AVP players Saralyn Smith (left) and Jen Snyder helped Rett demonstrate these drills. Photos by James Rulison
By Rett Larson
An old proverb says “the eyes are the windows to the soul.”
Unfortunately, not everyone’s windows can keep an unblocked line hit from getting wrapped around their face. Eighty percent of the input your body receives is visual, which makes your eyes one of the most powerful and overlooked muscles in volleyball conditioning.
Your visual system leads your motor system, so if you’re seeing better, you’re reacting and moving quicker. The good news is like any muscle, your eye can be trained to be stronger and faster.
Most athletes don’t even know they have a dominant eye, one that processes and transmits information to the brain a little faster than the other and controls the movements of the other weaker eye.
Here’s a test to find yours. Extend your arms at shoulder height and form a small triangular hole between the thumbs and index fingers. Now pick a distant object and center it in the hole. Without moving your hands or head, slowly close one eye at a time. The eye that has the object lined up in the hole is your dominant eye.
So, how do you go about making it easier to track the ball, see things out of your peripheral vision, or focus on a nasty float serve? The first thing you need to do is check your hardware—go make sure you don’t need to get contacts.
Next is software—your eye muscles and motor system. You can strengthen them by doing these simple drills. At the very least, you’ll have more constructive criticism when the referee misses a line call.
Unfortunately, athletes these days spend a lot of time looking into glowing computer screens. Staring at objects very close to you will, over time, change the shape of your eyeball and make it tough for you to see objects far away.
It will be even harder for you to track a ball that starts on the service line and is hit at 50 miles-per-hour toward your face.
To make those muscles stronger, we use a deck of playing cards and practice doing near-far drills while we do our core bridge series.
Take half the deck and hold it about one foot in front of the athlete (who is in a perfect plank position) and the other deck about 10 feet away. The player has 30 seconds to see how many cards they can go through reading—one near, then one far and so on. Once the player can get 20 cards in 30 seconds we move the far cards farther away.
The best hitters in baseball don’t just see a white ball hurling at them, they see the rotation of the seams. That acute focus is true of the best volleyball passers as well.
By training your eyes to track a small portion of the ball and not the whole thing, you’ll force your eyes to keep focus longer. If you’ve ever watched Karch pass a ball you’ll see that his head and eyes follow it all the way into his platform.
To train your focus, create a Marsden ball (optometry talk) by taking a volleyball and writing big numbers on it. Start by simply throwing the ball back and forth with a partner, trying to focus on one number as soon as possible and calling it out as you catch it. Make it more difficult by “peppering” with the same rules.
When you’re ready, start receiving serves with the ball, calling out the number as soon as you see it and tracking it all the way to your platform. If that’s not too much, add numbers of different colors to the ball and have the server call out the color to track as they serve.
Combining focus with good anticipation can lead to good decision making in competition. Research has linked the anticipation of the kind of serve, and consequently the trajectory of the ball, to specific cues in the visual search strategies of expert players. Reaction time can also be enhanced using simple closed and open-eye drills.
The athlete starts in a ready position with their eyes closed. Their partner tosses the ball as the athlete visualizes the probable trajectory of it. On the partner’s command, the athlete opens their eyes, reacts and passes the ball. Make this more difficult by lessening the amount of time they have to react or increasing the speed of the toss.
Add vision training to your acceleration workouts. Most liberos know that it’s one thing to focus on an object when you’re standing at the optometrist’s office, but it’s another to do it when you’re racing to track down a tipped ball.
Once you have mastered fundamental acceleration mechanics, tape a standard eye chart to the wall in front of you and accelerate toward it in a harness. While you run, attempt to read certain lines off the eye chart. As you get even more advanced, read it while keeping your head down, as most volleyball action occurs in the top third of your field of vision.
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