By Lee Davis
Good eyesight has played a major role in careers of famous athletes.
Baseball legend Babe Ruth’s vision allegedly was so good that he could read the label of a 78 RPM record while it was revolving on a phonograph player. Ted Williams, the last major leaguer to complete a regular season with a batting average higher than .400, claimed that he could follow the ball until it was practically in the catcher’s mitt and still whip his bat around in time to connect. In contrast, Ronald Reagan never played college baseball because his vision was poor.
As essential as vision and hand-eye coordination are to success in sports, many assumed for decades that they were essentially God-given traits and comparatively little could be done to improve them.
That attitude has greatly changed. A new business, Sports Vision South, located on Lorna Road in Hoover, is a high-performance vision and cognitive training center that helps elite athletes train their eyes for peak proficiency.
“Sports Vision is based on the simple but powerful premise that vision is a learned skill and, like any other skill, it can be improved with practice,” said Dr. Dorri Goldschimdt of Sports Vision South. “Elite performers in any endeavor require both finely-honed visual and motor skills, and an essential part of their competitive edge depends on how well they are able to integrate these skills in dynamic situations.”
Goldschmidt said the average person uses only 30 percent to 40 percent of their visual potential and, although elite athletes use much more, there is room for improvement.
“Research has shown that up to 80 percent of common athletic mistakes can be accounted for by vision errors, but despite this very few coaches or athletes are aware of the benefits of Sports Vision’s training techniques,” said Goldschmidt.
The techniques involve a sophisticated program of electronic perception/reaction exercises that can produce dramatic results in eye-hand coordination, peripheral awareness, concentration under stress conditions, speed and span of recognition, depth perception and anticipation timing.
“The objective is to get eyesight to the highest capacity,” Goldschmidt said. “And you can take that vision awareness and make it an asset in virtually any sport.”
Goldschmidt said that the earlier a young athlete develops those vision skills, the more quickly he or she will be ready for competition at a higher level.
“If kids start at 12 or 13, they will be ahead of others who have not had the training,” she said. “They will have an advantage when they get to more elite competition.
“Whether it’s soccer or football, the training can give the athlete better vision of the field of play,” she continued. “It can help a basketball player improve their free throw shooting. In ice hockey, Wayne Gretsky’s best asset was his awareness of everything going on around him.”
The optometry center of Sports Vision doesn’t conduct traditional eye exams, instead emphasizing an athlete’s dynamic visual skills. These skills include accommodation, convergence and divergence, anticipation timing, concentration, depth perception, reaction time, peripheral awareness, speed and span of recognition and stress effect.
This set of skills is identified through a high definition screening process that measures visual acuity, contrast visual acuity, refractive error and visual edge evaluation. Sports Vision South’s state-of-the-art technology will pinpoint the deficiencies in the eyes and increase their effectiveness.
Goldschmidt, a graduate of the University of Alabama School of Optometry, entered sports vision training by seeking out the top professionals in the field with proven track records of training pro athletes and even police tactical units and military special forces.
“My goal is to help athletes and individuals perform at their peak with the most effective services and technology available,” she said.
As technology related to sports medicine grows, the old saying, “Keep your eye on the ball,” is now a measurable skill. Sports Vision South hopes to make that essential part of success in sports better than ever.
