What Sports Vision Doctors
Can Do for You

By Liz Segre

Seeing 20/20 or better isn't the only measure of good vision. You may focus well on objects, but your vision isn't just one skill — it's a set of several skills, including depth perception and peripheral vision. And vision skills are important in sports performance, whether you play golf, soccer, baseball, basketball or racket sports. Most of what we understand about our surrounding environment is experienced through our eyes, rather than our other sensory organs.

Even if you have an eye exam every one or two years and your eyes are healthy, you can still benefit from seeing an eyecare practitioner who specializes in sports vision. A typical eye exam doesn't test every single vision skill; sports vision testing is more extensive. This is because it evaluates how you use your vision while moving around outdoors and interacting with other objects and players.

Many professional athletes work on their sports vision, but so do high school and college athletes as well as recreational golfers, tennis players, and even billiards players. Some professionals can benefit from the same vision training, including law enforcement personnel and pilots.

The key to tennis is positioning yourself in the right spot before the ball reaches you. If you're not good at judging where you need to be, perhaps one of your vision skills needs improvement. A sports vision specialist can help.

When you visit a sports vision specialist, he or she will probably give you a complete eye exam and will ask you a lot of questions about your activities. More testing will determine your sports-related needs. These tests may include:

• A holographic light projection, which displays images in 3-D so you can react to them as in real life.
• Computerized tests that measure your reactions.
• Slides seen through a special viewer.
• Depending on the sport, actual on-field measuring of your reactions to various sports situations. Many specialists will attend your games or matches, to evaluate your vision performance. They may also study videos of your games.

You may need only one visit to a specialist to set you on your way to better visual skills. However, many specialists have comprehensive training programs that require several visits to complete. These practitioners want to be sure that you devote adequate time and effort to developing your visual skills so they become second nature.

[Page updated July 2007]