Protective eyewear is an essential piece of equipment for high impact sports like basketball, hockey, football, and soccer. In these sports and many others, protective eyewear helps protect participants and players eyes from getting damaged from hard impact with other players or the ball or puck. Eyesight is very fragile and your eye can be permanently damaged very easily following hard impact during a sports event. Sports eyewear when worn consistently can reduce the risk of hard impact and can help prevent damage or loss of sight.

In basketball, there is no requirement to wear sports eyewear. But ask any player who’s taken an elbow directly in the eye during a basketball game, sports eyewear with a hard protective lens can save a lot of pain and discomfort. Several NBA greats have worn protective sports eyewear during the game of basketball, including the great Kareem Abdul-Jabar, Hakeem Olajuwon, James Worthy, Horace Grant, and Amare Stoudemire.

In hockey and football, the protective sports eyewear is a part of the helmet that most players are required to wear. There is great debate on whether the cages attached to the helmets or protective eyewear face shields or visors are better for hockey or football players. Sports eyewear on football and hockey helmets like face shields or visors help protect the eyes during play of these full-contact sports but do not impair straight-on or peripheral vision like some helmets with cages do. It has been proven that in hockey and football, players that wear full protective sports eyewear suffer less down time recovering from both eye and facial injuries but also from concussions and head injuries as well. While protective sports eye wear is not required in the NHL, a series of eye injuries, most notably to Bryan Berard, has more players wearing the hard protective sports eyewear with their helmets.

Close contact and flying soccer balls are a worry for many parents who choose to get their soccer-playing children protective sports eyewear. When selecting protective sports eyewear for your kid, be sure and select a product that offers a hard polycarbonate lens and is secured by an elastic band rather than temple/ear pieces. It’s hard for protective sports eyewear to protect your child’s eyes from flying soccer balls if the eyewear is sitting on the field because it wasn’t secured during the fast-paced game of soccer.