Eye Care for Athletes

Thousands of sports-related eye injuries happen every year and the overwhelming majority are preventable. Basketball has one of the highest rates of any sport, almost entirely from fingers and elbows rather than the ball. Baseball and softball produce fewer but more severe injuries because of projectile speed. Racquet sports combine high velocity with a confined space.

Ordinary prescription glasses are not protective. Standard lenses can shatter, standard frames are not built to absorb impact, and the frame itself becomes a hazard. Protective sports eyewear is built to a different standard with polycarbonate lenses and a frame designed to retain them under load, and it can be made to your prescription.

One rule we treat as absolute: any athlete with useful vision in only one eye should wear protective eyewear for every sport, without exception. The consequence of losing the second eye is not recoverable.

Glasses are a poor solution during most sport. They slide, they fog, they collect sweat, they limit peripheral vision, and in contact play they are an injury risk.

Daily disposable contact lenses are the simplest option for most athletes. Nothing to clean, a fresh sterile lens every session, and no consequence if one is lost mid-game.

For swimmers, and for anyone whose sport makes lenses impractical, orthokeratology is frequently the better answer. The correction happens overnight and the athlete competes with no lens and no glasses at all. For a young athlete whose myopia is also progressing, it addresses both at once.

Playing outdoors here means intense sun for most of the year. An outfielder losing a ball in the sun and a golfer misreading a green in flat midday light are both contrast problems, and both are addressable.

Sport-specific tints target this directly, and different tints enhance contrast in different conditions. Grey is the safest all-purpose choice. Brown and amber enhance contrast and depth perception, which suits golf and any sport where judging terrain matters.

Full ultraviolet protection is non-negotiable given the cumulative exposure of a career spent training outdoors in this climate, and it should be built into whatever the athlete wears rather than added afterward.

Correcting an uncorrected prescription produces a large and immediate improvement. That is where most of the real gain is, and plenty of young athletes labelled uncoordinated turn out to have an uncorrected refractive error or a binocular vision problem.

Training visual skills produces smaller, more gradual gains, and the evidence is stronger for some skills than others. We start by making sure the basics are right rather than selling a training programme to someone whose actual problem is that they need glasses.