[thom]

It’d certainly be interesting to see if 80% accuracy over a 2 second window was enough to exploit tactically. If so, you’ve probably just saved a few hours of a video analyst’s time. Interesting approach though. There’s been a lot of work on this over the years, including on (dare I say) more complex sports like soccer. This was from Sloan 5 years ago for example:

http://www.yisongyue.com/publications/ssac2017_ghosting.pdf

[tanbog6]

I'm pretty sure any skilled player can reliable judge what opposing players are going to in the next few seconds. Probably with closer to 95% accuracy.

[littlestymaar]

Especially for volleyball, because the only open question are: “to which attacker the setter will pass”, “where's the attacker going to attack” and “will the defense be able to get the ball”.

For the “nine well-defined classes: spiking, blocking, set- ting, running, digging, standing, falling, waiting, and jumping” used in the paper, the only things that are hard to predict is “jumping”, for the attackers, because it depends on who the setter will pass the ball to, and who's going to be “falling” because it depends where the attacker will shoot the ball and which defender is in range to catch it.

I've just tried to do it on a Youtube video, and it's actually a pretty fun game to play for a minute or two. (I think I'm above 85%, despite not having practiced volley outside of school's sport classes and never having watched it on TV, so I'm pretty convinced your 95% figure is well within reach of a skilled player).

[thom]

The interesting thing is whether you can identify exploitable tendencies in opposition team play (again, faster than your human analysts would otherwise do). If so, that takes preparation with the whole team rather than split second decision making.