Exercise for the Eyes

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 18, 1999 | by Jon Siegel

An innovative trainer teaches athletes to improve their performance by helping tham see better and faster. Referees and judges also benefit from `conditioning with your eyes.'

Harvey Ratner's small studio in a largely abandoned strip mall in Potomac, Md., resembles an oversized toy box: 3-D glasses, an array of whiffle balls connected by wires and funny-looking plastic bottles attached to baseball bats. Ratner is not seeking to regain his lost childhood. He is a visionary in the field of vision, one who sees new ways to help professional athletes improve their performance by maximizing sight.

"It's like weightlifting with your eyes," says Reid Nichols, director of player development for Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers. "It's conditioning with your eyes. We promote conditioning and weightlifting. Vision is something that is sometimes overlooked. It's an untapped market."

Ratner has worked with four major-league teams, boxing great Sugar Ray Leonard, hockey goalies and tennis linesmen. He is talking with the National Football League about improving the accuracy of its officiating. Though his clients are high-profile, his approach is surprisingly low-tech: Ratner uses a variety of handmade tools to help athletes and officials recognize situations fractions of a second earlier; that split-second can be the difference in a baseball player getting a hit or an umpire making the right call.

"If a guy is throwing you a fastball at 84 miles an hour, that is going to take a half-second from his hand to the front of home plate," says Ratner, who works part time as the women's tennis coach at Catholic University in Washington. "Break that into time spans: How much time do you have to see it? How much time do they have to hit it? Well, they'll work on your bat speed until your hands are raw. Most people don't work on seeing the ball earlier."

Some flaws relatively easy to correct: blinking during a play, for example. "Angelo Dundee taught a no-blink response," says Ratner of the legendary boxing trainer. "You have to teach the no-blink. Blink before the ball is snapped."

Ratner, who started HRA Sports Vision in 1980, did not foresee this career, although he has a degree in physical education. He played tennis at Montgomery College and the University of Maryland in the late 1950s and early '60s and later became a tennis instructor, a circumstance that bolstered his interest in sight. He consulted a leading optometrist, Morton Davis, who agreed to trade tennis lessons for instruction in the basics of vision.

"After the first hour of the first day, it was like, `Boom,' a light went on," Ratner recalls. "Unless you teach the vision system, people aren't going to fully learn. They're not picking up the ball quick enough and making decisions. It's like we're learning to play backward."

Ratner's sometimes odd inventions -- his clients called them "toys" then "gadgets" and now "instructional tools" -- have grown in popularity. One of Ratner's most useful is the "juggle stick," a plastic ring about the width of a basketball with four different-color whiffle balls evenly spaced around the rim. The object is to catch the spinning ring by one of the colored balls. The drill promotes quick decisions coupled with hand-eye coordination.

Ratner also improvises with standard equipment -- moving the pitching machine 30 feet closer to home plate, for instance, to force batters to make rapid decisions. He has his hitting students use bats with holes in them -- the object is to track the pitch through the hole to force visual concentration.

Besides training athletes, Ratner has worked with officials to develop specific programs for sports agencies such as the U.S. Tennis Association, or USTA. "Some people think it's too scientific," says Rich Kaufman, USTA's director of officials. "But I think the jury is still out on that. It could be very useful. It's sort of a new cutting edge." Ratner also has worked outside sports, helping police departments improve officer's' speed of recognition in life-and-death situations.