Rocket League is the epitome of a fun game. One of the reasons I love it so much is that it is quite easy to pick up and have fun, but it’s a very difficult game to master as there are a lot of aspects to the game that you need to pick up.

Throughout my coaching, I have always focused more on the strategic/mental side of the game whereas this one is going to be focused on mechanics and how to become the most consistent player you can be.

Training

A lot of people make critical mistakes when training in Rocket League and only really use it to try to practice the flashy mechanics like Ceiling Shots, Air Dribbles, and Flip Resets when realistically, in a team game, you’re unlikely to require those fancy trick shots. In a ranked game at Champion level, I could probably count on my fingers the amount of times that my team has been scored on with those kind of shots particularly in 3v3 as, when play gets faster, they become so much easier to defend. If you are looking to improve and make your way up to the purple ranks, you need to forget about the montage plays and instead focus on your core mechanics.

I'm sure most of you reading are aware of and will frequently use the custom training tool and practice your shots or goalkeeping using your favourite training packs but there are, in fact, many other aspects to your game in which you can be training that are equally as important.

The first thing that you need to think about in your approach to training is not to overload yourself. Focus on one thing in particular and just repetitively grind it for however long you want to be in training. If you keep chopping and changing between skills, you are not going to learn in an effective manner as you’re putting new information into your brain when it hasn’t had the time to process the previous task.

Now onto what you should be practicing.

Speed and Recoveries

The very first thing that I like to practice is my speed and recoveries as it is the ideal way to warm-up for a game and I like to do this when I first load up the game and also in between games. The best way to work on your speed and recoveries is in Free Play. What you should be doing in Free Play, contrary to what you should do in an actual game, is chasing the ball around the field utilising your flips and powerslides, wave-dashes, and half-flips.

What I mean by utilising your flips and powerslides together is you should powerslide, flip, and, as you’re landing again, hold the powerslide to continue your momentum. You can then either turn or flip again to get your wheels pointing in the right direction to boost off in the fastest manner possible. This is one of the fundamental skills needed once you reach Champion, as the pace of the game becomes so high that you need to be able to move around the arena as quickly as possible in order to beat your opponents to the ball.

Wave-dashes and half-flips are what I would consider to be more advanced mechanics but are not too difficult to learn and, although I would say that these are not necessarily essential skills, learning how to do these is, without a doubt, helpful for gathering and maintaining speed and momentum.

A wave-dash is accomplished by jumping off of a surface and letting your back wheels touch the ground before your 1.5 second dodge window has expired and then as soon as your back wheels touch the ground, you attempt a front flip. This will slam the front wheels of your car into the ground and you’ll gather all the momentum of the flip while remaining grounded. I find this mechanic is most useful when dismounting from one of the side walls. See the below tutorial for how to wave-dash effectively.

Half-flips are a little bit trickier and can take more time to get the hang of, but if your car is facing the wrong way then this is the fastest way, not to be confused with the most effective way, to turn your car around 180 degrees. The reason I say that it is not to be confused with the most effective way is that it is entirely situational. For example, you wouldn’t half-flip if there was an obstruction behind you such as the back wall.

A half-flip is accomplished by executing a regular back-flip (or can equally be done with a front-flip) and once your car has reached upside down, you cancel the flip by pushing your left-analogue stick in the opposite direction to your flip. This will mean your car will be upside down, with the nose facing in the correct direction. You would then use your air roll to get yourself back on your wheels. Personally, I like to have Air-Roll Left/Right bound to my L3/LS button so that I can execute the whole thing with only the use of two buttons. You can see this in the above tutorial too.

Putting all this together and practicing it in Free Play for about 10-15 minutes to warm-up and in between matches is perfect. I wouldn’t go practicing for too long in Free Play though, as it can sometimes be difficult to transition from unlimited boost to the limited boost you get in a real match and this can end up hurting your play.





Aerial Control

Once you’re happy with the above and it has become second nature to you, I would then move on to practicing aerial control.

In my opinion, the absolute 100% best way to practice your car control in the air is a rather restrictive tool exclusive to PC players only (sorry console players). But it’s a tool in the Steam Workshop called “Speed Jump Boost” by a redditor called /u/dmc_009. This is a list of challenges which increase in difficulty in which you have to work on your boost management as well as air rolls and mid-air adjustments to complete the map and knock a ball off a pedestal at the end.

Utilising air rolls into your aerials is really useful when you are ranking up, as not only does it make your opponents have to think more about where you are going to put the ball, but you are also able to adjust to get different amounts of power onto the ball.

For those players who don’t have access to the Steam Workshop, all is not lost. You are still able to practice your aerial car control and a YouTuber and high-level Rocket League player by the name of Kevpert has a fantastic set of drills for you to practice your aerial control and the video is shown below. These drills can be frustrating and difficult to get the hang of at first and, trust me, everyone struggles with them at first. But the more you practice, the better you will become and I personally guarantee that you will see results in your ranked games.

Types of Aerial

Furthermore, when it comes to aerial control, you will need to recognise the three fundamental types of aerial. The single-jump aerial, the double-jump aerial, and the fast aerial. Knowing when and where to utilise these three different types of aerial is hugely important. So many players in the mid-diamond-early champion ranks use the double-jump or fast aerials for almost every single ball in the air. This is usually due to an element of panic, with the thought that you have to get to the ball before your opponents. Half the time, the ball isn’t even immediately contested.

My general rule of thumb is that if the ball is in the air and is only just above the crossbar height, there is rarely a need to fast aerial or double-jump aerial unless you are certain an opponent is going to beat you to the ball. A simple single-jump aerial would be most effective as it allows you to utilise your dodge to launch the ball away from danger or to an awaiting teammate for a successful pass. The single-jump aerial is pretty self-explanatory. You just need to jump, pull back on the analogue stick and boost up towards the ball.

A double-jump aerial would be used when the ball is high in the air and you need to go straight up to reach it while also preserving some boost. This is used quite frequently in the game mode “Hoops” for kick-offs from a certain position as, if you try a fast aerial, you will run out of boost before you reach the ball. A double-jump aerial is executed quite simply by jumping once (holding the jump button for extra height), then jumping again when at peak height, tilting your car, and boosting up for the ball.

Finally, your fast aerial is the one that you use when you need to beat your opponent to a ball or get up quickly to make a challenge when you have enough boost to do so. This is the fastest way of reaching a high ball, but it has the downside of using a lot more boost. To accomplish a fast aerial, you need to hold boost and jump together while pulling back on the analogue stick, then release the analogue stick and hit jump again.

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