Training the Eyes to Win

Keep your eye on the ball.

You've heard it (or said it) a million times. Whether it was repeated by that club coach who smelled like Funyons and Old Spice, or the college volleyball team captain who wore shorts two sizes too small, it was advice that never made much sense. It took one man and eventually a partnership with his son to turn the concept of “keeping your eye on the ball” into something everyone can understand, even a 30-year-old editor who hasn't spent much time in the gym lately.

Starting with baseball great George Brett and the Kansas City Royals in the early 1970s, optometrist Bill Harrison has worked with athletes in nearly every other sport from volleyball to football, helping them sharpen their vision and focus, and teaching them to work out their eye muscles with exercises that seem overtly obvious after you try them for the first time.

Eight years ago, Bill's son Ryan, a sports enthusiast with a degree in exercise physiology from University of California at Davis, joined his father and has helped “take it to another level.”

“We had to make it more functional, easier and more accessible for the public,” said Ryan in an interview before he put yours truly through a training session that, luckily for me, will never make YouTube. “We have to readjust the technique for each sport.”

Everything started off seemingly simple: Ryan pulled out a string with five plastic baseballs attached to it. I held one end up to my nose and focused on the first ball until the string morphed into two strings that intersected at the baseball. Ryan then started moving the ball towards and away from me.

“Essentially, you're doing curls with your eye muscles,” said Ryan as he slid the tiny baseballs up and down the string. “This exercises the eyes' tracking muscles. There are seven muscles in the eyes and we are working six of them to get them to track better. If the strings intersect before the ball, everything looks closer to them than it actually is, and you'll react too quickly. If it's behind the ball, you'll react too late.”

Next, after putting on a pair of polarized glasses, I had to look at a plate with the letter E on it, which would test my dynamic and static depth perception. As Ryan walked backwards, the E disappeared at a certain distance — 10 feet away for me, but closer to 30 feet for true athletes like Barry Bonds.

“Barry has some of the best visual skills of any athlete we've ever worked with,” said Ryan. “He understands how to use his eyes as a tool. A lot of athletes have average to poor depth perception and muscle functionality. They might have good static depth perception, but the muscles don't track well and they have slow visual reaction.”

The training exercise soon became physical, to my immediate dismay. Ryan dragged out something that I still have nightmares about, the BOSU ball. It looked like a simple little exercise tool, a bouncy dome I had to stand on — one-footed, mind you — while I read numbers off of some posters Ryan had placed on the wall in front of me.

“If your focus is on your body, you're not that great of an athlete,” said Ryan, after realizing I was not going to win any trophies for my balance. “You're tight, you're tense and you don't really see the world around you. Your attention can't keep going outward and inward.”

At first it was impossible not to think of what my body was doing. But then, as I focused on the numbers and the images of the balls behind them, I started to display Karate Kid-like balance. Just like Ralph Macchio, my mind had forgotten about what my body was doing, letting it think for itself; I was in a watered-down version of the “zone” many athletes talk about after they play to perfection.

“It's amazing how much your eyes are affected by your balance,” said AVP 2003 Rookie of the Year Matt Fuerbringer, who has trained with Ryan for more than two years. “One of the first times I had a full training session with Ryan I was on my way to a tournament in San Diego in 2005. I had an unbelievable tournament after that session.”

Matt and partner Casey Jennings won that AVP San Diego Open, and they went on to finish sixth overall for the season.

A few weeks after my session with Ryan, I met up with him and Matt during one of their training sessions in the sand at Seal Beach.

“I'm more cognisant of what my eyes do, that's the main gift,” said Matt. “I like having that edge over other players.”

Ryan warmed up Matt with a few of the visual exercises I had experienced, and then went full steam into a workout that would have exhausted a steroid-fueled jackhammer. During one drill, Matt ran between four posters with colored cones placed in the sand placed in front of each one. He read the numbers first, then identified the colors behind them to figure out which of the four cones he was traveling to next.

“When I'm on my game, everything slows down. You pick up the ball earlier, you have more time to react,” Matt added. “In my warm ups, I watch the ball and focus on it. If I'm not focusing, I'll stop and simplify it and concentrate on my eyes not my footwork.

“I do the same thing during the game, simplify and take it down to the basics.”

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Matt Fuerbringer does some "curls" with his eyes with vision trainer Ryan Harrison.

Fuerbes improves his rapid recognition, visual concentration and peripheral vision by using his eyes to search for specific visual clues that trigger body movements.

Ryan Harrison uses quick test for depth perception.

Fuerbes works on his visual processing, memory and peripheral ability, and court awareness by rapidly switching his eyes between two posters of visual cues, recognizing color and jumping over the corresponding cone, all while playing catch with Ryan.