[msb-alumni] Tennis for the Blind
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2014 14:44:20 -0500
BlankYoutube video at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EEWKpunoHU
NY Times article itself at
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/science/a-game-of-tennis-tests-notions-of-blindness.html?_r=0
Hitting the Court, With an Ear on the Ball
Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
READY Kevaughn Merrill awaits his turn during a lesson in blind tennis at
Lighthouse International in Manhattan, an early adopter of the game.
By
THOMAS LIN
Published: June 4, 2012
WATERTOWN, Mass. — Dan Guilbeault was 3 when doctors discovered a
tumor
called an
optic glioma
pressed against his optic nerves. He continued to play the sports he
loved — basketball, baseball and football — until he lost most of his sight
at 11.
Multimedia
void(0)
The Sound of Tennis
Science Times Podcast
Subscribe
This Week: High-rises made of wood; tennis for the blind; and the culture of
cancer screening.
icons/audio_icon
The Science Times Podcast
Science Twitter Logo.
Connect With Us on Social Media
@nytimesscience
on Twitter.
list of 1 items
Science Reporters and Editors on Twitter
list end
Like the science desk
on Facebook.
Enlarge This Image
05BLIN1/05JPBLIN1-articleInline
Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
CLASS Getting a feel of the net at Lighthouse International in a program by
Tennis Serves, a group started by a high school student.
Enlarge This Image
05BLIN2/05JPBLIN2-articleInline
Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
FOCUS Michael Harris practices with Kiran Prasad, a Columbia student and
coordinator for Tennis Serves. The ball is larger and made of foam, with
ball
bearings inside.
Enlarge This Image
05blind-web/05blind-web-articleInline
Thomas Lin/The New York Times
PLAY "I was glad when I hit my first ball against someone," said Dan
Guilbeault, a student at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown,
Mass.
Now he is 19 and almost completely blind, and his favorite sport is tennis.
When he first heard about tennis for the visually impaired, his reaction was
“No way!” he said. “I was skeptical.”
So were faculty members at the
Perkins School for the Blind
here, when a sighted student from nearby Newton proposed it nearly two
years ago. But Perkins, known for athletic innovations like adapted fencing,
decided
to offer what are believed to be the first blind tennis classes in the
country.
Like tennis for sighted people, the game requires speedy court coverage and
precise shot-making. Blind players rely on their ears to follow a foam ball
filled with ball bearings that rattles when it bounces or is struck.
“Your ears have become your eyes,” said Dr. Robert Gotlin, director of
orthopedic and sports rehabilitation at Beth Israel Medical Center in New
York City.
Sejal Vallabh, a 17-year-old high school junior in Newton, encountered the
sport during a summer internship in Tokyo and then proposed the program at
Perkins.
She set up a volunteer organization,
Tennis Serves,
which introduced the sport last year at
Lighthouse International
in New York and the
California School for the Blind
in Fremont.
As blind tennis grows in the United States, where the Census Bureau
estimates that 1.8 million people over 15 have “severe difficulty seeing,”
it is testing
popular notions of the limitations of
blindness.
“I want to show that it is possible for blind athletes to play tennis,” Ms.
Vallabh said. No one believes it, she said, “until they see it for
themselves.”
The most important adaptation is the ball, which is larger and made of foam,
wrapped around a plastic shell that holds the ball bearings.
“It sounds like bells ringing,” said Emmanuel Ford, 10, who has
cerebral palsy
and is learning to hit tennis balls at Lighthouse.
Other adaptations include a smaller court with a badminton net lowered to
the ground, string taped along the lines and junior rackets with oversize
heads.
Players with some sight get two bounces, the completely blind three. Only
one set is played, and an umpire calls the lines.
The first sound-adapted tennis ball was designed in 1984 by
Miyoshi Takei,
a blind high school student in Japan. Now, about 300 players compete in
tournaments there; blind tennis is also played in China, South Korea,
Taiwan, Britain
and Russia.
During matches,
Mr. Takei, a 16-time national champion who worked as a massage therapist for
older people, mostly hit flat, aggressive strokes, but lobbed the ball on
defense to regain court position. Sometimes he lunged or dived for shots.
(He died last year, at 42, after falling in front of a train.)
His widow, Etsuko, who is also blind, said he saw the “court in his mind and
he knew where he was standing, where the ball was flying and bouncing.” By
listening, she said, “he could control the ball very well.”
An expert on orientation and mobility for the blind, William R. Wiener, dean
of graduate studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, said
that sound localization “is so important when blind people navigate the
world,” and added, “Listening to the ball, locating where it is and swinging
at
it probably helps you with the sport and also with your mobility.”
Blind tennis is made possible, scientists say, by the adaptability of the
human brain — which appears to repurpose its visual area, the occipital
cortex,
to process sound and touch in response to blindness.
A series of studies discovered activity in the visual cortex when blind test
subjects read Braille, and found that a blind woman could no longer make
sense
of the raised dots after suffering an occipital
stroke.
Another study, of sighted subjects who were blindfolded, showed that the
occipital cortex began processing tactile and auditory information within
five
days.
“How it works is not a mystery,” said Melvyn A. Goodale, director of the
Brain and Mind Institute
at the University of Western Ontario. “We know that it is possible to
localize sounds, and it is likely that the blind get better at this than
sighted
people.”
Dr. Goodale and his colleagues are studying
how echo processing works in the occipital cortex of blind echolocation
experts like
Daniel Kish,
who as a baby lost his sight to
retinoblastoma.
Human echolocators use palatal clicks or hand claps to “see” objects around
them, like sonar in bats, only bats use ultrasonic frequencies that can
resolve
flying insects. This skill allows Mr. Kish to hike along cliff edges and
ride a mountain bike.
While humans don’t have the auditory resolution to echolocate a moving
tennis ball, blind tennis “promotes freedom of movement,” said Mr. Kish,
president
of
World Access for the Blind,
a nonprofit group that has taught echolocation and other mobility skills to
hundreds around the world. “Most blind kids just don’t get early experience
interacting with flying projectiles.”
Kiran Prasad, 20, a Columbia University junior and Tennis Serves coordinator
at Lighthouse, said: “They’re living in a world that’s built for sighted
people.
I can only hope that tennis is giving them that confidence to feel like you
can do anything.”
Ms. Vallabh, the young founder of Tennis Serves, hopes to someday host a
national tournament and to have blind tennis recognized as an official sport
at
the
Paralympics.
But first the sport has to catch on, and it takes a few years for totally
blind players to become proficient enough to play a match, said Ayako
Matsui,
former secretary general of the Japan Blind Tennis Federation. And it is
still met with skepticism. The
Washington State School for the Blind
rejected Ms. Vallabh’s pitch, said Jennifer Butcher, a fitness instructor
there. “But if a student expresses interest in learning tennis, we could try
it down the road,” she said.
Meanwhile, Ms. Vallabh is working to improve the sport, partnering with an
engineering class at Harvey Mudd College
to design a ball that emits a continuous sound, so players can hear its
trajectory before it bounces.
At Perkins, a sound-adapted tennis ball sits on the desk of the school
president, Steven M. Rothstein, symbolizing possibility.
“Sometimes you don’t know until you try it,” said Matt LaCortiglia, the
adapted physical education coordinator at Perkins. “Now we’re doing a lot
more
tennis.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 5, 2012, on page D1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Hitting the Court, With an Ear on
the
Ball.
Steve
Lansing, MI
Other related posts:
