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It’s been over ten years now, but I’ve never felt a rush like that in my entire life.
The blazing heat should have been unbearable, but I didn’t feel it. The roaring crowd and instruments should have been deafening, but I couldn’t hear them. The constant pain in my right ankle? Gone.
The stage was the dream of every high school baseball player:
Koshien in the peak of summer.
Going into the top of the ninth, we were down 2–3. We were trailing by a single run, and to make things worse, the inning was starting with the bottom of our lineup. But we didn’t give up. The leadoff batter battled through twelve pitches to draw a walk. The second batter popped out to the infield, but the third blooped a lucky single.
Runners on first and third with one out.
“Uesugi. You’re up.”
I was sent in as a pinch runner at first base by the coach. Despite the pitcher keeping a close eye on me, I successfully stole second. Now it was one out with runners on second and third. The opposing team opted to intentionally walk the next batter, loading the bases. One out, bases loaded.
Standing on second, I focused every ounce of concentration I had on the ball. I’m pretty sure even if someone smacked me on the head, I wouldn’t have noticed—I was that dialed in.
And then—crack!
The batter hit it!
I only saw the ball drop between the second baseman and center fielder. I didn’t watch where it went after that—no time to waste. I took off for third. One of my teammates was windmilling his arm—keep going!
Home plate was in sight. I ran. Ran. Ran through!
I slid home safely.
In the bottom of the ninth, in true manga fashion, we turned the game around and won.
“UESUGIIII!! YOU’RE A DAMN GOD!!!”
Rough pats on the back from teammates. Deafening cheers from the crowd. The delayed pain shooting through my right ankle.
Everything about that moment was perfect.
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BAM!
A ball was slammed with brute force, all form thrown out the window—yet the girl, arguably one of the worst on the team at receiving, somehow managed to pull off the receive.
“Nice, Yuuri! That’s the way. Whether it’s a power hit or a soft touch, the basics don’t change. Just like that—get under the ball and take it head-on.”
Said Saeki-sensei, technically my junior in the teaching staff, as she gave advice.
By some twist of fate, I was suddenly reassigned from basketball club advisor to assistant advisor of the volleyball club in late July, and now it’s already day three of the training camp I got dragged into.
For the record, over these past three days—aside from the facility staff—I’ve spent my time in a gender ratio of 1:9.
Some people might envy that situation.
But eight of those nine girls are high schoolers, and just half a year ago, they were still in junior high. From their perspective, a 30-year-old smack in the middle of his “around thirty” phase isn’t “big brother” material. I’m strictly in the “old man” category. They don’t look at me that way.
And on my end, I have no interest in kids who still reek of baby powder! (He says, shaking.)
More importantly, I can’t even maintain a shred of manly pride.
I’m 171 cm tall.
That’s about average for a grown man in Japan.
But in this group, four of the girls are taller than me. One more is just about the same height. In this skewed little world, my height ends up looking… well, feminine.
So maybe I could at least rely on physical strength—nope, one of them’s definitely stronger than me too. That’s off the table.
Ah, I forgot to introduce myself.
My name is Uesugi Masaru. At this rate, in two more months, I’ll be turning into a wizard.
I’m a Japanese literature teacher at a public high school.
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Time: 10:00 PM.
Evening practice had ended, and so had bath time. The students were once again gathered in front of me.
It was time to begin our night study session. (And no, not in any indecent way.)
Some of the students had scored miserably on their final exams, but overall, they were serious and approached their studies far more diligently than I ever did in my school days.
Though they grumbled on the first day, once it became clear the opponent was just regular homework, the students buckled down and tackled it quietly.
In fact, three of them had already finished all their summer homework and were now reviewing the first semester and prepping ahead for the second.
…Honestly, I don’t even need to be here. I'm only playing the role of a chaperone because Saeki-sensei is still in the bath, but truthfully, a male teacher being in the same room with female students at night is just asking for unnecessary misunderstandings. I should probably leave soon.
“Uesugi-sensei. Do you regret what happened with Okumura-senpai?”
