Week 6: New and Improved

After last week’s revelation that patience is a virtue, my practice and progress this week has been going very well!

My new training plan seems to be working wonders. Instead of splitting up training and playing for different days of the week, I am doing both for every training session. My new regimen is as follows:

1 hours sessions (doubled times for 2 hours sessions)

10 minutes Freeplay Ball Beat Up

10 minutes training pack

20 minutes playing Competitive ranked matches

20 minutes re-watching those matches, identifying common mistakes, and addressing them in training

This has been incredibly helpful! Especially when thinking about what it means to engage in deliberate practice for this skill, this really is the best method.

Freeplay Ball Beat Up

My time spent in Freeplay helps me work on getting good solid contact with the ball at fast speeds. This is one of the many sub-skills of Rocket League that is especially integral to 1v1 playing. I can work on following the ball, recreate situations I often encounter in matches, and practice how to refine my timing when the ball is falling and moving across the field. It’s a great way to practice different types of mechanics that all come back to making good contact with the ball.

Goalie and Aerial Training Packs

The training packs I have been doing typically focus on defense and double jumps. These are two sub-skills that I encounter a lot in the matches and are pretty critical if I make a mistake, as I don’t have a teammate to help recover from any errors. I use the Pro Goalie training to practice blocking shots that either bounce or come from odd angles. This allows me to work on timing how fast I need to move to meet the ball as it drops. It also helps with watching and estimating where the ball will land as is falls toward me. This is definitely a perceptual skill that I have been consistently struggling with, so I make it a point to work on it every week for at least 10 minutes.

I have also been using the Rookie Aerial training to practice double jumps. This can be a really good mechanic if the ball is over a single bounce height, as it allows that extra coverage necessary to make contact with the ball. This can be the beginning of starting to fly (which I am still pretty far from). However, the piece of double jumps that I still struggle with is angling my car to hit the ball. Usually the way to clear the levels is to double jump and also angle the car up so you are more perpendicular with the ground than parallel. Since this is still fairly new and is more of a cognitive skill right now, my motor skills are not so great. I commonly will back flip or front flip because my fingers don’t do the right thing. I know what I want to do conceptually, but the message doesn’t seem to make it all the way to my fingers in time. Similar to the Goalie training, this has been something I’ve consistently struggled with, but I am seeing some improvement and getting more comfortable with the motions with my 10 minutes each session.

Competitive Matches

After I finish warming up each day, I hop in to some Competitive 1v1 matches to see if I can apply the things I’ve been working on in training. A few weeks ago, this was not going so well since I would get frustrated way too easily if I messed up something I was just able to do in a calm environment. Thankfully, I no longer turn into The Hulk and don’t sweat the small mishaps, instead I focus on getting good touches on the ball and being patient to not rush my shots.

I wish there was a better way to quantify how this has improved, but truthfully, I think it just shows in my playing. This week I actually won most of my matches and climbed the ranks a bit! Not only that, but I have been consistently winning matches against players at the Bronze level, in a way solidifying that I have surpassed Bronze level skill and am moving up to achieving Silver level skill.

Watch, Identify, Drill

The last piece of my sessions involved rewatching the matches that I played for the day and identifying common mistakes that I made. Typically, Tyler helped me with this since he has a more practiced eye. He let me know if I did something that I should stop now before it becomes a bad habit. We tried not to focus on mechanical things that will work themselves out as I play more matches and become more familiar with how to behave in-game.

Some issues we identified this week included getting more comfortable boosting at full speed, since I tend to lose control of my car when that happens, and working on sharp turns, since I commonly try to drift around the ball very close and miss it. The drills I did for these two issues were to follow the outer ring of boost pads on the field keeping the supersonic streak present so that I was consistently moving at top speed. This also helped me work on drifting around the corners and learning how long I need to press the drift button to make a shorter or longer drift. The other exercise I did to practice tight turns was to hit the ball and then quickly drive past it and make a sharp turn to hit on the opposite side, essentially playing ping pong with myself, shown below.

Overall, this new training plan seems to be working and I’m getting more confident in my abilities! Can’t wait to see how I progress over these next few weeks!