High quality video footages were captured both on indoors and outdoors handball courts during various training sessions and competitions of the Croatian handball club Kvarner Kostrena, with actions and activities performed by young male and female players. The recordings were made in full HD resolution (1920x1080) with a frame rate between 30 and 60 FPS (frames per second) using 3 or 4 stationary GoPRO cameras placed at a height of 1.5 m on the left and right edges of the court. From the spectators' point of view, the height of the camera, which was 10 m from the edge of the pitch, was at 3.5 m. The obtained footages pose a significant challenge because there is a cluttered background caused by multiple players involved in the scene, who often occlude each other and wear jerseys of a similar color to the background, which can make them difficult to recognize Furthermore, the players may be located at different distances from the camera and performing different actions and activities at the same time, which makes the further process of creating the handball database for action recognition quite difficult. In total there are 5389 video clips from 10 different classes: Catch (562), Throw (556), Background (806), Passing(715), Defense (471), Jump-Shot (520), Shot (351), Crossing (306), Dribbling (525), and Running (577). The videos from all classes were randomly divided into training and testing sets in a ratio of 80:20.