Sports seem to come naturally for a lot of people.
Watching an outfielder snag a fly ball, or watching a gymnast leap from bar to bar on the uneven bars, can look as easy and as a graceful as walking.
However, what if you couldn’t see the ball in the air? What if you couldn’t tell if you were inches or feet away from an uneven bar? Does that mean you shouldn’t pick up a bat or stay away from the mats?
Not if you’re Jackie Oates.
“My macular is pigmented. There’s blistering over it, which impairs my night vision, so I can’t see in the dark at all,” said Oates, whose eye sight is between 50 over 20 and 70 over 20. “I also have tunnel vision…I have 10 degrees around each orbital, so I can’t see the sides, I can’t see down, and I can’t see up.”
Oates suffers from a condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP). While sitting directly across from The Beacon reporter in an office at the Airials Gymnastics Club building last week, Oates said she could see the reporter and what was behind him, but nothing to the left or right.
The soon-to-be MUN student is an Airial, a member of Gander Collegiate’s girl’s softball team, a dancer and cheerleader. Oates has been involved with gymnastics for 10 years, and said she still gets a little apprehensive while competing on certain apparatuses.
“Beams and bars are definitely the hardest. You’re not allowed to look down when you’re on beam, and you have to keep your chin up. I rely on my muscle memory to walk across the beam, to do cartwheels and to do leaps,” she said. “It is difficult and I get a little scared sometimes because I don’t know where my feet are going. Most of the time it works out pretty well (laughs). Sometimes my feet come off the beam and I fall, but that’s a part of gymnastics, and I’m ok with that.
“I do what I want — carefully.” - Jackie Oates
“For bars, I don’t have any depth perception, and I can’t really tell how far away things are. When I go to jump from bar to bar, sometimes I think the bar is closer and I jump for it and miss it, and sometimes I think the bar is further away but I’m too close. It’s really frustrating, but it’s all about the feeling and getting used to it.”
The veteran gymnast may have lots of experience on the mats, but the softball field is relatively new territory. However, during her quest to find sports she can play and enjoy, Oates said softball fit the bill. However, like gymnastics, Oates had to do a lot of learning on her own. From a coaching perspective, how do you tell a ball player to keep her eye on the ball when she doesn’t even see it?
“I can see the ball coming in, but when it gets to a certain area, it’s just not there anymore. After swinging a bunch of times, I kind of know where the ball is going to go, so, again, it’s about muscle memory,” she said. “Sometimes my swing is off because I don’t exactly know where the ball is going, so some of it is chance.”
