Vision training for racquetball is something I ran into many moons ago! I was coaching a junior team and we played another club’s team. They spent 15 minutes practicing eye exercises while we practiced forehands and backhands. We annihilated them, but the losing team did see the aces better!
I do not mean to belittle eye work. I can think of many players who used it and with great success. I just think it takes a ton of time.
I had a long discussion with a young coach on eye work. Sports vision is a skill that is worked on in pro academies. It can be worked on in racquetball. But I explained to the coach that forehand and backhand technique have to be done first as does footwork. Then you can train the eyes. He explained he took big steps and because he saw the ball so well he could meet the ball with varying steps and kill or it execute correct shots.
I thought about it and began to ask myself this question; “Yes but what if you did not make the shot the first time? How can you recover and get to the next shot without taking false steps?”
I explored sports vision when I played tournament racquetball and found it to be very time consuming. I chose to spend my time practicing shots. If I advised a pro athlete with time to train, I would definitely recommend it.
But to recommend to take as few steps as possible so you can track the ball better is to ignore other details of footwork or to put it a different way-maybe that’s what an optometrist would probably do-not what a racquetball coach would do!