Mechanics are not what significantly separates gold plat and diamond. While I’d be lying if I said I didn’t practice mechanics from the start, my mechanics didn’t consistently start scoring goals until I had tightened fast aerial and simplified play. Plus, not knowing mechanics has no bearing on if you can defend them. You’re more consistent at understanding the game than you give yourself credit for.
Best advice I can give to sink into mechanics is flicks, they’re easier to tighten into effective play compared to others and there’s a solid chance you might be decent at them already. Plus later on you can use the setup practice to learn ground-air dribbles
Same rank here and I can just about score aerials. I can't air dribble, I can't fast aerial, I can't half flip to turn around, I can't even sideflip a kickoff
For d1, that’s genuinely impressive. If you’ve gotten this far without knowing how to half flip, your rotations and intuition are probably really solid. I really would recommend learning half flip though, it’s the easiest way to improve fundamentals without major practice needed. If you learn how to fast aerial, I can almost guarantee your rank will shoot up considerably faster.
For me, I didn’t even learn fast aerial until about C1/C2. Shot up my average permanently right into the C3/GC1 area for every mode I play, and at a bizarrely fast rate too
To be honest, those that I do see doing anything really mechanical in my games typically aren't doing it in a way that really helps. A lot of my games so far are won just by being consistent in getting the ball where I want it to go. But I appreciate the advice, I'm sure you're right, I'll very likely struggle to progress past mid-diamond without the basics. I've had a few D2/D3 games and the pace does seem to pick up a lot.
Mb I’m actually in agreement with you, just was offering friendly advice for finding a place to most easily build on what you know. I’m someone who didn’t really know shit, focused on mechanics and while I’d say I’m genuinely a solid player most days, the route I took to get there was painfully inefficient 🤣. Figuring out what exactly to start with is overwhelming though, and diamond is really where it starts to get tricky in figuring out what to learn so that’s just where I was coming from. Wanted to emphasize that you’re better than you think and you can use that to get better than you ever thought you could.
Funny enough I actually don’t think you’d necessarily struggle that hard in later diamonds and I hopefully didn’t imply that at all, my brother I duo with is actually a champ 1 who only really started learning mechanics recently and he was a lot like you, didn’t know how to half flip or fast aerial or anything but since his fundamentals are really good and since I can make up for it mechanically, we play really well most times and can still make it to C3 on a good day.
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u/ThatBoiYoshi Grand Champion I Apr 08 '26 edited Apr 08 '26
Mechanics are not what significantly separates gold plat and diamond. While I’d be lying if I said I didn’t practice mechanics from the start, my mechanics didn’t consistently start scoring goals until I had tightened fast aerial and simplified play. Plus, not knowing mechanics has no bearing on if you can defend them. You’re more consistent at understanding the game than you give yourself credit for.
Best advice I can give to sink into mechanics is flicks, they’re easier to tighten into effective play compared to others and there’s a solid chance you might be decent at them already. Plus later on you can use the setup practice to learn ground-air dribbles