Seventy-three percent of coaches are now incorporating visual training into their programs — a number that should feel like a victory after thirty years of Dr. Laby making the case that vision is trainable and performance-critical.

Instead, a new October 2025 study in Sports (Martinez-Perez et al., 2025) stops him short: across 155 coaches, mostly football and futsal coaches in Portugal, implementation rate had no statistically significant association with self-reported knowledge of sports vision. Coaches are doing it, but they can’t tell you why.

The episode digs into the study’s most revealing finding — coaches rank reaction time as the single most important visual skill, ahead of hand-eye coordination and anticipation, with depth perception ranked near the bottom — and uses it to explain the Athletic Vision Pyramid from Eye of the Champion: reaction time sits at the apex, built entirely on a base of fundamental visual functions most training programs never touch.

Dr. Laby argues coaches are already “ahead of the curve” on adoption; the real performance gains are locked behind understanding the how and the why, not just buying the tools.

• [00:00] The Celebration That Wasn’t — 73% Adoption, Zero Knowledge Link
• [00:30] The Study — 155 Coaches, Portugal, October 2025
• [00:55] The Reaction Time Paradox — What Coaches Rank First
• [01:20] Why Reaction Time Is a Visual-Perceptual Phenomenon, Not a Neuromuscular One
• [01:50] The Athletic Vision Pyramid — Base, Middle, Apex
• [02:20] You Can’t Train the Apex Without Building the Base
• [02:50] “Intuitively” — What Coaches Know Without a Framework
• [03:20] Strobe Glasses, Reaction Balls, and the Missing Framework
• [03:50] Why Assessment Has to Come Before Training
• [04:15] What the Survey Should Tell Coaches
• [04:40] Reaction Time Is the Output, Not the Input
• [05:00] The Door Is Open — Step Inside With a Plan

• Why 73% coach adoption of vision training is real progress — and why it still isn’t the win it looks like
• What a 155-coach survey (Martinez-Perez et al., Sports, Oct. 2025) found about the gap between implementation and knowledge
• Why coaches rank reaction time as the top visual skill, and why that ranking gets the causality backwards
• Why reaction time in sport is a visual-perceptual phenomenon first, not primarily a neuromuscular one
• How the Athletic Vision Pyramid from Eye of the Champion explains why you can’t train the apex without building the base
• Why “intuitive” adoption — strobe glasses, reaction balls, light boards — stalls out without a framework or a baseline assessment
• Why assessment has to come before training, and what the Athletic Vision Testing System is built to solve

• Sports Vision NYC
• Connect with Dr. Laby on Instagram
• Pick Up a Copy of Eye of the Champion
• Download The Ultimate Sports Vision Guide for Athletes [FREE]

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