Week 11: A New Approach to Dribbling

After last week’s refresher with the basics, I took a some more time this week to focus on dribbling. I was still feeling like I wasn’t getting any better and having some difficulty still with staying behind the ball and not losing control.

Playing the matches against Advanced bots was helpful for game play strategy and learning when to dribble, but it wasn’t giving me many opportunities to work on the mechanics of dribbling. So, I watched a few videos from Rocket League pros on the tips they offer for dribbling and these were the main takeaways:

· Turn Ball Cam off

· Practice in Freeplay

Turn Ball Cam off

This has been really difficult for me and I’ve been a bit resistant to it so far because when ball cam is off, I have a hard time figuring out where the ball is. There is a white circle under the ball with an inner circle that will get larger or smaller depending on the height of the ball, but as a novice player, this was difficult to adjust to, so I avoided it.

Unfortunately, avoiding the necessary back and forth with ball cam has only hurt me, because now, I need to train myself to do this for dribbling. I have tried to practice this by turning ball cam off when the ball is “over my head” so that I judge the balls height with the white circle’s instead. It takes some getting used to, but since some of the other skills are more automatized, I have more mental capacity to dedicate to assessing the white circles.

Practice in Freeplay

This seems pretty obvious, but it’s not just practicing in Freeplay, but practicing the right things and in the right way in Freeplay. The video suggests pushing the ball to the wall and keeping it along the side of your car as you move around the perimeter of the field.

This helps with controlling the ball and also with assessing your speed relative to the ball’s speed, one of my biggest struggles. I started out really slow with this, but gradually was able to move faster around the parameter. This also helps with the next step to dribbling, which is cutting under the ball. The most effective way to dribble is with the ball sitting on the roof of the car. This is also very advanced but learning how to cut under the ball to pop it up to the roof is one of the first steps.

Now that I have this new approach to dribbling, I am feeling more confident about the improvements that I’m making. Sometimes it feels like I’m not improving or that I have plateaued, but then when I look back to where I started, I realize how far I’ve come and the real progress that I have made!