Visual skills of athletes versus nonathletes: development of a sports vision testing battery

The field of sports vision has a fundamental premise that athletes require superior visual abilities to succeed in their sporting activity. This study takes a scientific look at what appear to be sports-related visual abilities using a clinical battery of vision tests to compare the visual performances of athletes to nonathletes. Significantly better visual performances were found to exist in the athletic population for certain visual skills: vergence facility, saccades, visual reaction time, peripheral awareness and near point of convergence. The tests for accommodative facility, visual proaction time, span of recognition distance phoria and distance stereopsis did not yield a statistically significant difference between the groups. These results provide a foundation for the development of a research-based sports vision testing battery.