Sports Vision Optometrist

The recipe for making a Professional Athlete is fairly simple: Combine two parts skill with one part each of strength, endurance, speed, agility, flexibility, and sportsmanship. Shake, then serve.

Still missing something? That’s because the best recipes of Chefs always have a secret ingredient. And when it comes to sports, that ingredient is vision.

When you’re a Sports Vision Optometrist, you’re paid to help amateurs and Professional Athletes alike improve their athletic performance by improving their eyesight.

Think about it: Hitting a golf ball or a baseball requires excellent eye-hand-body coordination. Keeping an eye on your opponents when you’re playing soccer, football, or basketball requires tremendous peripheral vision. And making a successful volley in tennis or volleyball requires flawless depth perception for quickly judging the distance between yourself, the ball, and your opponent.

As a Sports Vision Optometrist, you understand the correlation between how well you see and how well you play. Like a Personal Trainer, you therefore help your patients enhance their visual fitness by assessing — and then exercising — their eyesight. As with other types of Optometrists, your work as a Sports Vision Optometrist typically starts with an eye exam and ends with a prescription for glasses or contact lenses (and maybe even sport-specific protective eyewear). In addition, it often involves vision therapy techniques borrowed from Behavioral Optometrists, who believe that eyes can be “trained” to work better just like muscles can.

It makes sense. After all, eyes are, in fact, muscles — and it’s your job to pump them up like a Coach does a Bodybuilder!