All Swing, No Miss

Turning your passion into your profession is the ultimate dream. As kids it’s easy to fantasize about becoming a sports star, actor, or professional chocolate taster, but as we grow up, life tends to get in the way.

That doesn’t need to be the case though. Life can also offer up surprising opportunities, as Swupnil Sahai, developer of tennis-tracking app, Swing, has shown.

Despite being on a path to become a professor in statistics, it was seeing the Apple Watch unveiling back in 2014 that drove Sahai to give a passion he’s had since age seven one last chance.

“I’ve been a big tennis player my whole life,” Sahai tells us. “I was at Columbia University doing my PhD when I saw the Apple Watch come out. I was instantly excited because I thought it could be an amazing tool to track all of my tennis data.”

There was one problem: Despite wanting to be able to record things like his first serve percentage, Sahai had no experience developing apps.

He didn’t let that stop him.

“The year the Apple Watch was announced was the same year that Swift came out. It’s a much more approachable programing language, so was much easier for me to pick up. I just used some online resources, got together with a friend, and started working on this app.”

Having originally started out as a simple score tracker, Swing, which uses your Apple Watch’s accelerometer and gyroscope to record your efforts before relaying the data to your iPhone, has continued to advance and evolve.

The app is now capable of telling you everything from how many forehands you’ve hit to the speed of your serves. It’s this that has seen Swing gain backing from former world number one and US Open winner, Andy Roddick, and former world number four, James Blake. The pair have even helped develop new features for the app.

“They’ve been doing a lot to help us out,” two-time Apple Scholarship winner Sahai tells us. “Soon you’ll be able to use your iPhone camera to track not just what kind of shot you’re hitting but where it lands on the court. We’ll also be tracking footwork. Andy and James have been helping a lot in developing these features.”

It’s not just celebrity support that has excited Sahai. He continues to be amazed by the app’s users, too. One such user is Robyn Moore.

Diagnosed with PTSD back in 2016, Moore turned to tennis as a coping mechanism. Having used Swing to track her score during games, she came up with a big idea and reached out to Sahai.

It was for the Breakpoint 2019 challenge. “Originally we were emailing each other and I said I’m thinking of doing this thing. Is there any way you can help me record the level of shots we’re doing?” says Moore.

“Robyn’s email really stood out because she wanted to use the app for this really amazing cause. We’d never received anything like that before,” Sahai explains. “I immediately responded saying ‘Yes, yes, we’d love to help—whatever we can do. This is amazing’.”

In the challenge, Moore hit 200,000 tennis balls in just one month—that’s 800 balls an hour, eight to 10 hours a day—and used a specially developed version of Swing to record her hits.

“Swupnil has worked so hard developing things for us for this event. I’m very proud of what we have achieved. It’s amazing what people are doing and I’m very humbled by it,” she says.

With Swing, Sahai has shown that when you push your own dreams forward, you can help others achieve theirs too.

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