The way other articles describe it, a pro player is not really aware of the incoming ball, lower level non-conscious (reflex) systems track the environment and react before you are aware of it, just like when a regular person dodges a sudden obstacle coming at them and only a bit later they realize what's going on.
Sounds like one of the concepts that inspired the book Blindsight by Peter Watts. The subconscious 'reptile brain' is able to process certain old-school dangers, like an object moving quickly towards us, faster than our conscious brain, and can cause involuntary, potentially life-saving, reactions to the stimulus.
The conscious mind processing these things can often get in the way but, in the case of sports, alter the instinctive behaviour into something advantageous. An augmentation of the conscious and subconscious into better performance.
A converse example, being conflict between conscious and sub-conscious, is if you drop a mug of boiling water, the instinctive reaction is to try and catch 'thing you dropped', but the conscious reaction is 'don't burn yourself' so don't catch it and jump backwards to not get splashed.
One thing that has always bothered me about many AI approaches is that instead of having multiple layers that deal with different levels of urgency everything is delegated to a "rational" mind that thinks vs a combination of thinking predicting and reacting.
The parallel is this obsession with rationality over intuition. Though somewhat ironic because black box AI is just accepted.
Building something that mimic how it appears to work, as opposed to how it does work. Like building the symptoms whilst assuming we're building the disease.
Having said that, however, gotta start somewhere.
Having said that, however, we might have done a decade of work in the wrong direction by the time we find out what direction it should go...
That's a meaningless distinction when talking about the brain. The brain is very much doing calculations that we are not aware of, but they still occur.
Yea, I get they think 'really aware' is a meaningful distinction. But, from an energy standpoint if your doing calculations and you need to pay for them. Further even at 160 mph it still takes the ball 1/3 of a second to travel the court so tracking it is useful to update how your hitting it even if you need to move your body based on predicted location.
Computationally, predicting the location is actually worse as it involves tracking the ball's location and then adds on it's likely location. It's basically stuck going ok my lagg is ~1/20th of a second so I see X, it's actually at Y, but my reaction is going to be anther ~1/20 of a second so I need to try and hit it at Z. And then continuously updating both Y and Z based on new information. Then on top of that you have multiple Z's for different things etc etc.
Consciously you don't really perceive that lag because your stuck with it.
PS: And of course each part of the nervous system has different amounts of lag. To the point where many decisions are made outside of the brain.
