Week 8: Slowly But Surely

This week I continued with the same plan as last week to work on my dribbling. I did up the difficulty a bit by playing in some casual matches to get a more realistic setting to practice my dribbling in. As one of my classmates suggested, playing against bots was helpful to a point for just starting out, but it doesn’t have that unpredictability factor that exists in live 1v1 matches.

In these matches I tried to focus on dribbling any chance I got, just to practice it under pressure. However, since they are casual matches, the matchup between opponents isn’t always great. In the video of my matches this week, I played against several players who were definitely better than me, since they did a lot of aerial shots. As a result, I didn’t really get a lot of contact with the ball to practice my dribbling. Even though this is germane load that will be beneficial to me, for the purposes of practicing dribbling, it was more extraneous. In fact, I probably had better practice in my competitive matches even though I wasn’t playing with the intention to practice dribbling.

In additional to playing in matches, I also watched several videos of some of the best dribbling pros. It has been really helpful to see what they do in different situations. I think this could be an instance where mental practice comes into play for me, especially since other Rocket League players say it’s beneficial to watch pro dribblers to get better at it yourself.

Of course, through all of this, I am still playing in competitive matches each week. I’m not necessarily focused on dribbling in those matches, but I do try to keep possession of the ball more and attempt dribbling when I can. It is definitely helping my in-game performance even though it is difficult to control and practice. All in all, I’m still seeing improvement in my rank, as I keep climbing the ladder, slowly but surely.