Lacrosse Wall Ball Tips

Looking For Some Tips On Doing Wall Ball To Get Better At Lacrosse?

You’ve come to the right place. While our other page dedicated to wall ball has some excellent video examples from some of the world’s best players (and some great ready-to-go wall ball routines and workouts), we put this page together to share our recommendations for getting the most out of your wall ball routine. If you follow this advice, you will enjoy wall ball more – and more importantly, you will improve at lacrosse faster. And who doesn’t want to get better at lacrosse, right?

Many of our coaches and players have done a lot of wall ball. Here are our best tips for getting the most out of your time on the wall:

1. Find a Wall: find a wall you can easily get to and practice on several times per week. Concrete walls are best. Brick walls are easier to find – most schools have at least one large brick wall without windows somewhere around the building. Go explore and find a wall you can easily get to (that’s in a safe place) and make it your home away from home for getting better at lacrosse. If you don’t have a wall near you or don’t have the ability to get to a wall regularly, ask for a lacrosse rebounder for your birthday or Christmas. Better yet, save up and buy one yourself – there is no better investment than investing in your own personal development. If you need a lacrosse rebounder, this option on Amazon offers the best combination of quality at a lower price point ($200). There are cheaper alternatives, but they won’t last as long and you’ll end up paying more in the long-run. If you’re really serious about wall ball, this is the BEST rebounder available (it is heavy-duty, quiet, easier to move around, and returns passes at a faster speed than other rebounders). While this is an amazing product, it’s an investment ($1,000) – but maybe you can find a used one on Facebook Marketplace or a similar website. Then again, if your family has multiple lacrosse players in the household, this is one of the best investments you can make in your skill development. 

2. Have a Plan. Whether you are doing wall ball on a wall, on a rebounder, or partner passing with a parent, teammate or friend, have a routine. Just like you would (hopefully) have a workout plan for strength training or cardio, you should have a workout plan for wall ball. Not sure what skills to work on for your wall ball routine? Watch the videos below for inspiration. Ideally, you should plan to do wall ball 3-5 times per week for at least 20 minutes per-session. Again, the more reps you do, the faster you will improve and the better your stick skills will be. Log your workouts in a notebook to track your progress! In addition to the videos, which will give you a lot of great ideas to incorporate into your wall ball workout or routine, we’ve also included several different pre-developed wall ball routines you can steal if you just want to get started and already know how to perform most of the skills. 

3. Work Both Hands. Make sure you are working on both your dominant and non-dominant hands. You need to be able to pass, catch, and shoot with both hands. 

4. Work All Angles and Change Planes. Make sure you are working on passing and catching from different angles or “planes” – in other words, do overhand, sidearm, underhand, one-handed, and underhand passing and catching. Will you be able to do all of these skills the first time? No. Will you get the hang of it faster than you might think? YES! If you practice these skills, they will become skills. 

5. Keep Your Feet Moving. Don’t just stand there. Watch the videos below to see how the players in these videos are not square to the wall. Rather, they are perpendicular or sideways when passing and catching – and they keep their feet moving or “active” (just like you will pass or catch in practice or games).

6. Have Spare Balls. Have at least a dozen balls with you. Invest in balls to use for your wall ball routine. You don’t need brand new balls, but all the balls should be the same color and texture for consistency. Honestly, if you’re just starting out, and you can afford them, it is BEST to use new balls. Keep them in a bucket, out of the sun and away from water, and only use them for your wall ball workouts and they will last much, much longer. When you head out to the wall, keep them by your feet or in a bucket next to you, so if/when you miss a catch, you can grab another ball and keep things moving (versus chasing one ball all the time). While we want you to catch every pass you make off the wall, it’s going to take a while before you can do your routine with only one ball – so have spares near by.

7. Challenge Yourself. If you really want to see results, challenge yourself. For example, set a goal to not have any drops for each skill you practice. If you are doing 25 overhand passes/catches with your right hand and you miss the 25^th catch, you start over. Or maybe you mark a brick on the wall with chalk and aim for the same spot each time to work on your accuracy. Make wall ball competitive by challenging your teammates or friends to see who can do the most reps in a week. Track your workouts (as mentioned above) and motivate each other to stick with the program. This is also a good idea for coaches to take note of – consider having a wall ball competition for your players. For younger players, have them get their parents to sign off on their wall ball workouts to prove they are working the program. Doing things like this will lead to faster improvement that will translate to how you perform at practice or in games. 

8. Keep it fun. Listen to music while you’re doing your routine. Do wall ball with a friend or teammate. You’re going to be spending a lot of time on the wall. The more fun you can make it, the more likely you will be to stick with it. It shouldn’t be a chore for you – remember, you enjoy the game, and the better your stick skills get, the more fun you will have in practice and games guaranteed!

These are the most common tips we have for setting yourself up for success with your wall ball workouts. If you’re a wall ball warrior already and we missed something, let us know and we’ll add it to the page.

Remember! The only thing keeping you from becoming a great lacrosse player is YOU. You have complete control over how good you can get and how quickly you can improve. So stop reading this article and go hit the wall!

Food For Thought

But...if you’re still reading this page, let’s get nerdy for a second and talk about what it takes to master any skill – whether wall ball or anything else you choose to work at mastering.

Have you ever heard of the 10,000 hour rule? This “rule” comes from bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Outliers,” where he consistently references his rule to demonstrate the amount of effort and work required to master a skill. There is no shortage of experts (and masters of skills) who have challenged the validity of this rule, but it’s worth sharing that in example after example of humans who have become the “best in the world” in anything, that they have invested at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master the skill. The word “deliberate” is important here, which basically means practicing the skill correctly for those 10,000 hours in order to master it. 

Bottom line: that’s a lot of practice. If you were able to practice 24 hours a day, it would take you 416 days to master a skill! Specific to wall ball, if you want to have the best stick skills in the world and are willing to practice 5 hours per week every week of the year, it would add up to 260 hours per year. If it really takes 10,000 hours to become a master, it will take you approximately 38 ½ years to get there. Bump that practice up to 10 hours a week and you can get there in 19 years – but that’s still a long, long time.

You don’t have to MASTER lacrosse to be incredible. 99.9% of lacrosse players will NOT become become masters in terms of stick skills. Only a few can be the best in the world at anything. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have the best stick skills on your team, in Henry County, or in Georgia for your age – that IS possible, it really just depends on how many hours you choose to spend on the wall. Your goal should be to get better than you were yesterday. That will happen if you do wall ball. Got it? Great. Now really, go hit the wall.

And if you didn’t come to this page after watching the wall ball videos and checking out the wall ball routines we shared on our main wall ball page, you can go check that page out once you come back inside from your workout.