Youth Sports Were Already Intense—Now AI Tools Are Supercharging the Competition

Ashley Brown used to watch her daughter’s club volleyball games through the screen of her phone, afraid to put it down and miss out on footage of a set or kill that would catch the eye of a college recruiter. And as the coach of her daughter’s high school volleyball team in Caledonia, Michigan, Brown’s attention was constantly split between watching the games and tallying each player’s statistics by hand.

But this year, her daughter’s traveling club team purchased an artificial intelligence service called Balltime for all players aged 12 to 18. A single phone or tablet placed behind the court’s endline records a game and uploads it to the company’s platform, which uses body and object recognition algorithms to track each player so that their every ball contact and movement on the court can be cataloged and datafied.

By the time a player has gotten home from a game and showered, the service can prepare personalized stat reports and social media-ready highlight packages. It also gives coaches a bevy of data that was previously only available to professional and elite college volleyball programs. Balltime automatically measures how high in the air players make contact with the ball, their kill and error percentages, ball trajectories, serve speeds, and which rotations of players score the most.

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