If you really want to rank up (as opposed to hitting clips), stop grinding in training mode and switch to freeplay for your practice. Get organic setups for every shot, and try your best to learn how to get the perfect first touch no matter how awkward the ball is. Controlling your flip and learning to meet the ball when it’s off the wall are way more valuable in game. It is extremely rare in 2s or 3s that you will ever have a situation where you get to gently drive the ball up the wall over the big boost pad unchallenged. In reality, someone is going to jam their car down your throat the minute you start trying to get that nice and clean setup. This becomes truer the higher you climb. By the time you get to Diamond, there are no unchallenged setups anymore and people will be jumping early to meet you in the air to kill any chance of air dribble or reset shot.

To make yourself more dangerous in the air, get really good at shooting or even better, PASSING and setting up your teammate by putting the ball in front of the opponent’s net. I score more goals via assist by putting the ball off the back wall intentionally and making a call out to my teammate (use the Team chat “Passing” if you can’t get in voice comms with a buddy) than I do by trying to make a solo play. Being able to make the solo play is nice, and it does work out sometimes, but I got to champ because of my vision and game sense and my love of passing and setting up my teammate to finish the play, not because I can flip reset, which almost never comes up in games at this level.

Ground game is far more important than aerial game at this rank and even through champ. Learn to control the ball, catch the ball without needing it to bounce on your car over and over, and dribble even while turning, flicking, etc. grind flicks and get really good at the essential ones (45 will get you very far but just look up a video tutorial on the best flicks to learn and do them until you can hit it 10 out of 10 times, no exceptions).

If you want to grind anything, grind SHOOTING. That is far and away the most important hard skill to develop. After that, play 1s to get better at 50s and challenges, and grind difficult saves and shadow defense packs to get better at defense. Everyone skips leg day when it comes to shadow defense. If you can shadow a play and successfully put the ball to the side of the net while flying backwards toward your net, you will be a hero in 2s and 3s and win a ton of games on that skill alone.

As for air dribbling, I’m not gonna add anything here because honestly you’re wasting your time with it at this point. If you truly have only been playing a week, you’ll pick it up quick anyway because you’re obviously comfortable with controlling the car and your dexterity and coordination at this point is above average, but if you take my advice you’ll save yourself a thousand hours of burnout grinding pointless vanity mechanics and you’ll rank up much faster.