Dr. Howard Bailey founded Athletic Perception Institute (API) in 1979.

Using Eye Movement Recording techniques in the field of reading, he applied the application to athletics. He has recorded over 15,000 eye movements.

He was a ten-letter athlete in High School, winning All League and County designation in Baseball, Football and Basketball. He went on to play Baseball for the Navy, as well as lettered four years in college at Central Michigan University. He was captain of the baseball team his senior year. He also played varsity football at the University of Detroit prior to entering the Navy. The Philadelphia Athletics and the Cleveland Browns both drafted him. Dr. Bailey also officiated high school and college sports for twenty-five years.

After college, he was a teacher and Head Football Coach in Berkley, Michigan for seven years. After a hard Michigan winter, he made tracks for California where he had been in the Navy. While living in Chula Vista, where he taught, he met the President of Educational Developmental Laboratories (EDL) and was offered a position as Regional Director. EDL had, and has, the only instrument that records the movement of individual's eyes while in the act of reading. Because of his background in athletics, he saw the application that it had for screening. He designed some special tests for the recording of athletes and developed training techniques.

Dr. Bailey later became a dealer for EDL with responsibility for marketing in Michigan, Ohio and California. He continued for seventeen years. During this time as a dealer he founded API. It all began while playing golf with the Head Basketball coach at Cleveland State University. Telling the coach he could pick his starting five by recording their eye movements, he was taken up on his boast.

He picked four out of five after recording 23 players. The one he missed had irregular movements and he told the coach that “this kid” was on "something" or that there was a problem. Two days later the coach called and said that the boy had previously fallen in his Dorm and hit his head thus causing the irregular movements.

That was the beginning of Athletic Perception Institute. From its inception, eleven NFL teams; Baltimore, Cleveland, Dallas, New England, NY Giants, Green Bay, Detroit, Tampa Bay, Philadelphia, Washington and Buffalo, Olympic teams, major league baseball teams, Colleges, High Schools and the U. S. Military used API's programs and techniques. From these teams, there have been Gold Medals, Super Bowl MVP's, Top Gun Fighter Pilots and many other champions who have been trained on API. Dr. Bailey has trained many optometrists regarding his techniques and programs.

Dr. Bailey is seen as an expert in his field in training young children how to read more efficiently. He has developed the Eye Cue™ Reading Readiness program on CD as well as the API Vision Trigger System on CD for athletes. Both are for the Windows platform and have shown tremendous results.

Copyright, 2006. API Vision.