OF A SPORTS VISION OPTOMETRIST Inside the world

come to me. Obviously, if they fail a short screening, they come to me, and we do a full workup here.” the gym – not in a consulting room – it sparked an online conversation about his atypical approach to vision assessment.

“Here” is Gerry’s appropriately named Brisbane practice, Eyeman Optometrists, which includes a sports facility where athletes can perform drills specific to their sport and optometrists can observe.

“For the amateur but keen sportsperson, which is more of what I do than professional athletes, that’s what we do here. Patients of any age can come and put in contact lenses and face a cricket ball, a soccer ball or football. If a patient wants contact lenses for golf, we can put them in, and swing a golf club in our onsite facility,” he explains.

In February 2022, Eyeman Optometrists was affected by floods, which forced the practice to close for a week, but it hasn’t slowed demand. Gerry, who has a degree in optometry and completed a Masters in Sports Vision, works with junior through to elite athletes.

He was recently invited to work with the Brisbane Bullets (NBL) after the team’s strength and conditioning coach, Mr Stewart Briggs, requested his services.

His career has taken him Australia-wide as a consultant, conducting vision screenings for other sporting organisations like the Australian Institute of Sport, Cricket Australia, Cricket Umpires Australia, Queensland Cricket, the NRL, AFL and Fox Sports.

In Gerry’s experienced opinion, convergence is one of, if not the most, important visual skills for any sport where the ball is coming towards a player. He says there are three or four players on the Brisbane Bullets basketball team with poor binocular control and convergence.

“Binocular vision –because that gives you a spatial understanding of where you are, and where things are relative to you – that remains the biggest and most important skill in sport,” he says.

As Gerry explained in the post, after 30 years working with elite athletes, he finds it best working in their environment, making the testing specific and to their needs. Hence, all testing and training is done where the athletes are, typically in gyms.

“At the end of the day, if you are testing these players under the same conditions – under fatigue conditions – you’ve got a much better way of understanding what their vision and eyes are doing in a game,” says Gerry, nicknamed ‘The Eyeman’ by former AFL player Justin Leppitsch because he couldn’t remember Gerry’s name.

“Any patient, whether it be a sportsperson or not, who sits in your chair is hypersensitive to what their eyes are doing. They’ll be more likely to try harder to get results right or, if they’re not fatigued, they’re less likely to show any sort of compensation that’s breaking down.

“That’s why I’m quite adamant that I need to go to them, not them

Gerry says a sport like basketball has less acuity demand due to smaller court size and close proximity of players. Therefore, he is not overly concerned about minor visual acuity issues. Instead, he focuses on depth perception, binocular performance and ocular health.

“We’ve got a squad of 12 or 14 players at the Bullets, I’m not going to change all of them. I’m just going to work with those who have a definite problem.”

He recently introduced proprioceptive training after the Bullet’s CEO spoke to him about one player who is amblyopic. The approach focuses on the use of somatosensory signals in the absence of information from other modalities such as vision.

“The player has learned ways to adapt but the coaching staff were worried about certain things he was doing. It was a really great conversation. I predicted what I thought he was doing to compensate, and that correlated with their observations of him adjusting to errors,” Gerry says.

“I suggested trying proprioceptive training. There’s nothing new about this technique, but if you follow basketball, players have often worn glasses that blocked their vision inferiorly so they couldn’t see the ball while dribbling. You’re trying to teach people to have skill acquisition without direction of vision. So, this is more about skill development.”

In the case of the Bullets player with amblyopia, Gerry says he wears glasses, or goggles, where the central superior visual field is blocked out, but he can still see peripherally and inferiorly. He can wear them on the court; but has limited vision of the board and basket.

“We’re teaching him to be aware of his surroundings and shoot with a confidence of feel, not relying on his vision per se.”

Gerry says sportspeople have experimented with this kind of concept for years.

“Some people like it, some don’t. Tiger Woods is famous for his dad forcing him to play golf, even though it was dark, to make Tiger learn to feel the distance, not rely on what he saw,” he explains.

“When you’re dealing with an elite athlete, and you’re trying to change a skill, you are untraining them, and this takes much longer than to train them. For example, if you’re right-handed and I wanted to teach you to change your writing skill with your right hand, it would be more difficult than to teach you to write with your left.”

Gerry points to cricket as another example.

“If a coach tries to teach a kid to play a good shot and he plays it badly but still gets four runs, what has he learned from it? He’s learnt nothing. He still thinks he can play a bad shot but get four runs – all that matters to him is the four – whereas what we want people to do, by blocking out their vision, is to feel what their muscles are doing.”

FROM WORST TO FIRST

As a father of two teenage boys, Gerry knows how much sport plays a big part in kids’ lives. His best advice to optometrists interested in furthering their skills in sports vision is to simply talk to patients and find out which play sports.

“Typically, a patient in their mid to late 40s or early 50s comes in and they have a child who plays sport,” he says.

“The parent may have astigmatism that needs correction. You have a conversation about the impact on their vision. You can ask if their child wears contact lenses for sport. They might say they coach an under 14s team. You can ask if they’ve considered having all the kids’ vision screened.”

Like the NBL player’s vision screening in the gym, sometimes these conversations take place at kid’s sporting grounds, rather than in his consulting rooms.

He points to an occasion at his local rugby club where a child constantly dropped the ball.

“I spoke to his dad and said, ‘It’s none of my business and I’ll understand if you tell me to go jump in the lake, but your son’s just not catching the ball, I reckon he’s got some eye problems’. He said he’d taken his son to the shopping centre optometrist, and everything was okay. I asked him to give me five seconds and to show him something.”

By demonstrating the son had a vision issue, Gerry could then explain how he could correct the boy’s vision, and how that would then transfer to his sporting skills.

“This kid was getting put in the wrong positions on the field and getting dragged whenever he made a mistake. I saw him being belittled for no reason, so I made it my goal to correct his vision. He transferred into the kids’ team I coach in 2022 and played unbelievably well – he won best and fairest. He went from being the pariah who got three to five minutes a game to playing all bar 10 minutes in the grand final,” Gerry says.

“He had a really large exophoria so he had no depth perception, none. We fixed that with exercises and prisms – no contact lenses, no glasses – and taught him where to look when he caught.”

When someone’s making the same mistake repeatedly, and they’re copping feedback from people, they change the way they should do things.

“This young player was just looking at the wrong place. His eyes were never on the ball, they were always behind the ball. It took a while – over two rugby seasons – to correct his eyes and get him looking in front of the ball so he could give himself more time – and he never played wing again,” he says.

For a young optometrist who wants to get into sports vision, Gerry says it’s about having the right conversation and an understanding and confidence they can diagnose and correct the issue.