Hey parents: As your kids settle in to the new school year and your student athlete starts their sports season, you likely have a familiar checklist of items: uniforms, shoes, water bottles, and equipment for each sport. But there is one essential piece of equipment you may have overlooked: protective eyewear.
When you think about sporting equipment, you might visualize helmets, pads, shin protectors, racquets, bats, or balls. Eye protection is also essential, and deserves the same (arguably more!) attention. After all, you can easily get a new helmet, stick, or ball if one gets broken or lost, but you can’t replace your child’s healthy vision.
Sports are a leading cause of eye injuries for students and young adults, and many sports-related eye injuries are preventable with the right protective eyewear. Recent statistics show a year-over-year increase of 33% to more than 43,000 sports eye injuries in the U.S. in 2024. That’s enough for Prevent Blindness to declare September as Sports Eye Safety Month.
Whether your child plays basketball, soccer, baseball, lacrosse, hockey, tennis, ultimate frisbee, or another active sport, we encourage you to include eye protection in your pre-season prep.
How to Protect Your Child’s Eyes During Sports
One huge misconception we hear from parents of student athletes is the idea that ordinary glasses or sunglasses provide adequate eye protection during sports. Let’s dispel that myth immediately: They do not.
Your child’s regular prescription glasses are designed to correct their vision, but were never meant to deflect the force of a flying ball, stick, racket, or elbow. Sunglasses provide excellent protection from the sun’s UV rays and can improve visual comfort outside, but a typical pair of sunglasses is not designed to protect your eyes from impact, either.
In fact, wearing ordinary glasses or sunglasses while playing a sport can even be more dangerous to your student athlete if the lenses or frames break during a collision.
On the other hand, sports eyewear is designed specifically with impact protection in mind. For many youth sports, protective lenses made of polycarbonate are the ideal choice. Polycarbonate material has several features that make it well-suited to your student athlete’s needs: it is lightweight, impact-resistant, and offers built-in ultraviolet protection. It’s basically the hat-trick of eye protection.
The frame that holds your lenses matters, too. Sport-specific frames are designed to stay securely in place during movement and are constructed to withstand the force of a ball, stick, racket, or opposing team member. Protective sports eyewear may include wraparound designs, straps that hold them in place, or other features to provide a more secure fit.
If your child needs vision correction, we have good news: Prescription sports goggles can be made with their prescription and fitted specifically for their sport of choice.
It Just Takes One Eye Injury To Change Everything
As parents, we all hope and think, “It won’t happen to my child.” But severe eye injuries don’t even require an unusual accident. With one errant elbow, finger, racquet, or puck, a routine play can become a life-altering injury in a millisecond:
- A ball or puck can strike the face at high speed.
- Another player’s finger can enter the eye socket during a rebound.
- A racquet or stick can make unexpected contact.
- An aggressive opponent can send your student athlete to the ground, face-first.
The outcomes range from a painful, temporary injury to irreversible damage that impacts their vision permanently. Depending on the injury, your child or teen could experience bleeding, corneal damage, a detached retina, internal eye damage, or even permanent vision loss. A severe injury could cause vision challenges for the rest of their lives.
That’s why prevention matters.
How To Get the Right Sports Eye Protection Your Student Needs
So how can you reduce your child’s risk? We make it simple. The experts in our optical department will work with you by asking some questions about your child’s sport or sports, then recommend the right protective eyewear options especially for them.
Our range of protective sports eyewear is designed specifically for various sports and manufactured with impact-resistant materials. Our optical staff will make sure the protective glasses or goggles fit your student athlete well so they will stay securely in place while your student athlete runs, jumps, and scores.
Make Eye Protection Part of Your Back-to-School Checklist
Whether your student athlete is involved in lacrosse, tennis, hockey, basketball, football, baseball, or softball, they wear athletic equipment designed to help keep them safe. Don’t their eyes deserve the same consideration?
Before their season starts, make sure the proper eye protection is at the top of your equipment checklist. We’ll help you select the right protective eyewear, made just for their sport and with their prescription incorporated into the lenses if needed.
Now that school is back in session, it’s a great time to bring your student in for their annual comprehensive eye exam. We’ll make sure they are seeing their best so they can perform at their maximum both in the classroom and in their chosen sports.