Our younger D is an athlete and DH wants to start videotaping her. I’d like to buy him a camcorder for Xmas. The last camcorder we owned required mini video cassettes. 
I’ve heard a little about the GoPros but are they good for taping longer than 1 hr at a time? And which model would be best? How about the Sonys? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Camcorders will “tape” for as many hours as the memory will be able to hold. SD cards are what most camcorders use in addition to the internal memory.
Is zooming in important? How about slow motion or frame by frame shooting? Any other features? GoPro does pretty much none of that.
I highly recommend giving the folks at B&H a call or visit your local camera store (not a big chain one!) to get some recommendations.
I would suggest you let the user pick the camera
I have an older camera that records directly to DVD. The main benefit is that it’s easy to watch the recording on your TV. I’ve used it a bunch over the years to record something as a favor for friends and just hand them the DVD when done. Downside is that the picture is not as good as some of the other suggestions here, and they have gotten pricey recently.