A Routine You Can Actually Measure

Free-throw shooting is the most repeatable act in basketball, which is exactly why it rewards measurement. The best shooters aren't the ones with the prettiest form — they're the ones whose form is the same every time. But when you're at the line alone with a ball and a rack, there's no one counting your makes, timing your routine, or telling you whether your release drifted on shots 40 through 60.

The AI Free Throw Tracker puts that observer on a tripod. Prop a phone at the line, and the camera counts every shot hands-free while reading the mechanics behind it.

Set, Then Release: How It Finds the Shot

Shooting a free throw isn't one motion — it's a routine. You might dribble, spin the ball, take a breath. The tracker ignores all of that. It waits until your feet are planted and the ball is held in your set point for about a second, then watches for the release: the moment your hands drive up into extension. That upward release is the shot — and because it keys off the extension rather than an absolute height, it works whether you shoot from over your head or from a lower set. A pump fake or a hitch that never fully releases is logged separately, so it never pads your count.

What It Reads

  • Shots — full releases, counted hands-free out loud
  • Pump fakes — partial motions that never release, kept apart from real shots
  • Release point — over the head, at the forehead, or lower, shot by shot
  • Elbow & release arc (Pro) — how far your shooting arm extends and the launch angle of your arms
  • Tempo & consistency (Pro) — your set-to-release timing and how repeatable your release is, shot to shot
  • Leg dip (Pro) — with the feet in frame, the knee bend behind your leg drive

Why Consistency Is the Number That Matters

Any shooter can make ten in a row on a good day. The question a coach really cares about is whether shot 3 and shot 30 leave your hands the same way. The tracker measures the spread of your release across a session and turns it into a consistency read — a single number that goes up as your routine tightens.

That reframes practice. Instead of chasing makes (which you can't verify anyway without ball tracking), you're chasing repeatability — the thing that actually survives a road game, a tired fourth quarter, and a hostile crowd.

Your Video Stays on the Phone

The pose detection runs on Google's MediaPipe Pose Landmarker (the @mediapipe/tasks-vision library, a lightweight BlazePose model) entirely inside your browser via WebAssembly and your device's GPU. The camera feed never leaves the device. To keep improving the tool, we save the anonymized motion data each session produces — skeleton coordinates and measurements, never video or images — and Pro members can replay their own history from it. The picture stays on your phone; only the stick-figure math is kept.

The Thirty-Second Setup

  • Stand the phone at the line — side-on or straight in front — about hip height
  • Frame the shooter so they fill the box; hips-and-above is the minimum, feet in frame unlock leg dip and a cleaner replay
  • Set which hand you shoot with so the release reads correctly
  • Dribble and settle, hold your set a beat, then shoot — the shot tallies the moment your hands drive up

Replay Your Stroke

Every session records each shot as a stick-figure motion track you can play back — one shot at a time, or an average of them all. Seeing your own release animated back is where "my elbow flies out when I'm tired" stops being a guess. It's free to preview right after a session; Pro saves the history so you can watch your stroke hold together — or drift — across a week of reps.

Free Throws First

This first version is tuned specifically for the free-throw line — a set shot from a stop, which is the cleanest signal a camera can read. Set jump shots and moving jump shots are on the way, but shipping the free throw first means the counting and the form reads are trustworthy out of the gate rather than mediocre across everything.

And like its sibling tools, it reads the shooter, not the ball — no make/miss calling, because a ball in flight is exactly the small, fast, blurred target a phone camera can't track reliably. What it can nail is your body and your release, and that's what it measures.

Getting Started

Open the AI Free Throw Tracker on any phone with a camera — nothing to install, nothing to sign up for to try it. Shoot ten from the line and watch it read your release point and separate your real shots from your fakes. It's part of a growing set of on-device camera tools alongside the AI Baseball Swing Counter and the AI Rep Counter.