The development of protocols and norms for sports vision evaluations

The purpose of this study was to find the most appropriate protocol to establish norms for the most important visual skills required by elite athletes in sports performance. One hundred and fifty eight elite athletes were tested and their visual skills categorized as being: superior, above average, average, ineffective or needs immediate attention. Two methods namely, the percentage method and the mean and standard deviation method were employed to find the most applicable way to establish these categories. The results indicate that elite athletes perform very well for all the visual skills tested and that the norms thus established suggest the importance of these visual skills in sports performance.