Keep Your Eye on the Ball

Most of us have been told countless times to keep our eye on the ball. That’s good advice, but often hard to follow. If you are not a professional athlete with a retinue of specialists in support of your development, you probably do not know that you can improve your visual skills with training. Even a simple search of the Web will offer you many high-end gadgets and comprehensive training manuals for vision improvement. But I am not willing to spend unnecessarily and want results quickly.

Improving vision and performance through technology has a solid history. President Theodore Roosevelt was severely nearsighted, and only became competent in physically active sports when he was prescribed prescription eyeglasses at the age of 14. I recently heard a behavioral optometrist who works with the Special Olympics tell the story of a young runner who always came in second in his races. After he finished a testing protocol, he was fitted with the appropriate eyeglasses and won his next competition. Apparently, his vision problems forced him to focus on the runner directly in front of him, which made him a perpetual second-place finisher.

AllAboutVision.com offers some interesting and accessible tests and information at no cost. They show an easy-to-follow video to determine which eye is your dominant eye. If you are not close to a computer, simply make a triangle using your thumbs and index fingers. Center this triangle over a distant object. Then shut your left eye. If the object stays centered, you are right-eye dominant. If the object moves out-of-center, you are left-eye dominant.
When I teach a talented young student who is deciding whether to hit a backhand with one or two hands, I want to know which of their eyes is dominant. If they are right-handed and left-eye dominant (this is called “cross-dominance”), I would recommend that they hit a two-hander. They can hit with a more squared or open stance, and move their contact point forward. This allows the dominant eye to follow the ball throughout the stroke.
Focus flexibility is a skill that diminishes with aging. An easy exercise to keep this skill viable is to rapidly change your point of focus from the service line on your side of the court, to the top of the fence behind the opposite side of the court. Do this periodically to keep this skill fresh.

Be careful when dealing with depth perception. Young children do not comprehend depth perception easily, so we develop drills on-court to help them develop this capability. A fun test for adults is to hold a ballpoint pen and its cap about six inches from your chest and put the cap on the pen. Then, extend both arms fully before putting the cap on. Be honest … was it easy the first time?

I have updated a traditional tennis drill for developing a student’s focus. Using mini-court boundaries, I softly hit balls to students and ask them to watch the print on the ball. To make it harder, I then mix up the brand of the balls and the students have to call out which brand they are hitting.

Arthur Ashe’s early teacher, Dr. R. Walter Johnson, created one of the toughest drills I have come across. Dr. Johnson cut down a broom handle to 27-inches and had his students hit tennis balls with it off a rebound wall. Many people avoid me after I suggest they try this.

If you wear eyeglasses, prescription or not, there are terrific choices available. These glasses fall into two general categories: Comfort or Performance Enhancing. If I were a deep-sea fisherman who spent my weekends on the open water, glasses designed for tennis would not work for me. I would get the darkest tint available and I would spend the extra money for polarized lenses, which cut down the glare. Looking at all the open space to the horizon would not require glasses offering maximum visual acuity.

For my tennis glasses, I would still want comfort, but I would consider glasses to help my game.

Back in 1976, American Optical sold eyeglasses made for tennis. The lenses were tinted yellow, and they were made in the wire-frame aviator style. I found them uncomfortable in bright daylight, and too dark for indoor use. The yellow lenses were based on the glasses worn by competition shooters, who found the color enhanced the contrast between the black bull’s eye and the white background of the target. They were a gimmick that did not last.

More recently, I have experimented with some modern performance enhancing lenses, with colors like turquoise, amber and rose. What follows are my opinions, and not a comprehensive survey.

I enjoyed experimenting and I liked the styles, but I believe that these lenses added very little to my playing, maybe as little as changing my string tension by one pound.

I am a long-time wearer of prescription eyeglass with established preferences. I like the Ray Ban G-15 lens, as well as the lenses that darken according to light conditions. The G-15 was designed for the U.S. Navy, whose pilots often had to suddenly take off on missions at night after spending their days in the sun. According to the manufacturer, human eyes do not respond equally to all colors in the visual spectrum, so the G-15 was formulated to emphasize the colors that our eyes see most easily. The G stands for green, and my eyes adjust to this almost immediately—everything looks natural.

The transition lens does not get as dark as the G-15, but because it can change, the lens has less tint on grey and foggy days. For extremely dark days, I keep a pair of non-tinted glasses in my bag.

Finally, let me recommend progressive, or multifocal, lenses for older players. These are lenses designed with channels that allow us to see clearly at different lengths. For tennis players, the important distance seems to be about three- to 10-feet in front of us. Reading glasses or distance-only lenses do not work in this range.

This is 2013, so you probably should be choosing your eyewear as carefully as you do your sunscreen. If you do not need prescription lenses, you have plenty of choices. So remember to keep your eye on the ball. It may not be easy but it is always fun.