Sports Vision FAQ: Questions Athletes and Parents Ask

Sports vision is the area of eye care and performance training concerned with the visual skills athletes use in play: tracking moving objects, judging speed and depth, peripheral awareness, eye-hand coordination, and how quickly the brain turns what the eyes see into a decision. Sharp eyesight on a chart (20/20) is only one of those skills. At Ares it starts with a 75-minute evaluation and continues with training built from the results.

What the evaluation measures

Compare providers on facts you can check: who runs the session and what they are licensed to do, what is measured in person on physical hardware rather than only on a screen, whether you leave with your own written baseline, and the full price, including follow-up.

Ares Elite Sports Vision is in Carmel, in the Indianapolis area. Evaluations are run on physical hardware by Dr. Joseph LaPlaca, OD, an optometrist licensed in Indiana, and the prices are published: $449 for the 75-minute evaluation and $299 for a re-evaluation.

Six questions to ask any sports vision provider

A typical in-office training session lasts 45 minutes and is highly focused. You will run through dynamic drills that couple visual tracking with physical motor responses—such as tracking multiple moving targets on a screen while balancing, reacting to peripheral cues on tactile boards (Senaptec/SVT), or executing sport-specific movements while wearing strobe-occlusion eyewear. We recommend 1 to 2 sessions per week, combined with 10 minutes of daily home neuro-visual work. There is no fixed number of weeks: training is planned around your season and continues as part of your preparation, with progress measured at re-evaluation.

How sports vision training works

Not on its own. 20/20 describes static visual acuity: how clearly you read still letters on a wall chart. It tells us nothing about how well your visual system works in motion. Sports require dynamic visual processing: tracking moving targets, estimating depth and speed, maintaining peripheral awareness, and getting what you see to your muscles under fatigue.

What a sports vision evaluation tests

Training uses physical exercises, eye-tracking systems and specialized lighting, and no medication. Our age floors are firm: evaluations start at age 10, and training starts at age 12. Dr. LaPlaca lowers the training floor only in exceptional individual circumstances. Those floors exist because the visual-cognitive system needs enough developmental maturity for the measurements to mean something.

Sports vision for young athletes

No, and we do not claim it does. No training program prevents concussions. What we train and measure is visual performance: peripheral detection, processing speed, and reaction time. An athlete who picks up the play earlier has more time to make a decision. Injury prevention and concussion management belong to your athlete's medical team. Ares does not diagnose concussions or clear athletes for return to play.

Concussion baseline testing

We do not claim it does. Some of the visual skills trained at Ares, such as saccades (quick eye movements from one point to another), eye teaming (how well the eyes work together) and sustained visual focus, are also used in reading. Ares training is sports performance training: it is not a treatment for reading, learning or attention difficulties, and we do not measure school outcomes. If your child struggles with reading, book a comprehensive eye exam with an optometrist.

We provide coaches with objective visual-cognitive profiles for their roster. By identifying each player's primary bottleneck (visual capture delay, cognitive routing lag, or motor execution delay), coaches can tailor skill training and position assignments. For example, a quarterback with a routing bottleneck may benefit from simplified visual reads, while a receiver with an acquisition bottleneck requires tracking drills.

Sports vision for coaches

It shows how an athlete’s numbers change under load; it does not predict a game. We test reaction time and decision accuracy both at rest and under athletic load (elevated heart rate and physical fatigue), so a coach can see which athletes lose speed or accuracy when they are tired. That is one input for decisions about training and rotations, alongside everything else a coach knows about the player.

Ares offers mobile on-site visual screening services for clubs, high schools, universities, and professional teams. We bring portable eye-tracking systems and tactile response arrays to your facility to benchmark your entire roster in a single day. Each player receives a millisecond-accurate visual scorecard, and the coaching staff receives a group dashboard summarizing roster-wide strengths and bottlenecks.

Team and roster screening

We require a standard indoor room (such as a classroom, conference room, or section of a gym) with access to power outlets and stable Wi-Fi. Our team handles the entire setup, and we coordinate with your coaching staff to rotate players through the 15-minute screening stations in small groups, ensuring minimal disruption to your practice or meeting schedules.

The A.R.E.S. protocols draw on the principles of neuroplasticity and visual-motor integration. In practice, the evaluation and training measure and work on saccadic accuracy, smooth pursuits, stereopsis under load, contrast sensitivity, multiple object tracking, and the time it takes to turn what the eyes see into a decision and a movement. Progress is judged by each athlete’s own numbers at re-evaluation, not by claims about what changes in the brain.

A.R.E.S. provider certification

We use a curated suite of elite sensory technologies, including eye-tracking systems, strobe-occlusion eyewear (to force reliance on predictive spatial awareness), tactile coordinate reaction boards (Senaptec / SVT) for Choice Reaction Time and peripheral response, and 3D multiple object tracking (MOT) systems to train spatial attention mapping under high cognitive load.

Technology and data

The comprehensive 75-minute Sports Vision Performance Evaluation costs $449. This diagnostic session includes static/dynamic vision audits, eye-tracking calibration, Choice Reaction Time (CRT) mapping, post-error slowing telemetry, and a complete, printed/dispatched Millisecond Scorecard. Book your time on our booking page (every Book Your Evaluation button opens it), then pay online at areselitesports.vision/pay/evaluation. The payment link is also in your booking confirmation email.

What the evaluation tests, and who runs it

Our facility is located at 510 W. Carmel Dr., 2nd Floor, Carmel, IN 46032, and the Sports Vision Performance Evaluation is done there, in person. For athletes outside Central Indiana, we offer virtual Tele-Training packages: we ship customized training gear (including strobe-occlusion eyewear) and host live, one-on-one virtual training sessions with our performance staff.

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