What Should I Do With My Eyes
From day one when kids are learning to dribble a basketball, coaches teach them to keep their eyes up. At camp we used to walk backward in front of tiny dribblers while holding up numbers with our fingers that they were to identify as they bounced the ball while making their way down the court.
“You don’t need to look at the ball”, we would tell them. “It will come right back to you from the floor. Like it’s on a string. Trust it, learn to feel it. Let the ball become an extension of your hand. There are other things you need to look at. Just let the ball do what it does.”
“It will come right back to you from the floor. Like it’s on a string. Trust it, learn to feel it. Let the ball become an extension of your hand. There are other things you need to look at. Just let the ball do what it does.”
It is imperative that basketball players learn to keep their eyes up. When you look up, you get a sense about where your teammates are and where they’re going. You can identify threats from opponents as well as chinks in the armor of their positioning, places where they could be vulnerable for attack. Basketball players have lots of things to look at, but the ball is the least of their worries. They have far more important things to do with their eyes.
Henry David Thoreau once said, “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” Basketball is a game of peripheral vision. The more you can see without looking at it, the better a player you become. But that’s not true across the board. Baseball, golf, and tennis-- among others-- are just the opposite. Success, to a large degree, in those sports, hinges on your ability to keep your eye on the ball.
Somewhere around the beginning of the middle of my life, I became enamored with tennis. It’s a hustler’s game, unlike its late-life cousin, golf, the game that gives you nothing for getting somewhere fast. And in tennis, the teaching points--skill wise--are 180 degrees away from basketball. You don’t stay square, you don’t step-slide and no matter how tempting it might be to try a look-away shot, it’s never a great idea to take your eye off the ball.
More than once, when I’m not hitting well, the coach on the other side of the net will say, “Keep your eye on the ball.” And my internal eye--the one that is elite with sarcasm--will roll. “Great tip,” I will mutter under my disgusted-with-myself breath, even though I know that it’s precisely the thing I had failed to do.
Where we look always matters, but just looking guarantees nothing. Eyes alone don’t see.
Where we look always matters, but just looking guarantees nothing. Eyes alone don’t see.
What allows us to detect and appreciate and understand and ascertain is a complicated convergence of the eyes and the brain (and the heart, if you really want to get the whole picture). What we’re thinking while we’re looking—or whether or not we are—is what in the end determines what, if anything, we see. Simply stated: the more engaged we are when gazing, the better our vision will be.
Most often when I miss hit the tennis ball, it’s not because my eyes were up high on a distant target (though occasionally that is where they go). It’s usually, instead, because my eyes are down toward the ball, but my brain is in the parking lot thinking about what I’m about to have for lunch. Likewise, a basketball player who keeps her eyes to the rim but her mind on the scoreboard, won’t be apt to see the next play she should make on the floor. The mind is a slippery soldier, but it must be an interested partner. Without it the eyes can’t see.
Thoreau’s statement was profound, though I don’t think he had sports on his mind when he said it. Something has to be a point of focus, because if not, then by definition nothing is. And that will be a problem regardless of what you do. Focusing on nothing just opens the doors and the windows for the riff raff to get in. And riff raff does little better, than wildly distort a view.
Regardless of where your eyes go, your mind needs to come along, too.
Sherri Coale
P.S. The car goes where your eyes go...