It’s happened to all of us. You start playing Rocket League and are moving up the ranks. You get to Gold and someone completely styles on you with a mind-blowing Air Dribble. It looks so cool! Who wouldn’t want to be able to do that? Not to mention how effective it seemed because they scored. After it happened to me, I quickly picked my jaw up off the floor and did some research. I practiced it for an hour or so and didn’t see any noticeable improvement, so I gave it up.

It wasn’t until I was Platinum 2 that I decided I was going to master it. Not because I wanted to Air Dribble goals, but because I wanted to learn better car/ball control. By now I’ve realized that they are not that hard to defend and in a 3v3 match, you don’t get a lot of chances to do them. Learning Air Dribbling was one of the most significant improvements I made to my game, and I’ve only tried to score with them a handful of times in actual matches. By learning better car/ball control, you learn when soft touches are more advantageous. For example, there were times before I learned Air Dribbling when the opposing team would have cleared a ball to my side of the pitch and I would have doubled jumped into it, causing it to bounce off the wall and center in front of my goal. Now having learned to control the ball in the air much better, I know I need to lightly let the ball hit my car and roll up the corner, allowing my team time to get back and create a better defense.

I will go over some pretty universally accepted tips to practice your Air Dribbling and also some of my personal preferences. There are advantages to both custom training packs and Free Play, so it’s good to practice in both. Also, if you haven’t changed your sensitivity settings, you will likely notice that Aerial Steering Sensitivity at 1.0 will not react quick enough to make the tiny adjustments you need to make in the air. I have my Aerial Sensitivity set to 1.25 and my Controller Deadzone settings at .16, but you will have to tweak that to what feels right to you.

Here are some essential tips to practice Air Dribbling:

- The ball needs to be rolling flat up the wall. If the ball is even a tiny bit off the wall, it will make it exponentially harder to execute.

- Your car needs to match the speed of the ball but if you are rolling the ball up the wall yourself, you don’t have to worry about this as much because you will likely already be traveling at the same speed.

- When you make contact with the ball once you’re on the wall, you need to be slightly angled towards the opposing goal. The degree of the angle will vary depending on where you are on the pitch, so this will take some getting used to. Generally, the further out from the opposing goal you are, the greater the angle should be.

- Jump off the wall as soon as you hit the ball. There are some people who prefer to wait a millisecond or two, but I find it is easiest if you jump, hold your air roll button, and start to use the joystick to straighten your car upright all at the same time. I feel as though this gives you the most time to adjust in the air.

- Take your time when making your first touch. This took me a while to learn because playing matches gets you use to rushing to the ball. You typically have a full 1.5 seconds to make your first touch on the ball. Generally, you want to make your first touch happen before the ball starts making its descent.

- Your first touch needs to be as light as possible. If you hit the ball too hard, it will fly further away from you and angle your car in a non-ideal position. The best way to do this is feather up to the ball and stop boosting right before you touch it. You should be aiming for the lowest-middle part of the ball that is closest to your bumper.

- Carry the ball into the net. The hard part is over, and you can feather or even hold boost and guide the ball into the net. Learning how to steer the ball and make the tiny adjustments is not necessarily something I can explain in text but will come with practice.

- There is no substitute for practice. It took me overall 6-8 hours practicing Air Dribbles to do them with any consistency and another 6-8 hours to be able to do them almost every time.

Learning to Air Dribble is invaluable when it comes to learning ball/car control and will help you in so many other areas of the game. The great thing about Rocket League is that nothing you learn is ever useless. You could drive around backwards in Free Play for hours and would almost certainly find a way to help you in some fashion in matches. Although you might not be scoring many mind-blowing goals from Air Dribbling, if you are a serious player you will not regret having mastered it.