Week 7: On to the Next Sub Skill

This week I started training a new subskill: Dribbling. Since I’ve been fairly consistently placed in the low Silver rank, it’s safe to say that I am no longer a Bronze level player. This means that I now need to start working on sub skills that are necessary for moving up from Silver.

Dribbling is one of the most useful skills to use in Rocket League, especially in 1v1 play, when you don’t have a teammate to pass the ball to. The best strategy is to keep control of the ball for as long as possible, hopefully leading up to a goal.

To learn this skill I have been practicing pushing the ball around the field, and it is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. My biggest challenges are not going too fast and then passing the ball, thereby losing control of it, and turning ball cam on and off to get a better view of the ball. I first started with simply pushing the ball around the field, but I kept using the walls to help me the guide the ball and didn’t want to develop a bad habit from the start. I also started with ball cam on constantly. After watching a video on the basics for dribbling from one of the RL pros, I changed my training to dribble the ball following the boost patterns so I could practice getting some more precise direction on the ball and I also practiced a particular technique to dribble the ball off-target (not directed at the goal) and then swing around to take a shot on goal, something that can very useful in game. I have also started to be more aware of using ball cam, which so far has been a great help to see how close I am to the ball.

But dribbling in Freeplay and dribbling in a game are two very different contexts. I was really struggling in Freepay to keep control of the ball that I figured I would do terribly in a match, but when I go into one, I was actually able to put to work what I had been practicing. I was seeing the effect that Schmidt and Bjork (1992) discussed in their article, where my performance in training was poor, but was much higher in post-training performance!

I played matches against beginning bots, so I could get some of the in-game pressure, to practice in a closer context to that of post-training assessment. It definitely helped me read the situations better to know when to dribble and when not to dribble. As I get more comfortable with it, I’ll work my way up the bot difficulties and eventually play against real people!

This is definitely going to be a focus for at least another week so, since it is really challenging. Hopefully soon I will try hop into a real match, instead of just ones against bots.