I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t read the sports page.  In fact, I didn’t realize that Tampa is home to the 2009 Super Bowl until relatively recently.  So I most likely would have missed an article in the Wall Street Journal if it wasn’t emailed to me by a colleague. It is a story about the Arizona Cardinals’ wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald.

Here is an interesting snippet about Mr. Fitzgerald:

When he was young, his grandfather, Robert Johnson, the founder of a optometry clinic in Chicago, set out to make sure his grandson had “visual dominance” — at first because he was having trouble in school. From the time Mr. Fitzgerald was in first grade, during summer visits, Mr. Johnson would take him to the clinic and have him stand on balance beams and wobbly boards while doing complicated hand-eye drills. By the time his grandson was 12 and emerging as an athlete, Dr. Johnson tailored many of these exercises to athletics. To improve the boy’s precision, control, spatial judgment and rhythm, for instance, Dr. Johnson would hang a painted ball from the ceiling and have him try to hit the colored dots on the ball with the matching colored stripes on a rolling pin.

Although the WSJ doesn’t use the term, the article is describing Sports Vision – the improvement of a variety of visual skills to improve performance on the field. It goes on to discuss the benefits of such experience. Sports Vision can benefit anyone from children to professional athletes,  whether or not they have a vision problem.

If you are interested, you can read the entire article here.

Be Well!

Nathan Bonilla-Warford, OD
Bright Eyes Family Vision Care
Located in the Westchase area of Tampa.