The expansion of a Schubert polynomial into slide polynomials corresponds to a sum over sub-balls in the subword complex. There has been recent interest in other, coarser, expansions of Schubert polynomials. We extend the methods used in [KM04] to prove that the subword complex is a ball or a sphere to a more general method, and use it to prove that the expansion of a Schubert polynomial into forest polynomials also corresponds to a sum over sub-balls in the subword complex. When expanding the product $\mathfrak{S}_π\mathfrak{S}_ρ$ of two Schubert polynomials into Schubert polynomials $\mathfrak{S}_σ$, there is a bijection between shuffles of reduced words for $π$ and $ρ$ and reduced words for $σ$ (counted with multiplicity). We give such a bijection for Monk's rule and Sottile's Pieri rule. We give tableau-based definitions of slide polynomials, glide polynomials, and fundamental quasisymmetric polynomials and show that the expansion of a Schur polynomial into fundamental quasisymmetric polynomials corresponds to a sum over sub-balls in the tableau complex. The Schubert polynomials are the cohomology classes of matrix Schubert varieties, but there is no geometric explanation of the slide polynomials. We show that the slide polynomials are not (antidiagonal) Gröbner degenerations of matrix Schubert varieties, answering in the negative a question of [ST21, Section 1.4].