The importance of film review has become more and more prevalent in sports across all levels, giving advantages to coaching staff and players to scout externally and improve internally. After the adrenaline levels come down following a game or practice, coaches and players have a good idea of what happened, but referring back to film gives teams a strategic edge over the competition.
Over 15 years ago when coaches were mailing each other VHS tapes to scout one another, the exchange was strictly to understand the opposition’s tendencies and dissect their own weaknesses. While this is still one of the goals, teams taping their own practices has become a much more common occurrence with the purpose to improve player development.
The ability to put athletes under a microscope in a practice setting gives coaches more of an understanding on how an individual is performing on a day-to-day basis. As player development has become more and more prioritized in sport, programs are scheduling additional practice time in the film room where athletes can study together to understand their individual assignments on a deeper level and perform better as a team.
Curt Cignetti has brought this modern ideology to Indiana’s football program. The Hoosiers, who have historically been a basketball school, recently won the national championship in the 2025-26 season in Cignetti’s second year with the program. Indiana only had two winning seasons in the twenty years prior to his hiring. Indiana’s practice times are never over 90 minutes a day and no more than six hours a week. This deliberate move gives the Hoosiers more time in the film room to study both themselves and the opponent.
When it comes to scouting opponents, film is as important as it has ever been. Film shows coaches what the other team does and gives them an idea on how to get their own players to replicate potential looks that they’ll see in game action. Most of the time, scout team players are encouraged to watch the opponents tape so that they can reproduce it as best as possible.
“The coaches will watch video. They’ll take notes, they’ll annotate it and then we’ll watch a little bit of video before practice,” said Ethan Campbell, a student manager for the Springfield College men’s volleyball team. “We can use video to break it down into each row, and that makes it really easy to focus on the specific rally or moment of the game that you’re dealing with at the moment. Instead of just thinking we have to get to 25 points first, or we have to get this point, we’re able to break it down into what row the other team is in, or what row we’re in, and based on that, we know their tendencies, and we were able to expect what the other team is doing better.”
The Springfield men’s volleyball team has a new and complex way of watching film that uses AI to create collections of clips of specific situations, such as successful attacks and breakdowns of individual rows. The platform is called Volleystation, and it’s not the first of its kind to utilize AI to sort film, as other sites like Hudl and QwikCut have done something similar. However, the program is the personal choice of the team, as it can filter by player actions, such as serves and defensive plays, whereas Hudl cannot do that.
“With the annotations, Volleystation breaks it down so every action in the game has a mark or a code to it. It makes it really easy to look at an individual player’s actions on the video, and so we’ll look at that one-on-one, small group positional groups, or even as a full team,” Campbell said.
While there are many ways to break down and explain film, the efficiency t,hat Volleystation brings to the table gives the men’s volleyball team an advantage over their competition, as they can spend more time watching pre-organized film, while other programs have to sort through individual plays themselves.
“We believe that because of the system, and how we’re able to break it down,we can break out any video that we have on there into specific actions for each player. When we’re scouting, if we want to look at the team we’re going to play, if we want to look at all of their row one attacks and plays, it breaks it down into that. So, it makes it really, really easy and time effective to look at film and look at it in a depth that we believe most other teams don’t have the advantage that we have with Volleystation,” said Campbell.
Not only is film changing for internal growth, but also impacts how athletes prepare to work together as a team. As these athletes are watching themselves, film gives more context on how to repeat a good rep and improve, as well as giving explanation into the why; Why does one have to execute their assignment on a given play? By taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, the player understands why their role is important and causes the team to work together to improve team chemistry, therefore improving team performance.
The fundamental purpose of film review has changed. It’s not solely to look at opponents, but also to improve and develop internally for individual players to perform better as a team. With the new technology that continues to develop over time and its ability to sort situations and player actions to find tendencies, coaches and players’ urgency of watching practice and game tape to get the upper hand is at an all time high.