014 has been for Scotland and for sport.

From the trio of medals won by our winter Olympians and Paralympians in Sochi to the momentous Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the spellbinding Ryder Cup in Gleneagles, it certainly has been a vintage year.

While memories of those huge events may be fading, their impact continues to be felt the length and breadth of the country.

At SportScotland, our plans to deliver a sporting legacy began long before the first athlete walked out at Celtic Park for the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games.

Since winning the bid to host the Commonwealth Games in 2007, SportScotland, with substantial investment from the Scottish Government and National Lottery, has used the Games as further impetus to accelerate improvements to the sporting system and is now implementing a world-class system at every level.

The pathways connecting grassroots, club and performance sport are the most sophisticated they have ever been and encouraging statistics are emerging to support that progress.

At grassroots level, Active Schools continues to grow with an increase in the number and range of sessions being delivered and more than 21,000 school and club links are now established.

Shortly before the Games we announced we will be investing a further £50million in Active Schools over the next four years and are working with our local authority partners on shaping their continued support.

A key component of Games legacy can be seen through our Community Sport Hubs, which have benefitted from £1.5m of National Lottery investment each year since 2010.

We set out with an ambition to deliver at least 150 hubs across all 32 of Scotland's local authorities by 2016, and with 134 already up-and-running and a further 33 planned, we are on track to exceed that target.

The figures show that 908 individual sports clubs are already involved in hubs with 93,706 members enjoying around 50 different sports.

These hubs are bringing local communities together to offer more opportunities for people to get involved in sport and physical activity and are a vital link in the sporting pathway.

They are run by the local community, for the local community and we are keen to increase engagement as they develop.

To support that, we provided £10m investment to support club development and enable governing bodies to employ development officers to manage the anticipated rise in demand.

A number of sports have already seen significant membership increases by people inspired by the Games.

At the top of the pathway there is no question that our athletes have delivered. Team Scotland won a record 53 medals including our best ever tally of 19 golds, finishing fourth in the medal table - a phenomenal achievement.

This was thanks to a very successful collaborative approach between the athletes, Commonwealth Games Scotland, the governing bodies of sport, coaches and the experts at the SportScotland institute of sport.

For the first time, all three of our Olympic curling teams (all Scots) won medals at the Winter Olympics earlier this year

But those athletes could not do their job without a strong coaching network to support them.

Since 2009 the number of UKCC Level 1 and Level 2 coaches has quadrupled, improving not only the quantity but the quality of coaches working in schools and clubs across Scotland.

There is a well know quote from the film Field of Dreams: "If we build it, he will come".

We don't believe that, we believe it has to be the right facility in the right place with the infrastructure to support it.

As a result of targeted investment, facilities too, are now the best they have ever been and being well used by performance athletes and the local communities they serve.

A number of centres of sporting excellence are already in place across Scotland, including Aberdeen Sports Village, the Emirates Arena, Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome, and Tollcross Aquatics Centre in Glasgow, Dundee's Dick McTaggart Gymnastics Centre and Olympia swimming centre, Edinburgh's Royal Commonwealth Pool, The PEAK in Stirling and the Ravenscraig Regional Facility in Motherwell.

These excellent facilities resulted from SportScotland's previous investment of £44.3m, as part of the National Regional Sports Facilities Strategy, complementing some £300m of capital investment from our partners in local authorities.

In addition, Scotland's £30m National Performance Centre for Sport will be completed by 2016 at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University campus, and at least £9m is being invested in SportScotland's Inverclyde National Centre, which will become a para-sport hub.

A further legacy strand from the Glasgow Games we have been involved with has seen more than £600,000 of equipment distributed to schools, clubs, governing bodies and local authorities around Scotland.

Imagine using the starting blocks from which Eilidh Child won her silver medal in Hampden or boxing in the ring where Charlie "The Mailman" Flynn delivered?

That's the kind of inspiration to spark a whole new generation of Scots to get active and see where their sporting journey could take them.

This year, 2014, without doubt, represented a defining moment for sport in this country and now we are delivering a sporting legacy to be proud of.