How to Analyze Your Kid's Swing on Video (Free)

Your phone is the best coaching tool you own, and you already have it in your pocket. The catch is that most swing videos are filmed and reviewed in a way that hides the very things you're trying to see. Here's how to film it right, what to actually look for, and the mistakes to avoid.

How to film it so the video is actually useful

A bad angle turns good analysis into guesswork. Before you worry about what to look for, get the footage right. Three rules cover almost everything:

• Shoot from the side. Stand square to the swing path, roughly perpendicular to where the pitch comes from, about 10 to 15 feet away. Hold the phone at hip height, not up by your face. The side view shows balance, stride, and bat path better than any other angle. A view from behind the plate or at an angle distorts all three.
• Use slow motion. A swing lasts a fraction of a second. At normal speed you'll see a blur and learn nothing. Turn on your phone's slow-mo mode (120 or 240 fps on most phones) so you can scrub through the swing frame by frame.
• Pick one angle and never change it. This is the rule people skip, and it's the most important one. If today's video is from the side and next month's is from behind, you can't compare them. Same spot, same height, same distance, every single time. Consistency is what lets you see progress instead of just seeing a different camera position.

Film a few swings, not one. The first swing is often a warm-up. Get three or four clean ones off a tee or soft toss so you're analyzing a pattern, not a fluke.

What to look for (in plain language)

You don't need coaching jargon. You need a short checklist of things you can genuinely see. Scrub the video slowly and check these four:

Watch each checkpoint on its own pass through the video. First watch just the head. Rewind, watch just the front shoulder. Trying to watch everything at once is how you end up seeing nothing. And compare against a reference: pull up a slow-mo clip of a solid hitter filmed from the same side angle, and the differences jump out.

The common mistakes parents make

Filming is the easy part. The review is where good intentions go sideways. The usual traps:

• Coaching the result, not the swing. A ground ball to short doesn't tell you what to fix. The frame where the front shoulder flew open does. Judge the movement, not where the ball went.
• Finding five things to fix. You will always be able to find more flaws. That doesn't mean you should mention them. Kids can hold exactly one swing thought. Pick the one that's upstream of the others and ignore the rest for now.
• Comparing swings filmed differently. "He looks better than last month" means nothing if the camera moved. This is why the same-angle rule matters so much.
• Turning practice into a film session. Ten minutes of your kid staring at their own swing on a screen kills the joy fast. Film, pick one thing, get back to swinging.
• Guessing at the fix. Spotting that the barrel loops is one skill. Knowing the right drill to shorten it for a 10-year-old is a completely different one. It's fine not to have that second skill. Most parents don't.

Where the guessing ends

Here's the honest gap in all of this. Filming the swing is free and easy. Seeing that something's off is doable with the checklist above. But knowing the one thing to fix, and the drill that fixes it, is the part that actually takes a coach's eye, and it's the part parents get stuck on.

That's exactly what Fungo's swing analysis is for. You upload a swing video, and the app reads it from sampled frames across the swing and tells you the single most valuable thing to work on, in plain language, plus a drill from a real coach to fix it. Then you film a follow-up a few weeks later and it compares the new swing against your baseline, so "he looks better" becomes something you can actually see side by side.

You do the free part with your phone. Fungo does the part that's hard to do alone.