THERE were no easy answers this week when various different stakeholders packed into a conference room in an Edinburgh city centre hotel to discuss the future of sport in Scotland. Just a room full of passionate people, committed to investing their formidable energies to contribute to this nation's sporting success. Which is at least is a start.

Ranged against them and everyone else, though, is a fearsome challenge. If the last few years has been a golden period for Scottish sport, how exactly do you keep that graph heading upwards when budgets only seem likely to progress in the opposite direction? When one of the keynote speakers, councillor Archie Graham, the depute leader of Glasgow City Council, rightly blushed with pride of the city's involvement in 2014, signing off with the phrase "it was our finest hour", in truth for many of the people in that room that was almost exactly the opposite of what they want to hear. They hope Glasgow 2014 doesn't necessarily go down for posterity as the high watermark of Scottish sporting achievement. Wasn't it meant to be a start, not an end? Why shouldn't there be even greater moments ahead?

The problem is that in these times of government austerity and cutbacks, the latest spending review is always just round the corner. Back in June, Sportscotland, the national funding body, actually announced a record expenditure of £45.2m for the 2015-2019 cycle, up £3m from the 2011-15 period, but chancellor George Osborne is currently attempting to find £20bn of cuts for the review which will be announced in late November. Gloomy noises are already being made about what is likely to trickle down in the days and weeks after that. Sport north of the border, not to mention its partners in local government, is unlikely to get off Scot-free.

Funding from the private sector is the holy grail, for which James Docherty, the senior sponsorship manager of energy giants SSE, was a hugely impressive advocate. There are indeed synergies out there for large businesses to bankroll appropriate sustainable success stories - SSE, for instance, are currently working on a sponsorship deal for the Scotland's women's football team - but even giant energy firms have only so much cash to go round.

There is certainly no shortage of ambition. Louise Martin, the chair of sportscotland and president of the Commonwealth Games Federation, has grand plans for Scotland to provide a world class platform for people at all ends of the sporting system, be it grassroots or high performance. But she admits volunteers remain the bedrock of Scottish sport.

Some improvements are easy enough to pinpoint. While there could still be more, the nation's facilities base has improved remarkably and will continue to be augmented by the national performance centre for sport at Heriott-Watt University in Edinburgh, a new multi-sport base in Dundee and a fully upgraded Inverclyde Centre down in Largs. The network of community sports hubs grows each year, while the amount of Level A coaches across most sports has also increased astronomically.

Schools, of course, are the frontline. While sports clubs rely on the school network out of hours for much of their facilities, there is a consensus that two hours a week is a somewhat insufficient minimum requirement if our next generation of kids are to beat the obesity timebomb. Some kind of structured exercise each day would be a start, with one idea for best practice being for kids to walk a mile a day at primary school. The idea, long trumpeted by Judy Murray's Set4Sport scheme, that generalised training in transferable ball skills etc from an early age would be a better start than specialised training seems to have taken hold. If getting female pupils to buy in remains a challenge, there are incredible female role models out there like Eilidh Child, Laura Muir and Lynsey Sharp.

Scotland has shown a flair for hosting events and that will continue. Glasgow will host the European Sports Championships in 2018, and whether Scotland are there or not, Hampden will play host to the European Championships in 2020. Football, or at least men's football, continues to get a bit of a kicking, mainly because so many of our young men gravitate towards it, far too many too to accommodate in the professional ranks. In recent years such raw materials have translated to little in the way of world class talent.

Elsewhere in high performance sport in Scotland, sports continue to sing off different hymn sheets. To illustrate the point, while Forbes Dunlop, the CEO of Scottish swimming, boasts of a network north of the border which offers an environment capable of sustaining every one of Scotland's 2014 medallists with the exception of Dan Wallace, Craig Burn, his counterpart with Scottish Cycling, was explaining that economies of scale mean that aspiring Scottish cyclists can only ever be a cog in a British solution. Such is the investment, backed by Sky, required in wind tunnel testing and various technical specifications to be competitive at world class level that it dwarves the entire annual Scottish budget.

If there was one abiding message, though, it was a need for closer interaction, a need to abandon the egos, and personal fiefdoms to get round the table and thrash it all out. With his cycling background, Burn uses the metaphor of sport, health, education all having to take their turn at the front to ensure that Scottish society keeps moving in the right direction. Scottish sport may yet build on its 2014 legacy. But it will need the whole of society to buy in if it is to deliver bang for its buck.