Improve your softball visual skills with Vizual Edge

Train your visual skills to improve your performance.

Bat more consistently
Improve your fielding percentage
Sharpen pitch location
Develop focus, concentration and decision–making skills
Improve your timing, balance and confidence
Make faster decisions on the field
See the location, motion, and rotation of the ball better
React more quickly to field fly balls, line drives and grounders
Develop visual confidence at the plate

Train your visual skills that impact your performance on the softball field!

Eye alignment
Flexibility of eye movements
Speed of focusing
Speed of processing visual information
Reaction time
Visual concentration
Visual confidence

Hitting a pitched softball requires many skills, however you can’t hit what you can’t see. Athletes with efficient visual skills have visual confidence at the plate. In order to hit a pitched ball, you need to see the location, motion and rotation of the ball. Training the speed and efficiency of the two eyes moving together will allow you to get your eyes on the ball.

When fielding fly balls, line drives and grounders, you use the information from your eyes to react. Visual information influences your decision-making on field.

Softball Teams Using the VEPT

Softball Vision Performance Testimonials

Higher Ground Softball

Bobby Simpson
Founder and CEO of Higher Ground Softball

Hi, I'm Bobby Simpson, Founder and CEO of Higher Ground Softball.

During almost forty years of instruction in many facets of softball and baseball, including international elite level softball, I am firmly convinced that visual and mental skills separate players that have similar physical skills. To be successful, players must collect visual information, analyze it, decide what to do with it, act on it, and then learn from it. The process starts with and depends upon complete and accurate collection of visual information.

Vizual Edge testing and training can greatly increase the odds of success by determining a player's visual strengths and weaknesses, then help that player improve those critical skills. It's user friendly, it's cost-effective, and it works.

Bobby Simpson
Founder and CEO of Higher Ground Softball

University of Tennessee Softball

Karen Weekly
Co-Head Softball Coach at the University of Tennessee

Hi, I'm Karen Weekly, Co-Head Softball Coach at the University of Tennessee. There is no question that visual performance is critical to success in the sport of fastpitch softball, where a hitter has less than .4 of a second to make a decision once the ball is pitched. Typical of most coaches, I always believed that an athlete either had good eyesight or they didn't, and there was nothing that could be done to change it. I was truly excited when I learned there was a program that could provide "weight training for our eyes" and thereby improve our decision making and reaction time. The Vizual Edge program is an essential part of our training. With the program, we are able to assess our athletes' visual skills, provide a user-friendly, competitive and fun training program to improve those skills, and then evaluate and track our athletes' improvement. I definitely recommend the Vizual Edge program to any athlete or team that is looking to gain an extra edge on the competition.

Karen Weekly
Co-Head Softball Coach at the University of Tennessee

Softball Sports Vision Articles

Vizual Edge puts vision training in the crosshairs of diamond success

Seeing is believing

by: Don Cameron
Softball West (3/22/2012)

Joe Kinsella, head coach of Lake Forest College softball, said Vizual Edge’s recent shift to web-based technology allowed him to seamlessly incorporate the tool into his team’s train- ing program.

Softball players participating in VEPT believed their visual skills improved, enhanced performance

PERCEPTIONS AND ATTITUDES OF COLLEGE SOFTBALL PLAYERS PARTICIPATING IN VEPT

by: Frank J. Spaniol, Professor, Sport Science
Unpublished survey (10/10/2011)

As a group, 79% believed that VEPT increased their ability to “focus”, 74% felt the visual practice improved their concentration, and 73% agreed the training augmented their ability to “see” the ball. In addition, 33% reported more consistency, 67% believed batting results increased, 66% felt their fielding improved, and 67% reported superior balance. Overall, the results of this survey indicate that a significant number of college softball players participating in VEPT believed their visual skills improved, which they felt translated into enhanced performance.

Des clubs de baseball utilisent des logiciels pour améliorer la vision de leurs athlètes.

L'entrainement visuel, l'avenir du sport?

by: Seth Stevenson
Slate France (6/10/2009)

Barry Seiller (l'ophtalmologiste qui a conçu le logiciel Vizual Edge en 2002) a réalisé des analyses et des tests d'acuité visuelle pour différentes équipes (les Houston Astros, les San Diego Padres, les Cincinnati Reds et autres Seattle Mariners, Texas Rangers, Milwaukee Brewers ainsi que les hockeyeurs des Chicago Blackhawks); il a fait de même pour quelques programmes de sport universitaires et pour plusieurs sportifs participant aux Jeux olympiques. (Les équipes de bobsleigh développent leur capacité de convergence afin de mieux évaluer les angles d'entrée et de sortie dans les courbes de vitesse des pistes.) «Les athlètes de haut niveau jouissent d'une acuité visuelle développée», si l'on en croit Seiller. Selon lui, rien qu'en analysant les résultats obtenus par des joueurs de la Minor League sur le Vizual Edge, il a souvent pu deviner lesquels auraient les meilleurs moyennes à la batte.

Athletes who use vision performance training hit the ball harder

EFFECT OF VISUAL SKILLS TRAINING ON THE BATTING PERFORMANCE OF NCAA DIVISI

by: Frank Spaniol, Randy Bonnette, Liette Ocker, Don Melrose, Jeff Paluseo, and David Szymanski
Poster publication NSCA Meeting 2008 (7/14/2008)

The results of this study indicate that NCAA DI baseball players that received visual skills training produced significantly higher batted- ball velocities than NCAA DI baseball players that did not receive visual skills training.

Vizual Edge Performance Training Software

Product Review

by: Ken Krause
Softball Magazine (5/1/2008)

See the ball, hit the ball. That's a mantra that is repeated on a daily basis on fastpitch softball fields all over the world. Coaches (and parents) tell their hitters to see the ball big, watch it all the way in, get a good look, etc. Yet while it a~1 sounds like good advice, few can actually tell them how to make It happen. That's where VizualEdge Performance Training software comes in.

Vision training for athletes evolved from reading therapies developed decades ago to help children

A Little Flabby Around the Eyeballs

by: GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
New York Times (2/5/2006)

Vision training for athletes evolved from reading therapies developed decades ago to help children with learning disabilities and people with amblyopia ("lazy eye") concentrate and follow lines of text. Unlike exercises designed to strengthen eye muscles, reading therapy works to improve the eye-brain connection. Sports vision therapy takes it one step further. "It's about eye-hand-foot-body-brain coordination," says Dr. Barry Seiller, an ophthalmologist who is Brett Basanez's vision specialist and the director of the Visual Fitness Institute in Vernon Hills, Ill. "Maybe you foul off the ball a lot, or you have all the technical skills but somehow just can't put it together. You go into slumps. You fail in the clutch. All of that, to us, screams 'visual problems."'

College Softball student-athletes find benefits from vision training

ATTITUDES AND PERCEPTIONS OF NCAA DIVISION I SOFTBALL PLAYERS PARTICIPATING

by: Spaniol, F.J., Seiller, B.L.,K. Puchalski
Unpublished survey (4/1/2005)

Athetes have found numerous benefits to vision performance training both on and off the field.