[Sportsandrec] FW: [nfbsc] A twist on tennis allows the blind toplay

Sun Jul 8 03:40:59 UTC 2012

with so many changes, it really doesn't sound like tennis

-----Original Message----- 
From: Eric Calhoun
Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2012 8:41 PM
To: sportsandrec at nfbnet.org
Subject: [Sportsandrec] FW: [nfbsc] A twist on tennis allows the blind 
toplay

Original Message:
From: Vicki Phillips <xpirate412 at gmail.com>
To: <nfbsc at yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [nfbsc] A twist on tennis allows the blind to play
Date:
Sat, 7 Jul 2012 20:06:37 -0400

A twist on tennis allows the blind to play
By Laura Shin | June 11, 2012, 4:14 AM PDT

Tennis for the blind seems like a fantastical notion. After all, when
Sighted people have a hard enough time making contact with a little ball
that's whizzing through the air, how could a blind person be expected to
do
so without the benefit of sight?
But a new kind of tennis ball filled with ball bearings that rattle every
time it hits the ground or a racket is making it possible for the blind to
play.
The origins of blind tennis
Blind tennis originated in Japan in 1984 with a blind high school student
named Miyoshi Takei.
According to The New York Times, 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. (Takei died last year at 42 when he fell in front of a
train.) Japan now has about 300 players who compete in tournaments, and
the
sport is also played in China, South Korea, Taiwan, Britain and Russia.
American high school student Sejal Vallabh, who is sighted, learned of the
game while on an internship in Japan. The 17-year-old native of Newton,
Mass., founded a volunteer organization called Tennis Serves that is
starting to introduce blind tennis to the U.S., where about 1.8 million
Americans over 15 have severe difficulty seeing, according to the Census
Bureau.
Tennis Serves has brought the game to the Perkins School for the Blind in
Watertown, Mass., Lighthouse International in New York and the California
School for the Blind in Fremont. Vallabh hopes to someday hold a national
tournament and to have blind tennisrecognized as an official sport at the
Paralympics. She is also working with an engineering class at  Harvey Mudd
College to design a ball that emits a continuous sound, so players can
hear
the ball as it travels through the air, even before it bounces.
How blind tennis differs from sighted tennis
The ball is larger than a regular tennis ball and made of foam that
encases
a plastic shell holding the ball bearings. (You can hear the sound it
makes
in the video below.)
The game is also played on a smaller court with a badminton net lowered
to
the ground, with junior rackets with oversize heads and string taped
along
the lines. Players with some sight get two bounces, the completely blind
get
three, the Times says.
How the mind adapts to play blind tennis
One of the key adaptations of blind people is their ability to localize
sound.
In the blind, the human brain seems to use the area usually devoted to
vision, the occipital cortex, to instead process sound and touch in order
to
help them see what is around them.
For instance, studies show that when blind subjects read Braille, their
visual cortex activates, and that, in sighted people who are blindfolded,
the visual cortex begins to process sound and touch within five days.
So, when it comes to blind tennis, the players ability to localize sound
is
key to their ability to find and make contact with the ball. The Times
quotes William R. Wiener, an expert on orientation and mobility for the
blind, who is dean of graduate studies at the University of North
Carolina,
Greensboro, on the importance of sound localization to the blind:
Listening
To the ball, locating where it is and swinging at it probably helps you
with
the sport and also with your mobility.
Still, it takes a few years for totally blind players to be able to play
a
match of blind tennis, according to Ayako Matsui, former secretary
general
of the Japan Blind Tennis Federation.
But sound localization isnt the only sound processing skill that enables
blind players to see. Some of the blind use echolocation to navigate the
world  in other words, they use palatal clicks or hand claps to see
objects
around them the way bats use sonar. For  instance, Daniel Kish, who lost
his
sight as a baby, uses echolocation to hike along cliff edges and ride  a
mountain bike.

LINK: Watch the video below to see a blind tennis tournament.
http://www.youtube.com/v/6ZELzVCvaHI?version=3&hl=en_US

SOURCE
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/science-scope/a-twist-on-tennis-allows-the-b

lind-to-play/12904
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