Trinity Rodman on using her father’s rebounding style in her game

“I watched my dad play a lot more than people really know”

Trinity Rodman has said she is trying to incorporate her father’s tenacious rebounding style into her own game.

Even though they are two different sports, there’s one central principal that Rodman has taken from basketball and applied to soccer: “Hunting.”

Rodman is, of course, the daughter of NBA legend Dennis Rodman, one of the best rebounders in basketball history.

Speaking to reporters at the U.S. women’s national team media day last weekend, Rodman said she has studied her father’s style of play, looking to apply it to her own game.

Even though she was born two years after her father’s 2000 retirement, Rodman said. “I watched my dad play a lot more than people really know.”

“I think, obviously, my dad was pretty good at rebounding,” she added in quotes published on Fox Sports. “I think just always hunting, with rebounding it is hunting in front of goal, hunting when you lose the ball. I think that is a huge part of my game, reading, tracking back and being the first person to get a foot, a head, a knee or a shin on something that pops up.

“Even if he wasn’t the first guy under the basket or he was next to Shaq [O’Neal], who was way bigger, way taller, he was going to get the rebound. It was timing, it was anticipation, it was body movement, it was positioning, it was everything. I think he was so intelligent and people take that away. He was a freak of nature, and an insane athlete, but at the end of the day I think he was one of the smartest players of all time.”

Rodman put that ethos on display in the USWNT’s send-off game against Wales on Sunday. Having already scored once, Rodman demonstrated her “hunting” mentality to rob the ball off a Wales player before curling home a fantastic strike to complete her brace.

Rodman is not close with her father, saying that she has not been in communication with him for months. She has maintained a sense of perspective on the relationship, saying she is comfortable with where things stand between them.

“Like I’ve said before, I’ve gotten closure with it all,” she said. “I know he’s proud of me. I truly do. He has his own things to deal with but at the end of the day, he’s communicated to me that he knows I was going to be here, and that’s all I need.”

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