Ear on the ball

A teenager of Indian origin is working hard to popularise blind tennis in the US

Dan Guilbeault was three 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. Now he is 19 and almost completely blind, and his favourite sport is tennis. When he first heard about tennis for the visually-impaired, his reaction was “No way!” he says. “I was skeptical.”

So were faculty members at the Perkins School for the Blind, 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,” says Robert Gotlin, director of orthopedic and sports rehabilitation at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.

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 an organisation, 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,” Vallabh says. No one believes it, she says, "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,” says 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 racquets 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, Taiwan, UK and Russia.

Blind tennis is possible, scientists say, by the adaptability of the brain — which appears to repurpose its visual area, the occipital cortex, to process sound and touch in response to blindness.

“How it works is not a mystery,” says Melvyn Goodale, director of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario. “We know that it is possible to localise sounds, and that the blind get better at this than sighted people.”

Vallabh, the young founder of Tennis Serves, hopes to someday host a national tournament and to have blind tennis recognised 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, says Ayako Matsui, former secretary general of the Japan Blind Tennis Federation. And it is still meets with skepticism. The Washington State School for the Blind rejected Vallabh’s pitch, says Jennifer Butcher, a fitness instructor there. 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.

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©2012 The New York Times