Soft vs Hard Eyes

How soft are your eyes

Recognition of the full field is one of the biggest challenges for many ultimate teams. We’ve all experienced the frustration of handlers staring straight down the field and not seeing a wide open cut juuust outside their vision or a defender not helping on a wide open cutter that sprinting right past their shoulder. There’s a myriad of reasons for that but one of the keys to improving this is improving how and where you direct your focus as a player.

What are soft and hard eyes?

It’s quite simple to feel the difference here. Pick out an object near you and focus on it hard in the center of your vision. The more tension you introduce by narrowing your eyes and squeezing your jaw the smaller the range of your peripheral vision becomes, and even everything else in your vision becomes a little dimmer. Now do the same but keep your eyes open and relax everything in your face - you’ll find an increased peripheral vision range, and you’ll also probably find your eyes flicking to other objects around the center of your vision rather than staying fully on the object in the center.

Or to give it a more visual example here’s a super lame scene of Sauron’s eye narrowing from the Lord of the Rings movies. You see as well the way his vision is shown as a literal narrow searchlight (ffs Peter Jackson) darting around the place, well that’s what a lot of ultimate players look like with the disc in hand!

What’s the problem with ‘hard’ eyes

The essential problem is you become like that Sauron searchlight. As a thrower or a cutter or a defender downfield even if you’re moving your head and checking different angles you’re only allowing yourself to notice a narrow window at a time instead of letting yourself take in all in information in your field of view. Of course this is most noticeable when a thrower gets tunnel vision and stares at a single point downfield oblivious to everything else that’s happening around them.

What causes ‘hard’ eyes

If you did the exercise above you’ll probably have felt this, but tension is both a cause and an effect. Anxiety about the game situation will make it more likely that you’ll tense up and get this type of tunnel vision. This can be an elite player in a championship game who really doesn’t want to make a mistake or a beginner player that doesn’t trust themselves to read the offence and execute the throw. Feeling like you have tunnel vision or difficulty processing the whole field when you normally don’t is a great way to understand that you might be feeling pressure subconsciously even if you feel OK consciously.

We also need to look at practice design. Maybe you’re sick of hearing this from me but having a lot of practice activities where your players are encouraged by the design to look in one place only then that’s going to encourage players to habitually stare hard at one place. Even if that focus can switch in a checkdown fashion like a reset drill if it’s one thing at a time only it’s still happening, you’re just moving your head to see a different tunnel rather than seeing more of the field.

Similarly, playing a lot in rigid systems can encourage this fault in players. If you’re always expected to look in certain places at certain times you get used to relying on that rather than actually understanding what’s going on.

How to train softer eyes

Well; I don’t know that I’ve been great at doing this and it’s not something I would be hyper focused on. But here’s some thoughts:

• More game-like activities over static drills should help. However, games themselves are a magic solution

  • Unmodified small sided games like 4v4 are useful for lots of things but the small field size and small number of options I think rewards ‘hard’ eyes. There just isn’t that much field or that many opponents to be aware of

  • Activities that draw awareness to different parts of the field e.g. a game where you’re trying to switch halves/thirds with every second pass can be a good framework to start making players aware of looking into parts of the field they weren’t previously

  • Introducing players to different systems or variations of playing the same system rather than letting them get entrenched into always looking for the same thing - that means defence as well as offence by the way.

  • But whatever you’re doing needs to be actually coached. So for me this is something I want to build into the list of stock questions I have ready for players when I’m talking to them about what happened in previous reps e.g. ‘Did you know your teammate was wide open on the far sideline when you threw the contested under?’ or ‘Did you notice the player going deep and did you think about a switch there?’ and gradually get across the expectation of being more aware of what’s going on

  • Having good film of players makes that last point much easier

I’d definitely be interested in hearing thoughts on this and it’s something I’ll be watching (heh) out for at US nationals this year.