[dhitchco]

Well,
to "track" a moving object you need to have at least two people or devices "watching" the moving object. In your case, you can track a person on a basketball court by having only two observers, since there really is no 3rd-dimension inthe game.

In such a relatively-small space as a basketball court, you can't track the player via a technology such as GPS. But, you do have a few choices for technologies. First, the most obvious is to use radio frequency "beacons" such as cell phone that can emit a "beacon" which can be triangulate the player's position on the field. Even easier would be to use a 900Mhz low-power belt-worn transmitter and two receivers to triangulate the player's position. You could also do the same thing via light (e.g. lasers) but they would require "aiming" the light at the player each time you wanted to triangulate.

One other technology that may work is to use pixel-movement detection on a ceiling-mounted video camera. This is a technology that is being used in the surveillance industry.

Now......put away all of the technology and use humans as the observers. Divide the basketball court up into squares (3'x3') and then simply "call-out" that player "A" moved from square 17 to square 22 at time 00:00:04 or something like that.

I've often wanted to use tracking technology to monitor where runners are within a marathon, and stock car drivers use their in-car radio system to pinpoint their location ont he track, but it's all relatively expensive.....Plus, once you get the data, how do you want to use/track the player's movements? If you intend to keep their "traces" then you need a multi-record database to draw a map of the player's movements.