You'll want to turn on full manual settings, which I'm pretty sure you should be able to do. In the camera app, enable Pro Controls in settings. Then you can manually tweak shutter speed, ISO, and focus right from the viewfinder.
Shutter speed is the big one — set it to 1/1000s or faster to freeze motion.
ISO: keep it low for better quality. 100–400 if it’s bright, 800–1600 if it’s darker. (ISO basically is how sensitive to light you want the camera sensor to be. If too sensitive (too high), photos can get grainy.)
Focus: use continuous autofocus if you can, or pre-focus on where the action will happen. Pixel 7 I believe has burst shutter mode, which would be ideal.
Aperture on Pixel 7 is fixed at f/1.85, so nothing you can do there, but it's a good large opening that is suitable for action shots.
Increase exposure a little if the scene looks too dark.

If you want even more control, third party camera apps typically let you lock in all you manual setting preferences. I use ProCamera, but I have an iPhone.

[–] Biskii@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Woah, this is amazing. As a complete newb I appreciate this so much! I will try to mess with it when I take my dog out to play later

Edit: this helped so much! I'm still practicing, but I was able to take some pretty good pictures of my dog playing catch. Thank you again for helping me, I'm starting to really enjoy this