Just as I stood to leave the room, Maejima—the student who’d taken over as basketball club captain from Okumura—asked me that.
“Why do you think that?” I asked.
“Well, since July, instead of pushing us to practice harder, you’ve been telling us not to overtrain, to cool down properly... Stuff like that.”
…Come to think of it, I had canceled the first night’s practice during this camp and again adjusted today’s training menu to lower the intensity. No wonder they thought that.
“…Maybe it’s a little different from what you're thinking, but yeah. I do regret it.”
“I don’t think it’s something you need to feel bad about. You kept telling us not to push ourselves too hard. Okumura-senpai was the one who chose to keep training. If it were me, I’d have done the same thing.”
“Yeah, I figured. I once kept playing through an injury myself.”
“What? That’s the first I’ve heard of that.”
“Sensei! That sounds like a good story!”
When I looked around, I saw that all eight students were watching me intently. Might as well. This was a good chance to let them hear what I think.
“Haa… Alright. I’ll tell you an old story from when this soon-to-be-30-year-old was still in high school. Don’t blame me if it gets boring halfway through. It was around this same time of year, when I was a third-year in high school—so more than ten years ago now. I appeared on TV once. You’ve all heard of it, right? Summer Koshien. My alma mater was a public school, but it had a strong baseball program. In my third year, we made it through the prefectural tournament. Of course, any school good enough to make it to Koshien has a deep bench. I didn’t even get a uniform my first two years. I finally got one in my third year. Not because I was a regular or anything, but because I was fast—I was brought in as a pinch runner. Actually, there was another guy faster than me, but he was injured. I had shin splints… basically, a kind of injury. But I kept that to myself. That’s how I got to wear the uniform. So yeah, I understood how Okumura felt. That’s why I let her keep playing.”
The students looked at me with intense, serious eyes. I guess something about this resonated with them.
“Anyway, just because I got a uniform didn’t mean I got to play. I didn’t get any time on the field during the prefectural tournament. Not even in the first game at Koshien. But I did get a shot—in the second round. I won’t go into baseball rules since some of you might not know them, but we were losing until the very end of the game. Then, right at the end, we turned it around. And the key play? It was me—a pinch runner who came in mid-game. I was thrilled. I only played for eight minutes total. That was the entirety of my official game time in high school. Can you believe it? I’d been playing baseball since elementary school, grinding through hellish practices under a demon coach every day in high school, and the payoff was just eight minutes of play time.”
“…Sensei, do you regret continuing to play baseball?”
“Nope. Not at all. If I could do it all over again, I’d do the same thing. …Well, maybe that’s boring. I’d train even harder and become an even better player.
…And that’s exactly why I let Okumura keep playing, even knowing about her injury. That was my mistake.”
“But Sensei, you just said you don’t regret continuing to play while injured. Then why regret what happened with Okumura-senpai? She must’ve known too, and still chose to play…”
“Maybe so. But if I, as a teacher, push that choice onto students like Okumura—or onto any of you—then I’m not doing my job. When I tried to apologize to Okumura’s parents at the hospital, both she and her parents told me, ‘You’re not at fault, Sensei.’ That’s not something a student or a parent should ever have to say. That’s when I realized I’d been in the wrong.”
“So, you’re saying if you had been injured in high school, you would’ve told someone?”
“No, I wouldn’t have. But I’m not going to let my students be in that position. More importantly, I won’t let any of you regret not getting to play because you were injured. I’ll go back even further—I’ll make sure you don’t get injured in the first place. That’s why, over these past three days, whenever I thought something was too much, I reduced the training intensity or canceled it altogether. Got it?”
These kids really are serious. They looked at me with eyes that showed they understood exactly what I was saying.
“Oh, and I’ve got one dream. Even after ten years, I still can’t forget the excitement of Koshien. So now, my dream is to stand on that kind of stage again—this time as a coach. Spring High… that’s the volleyball equivalent of Koshien, right? I even got a Class C driver’s license so I can drive a microbus. I didn’t have time to prepare this time, but for the late-August training camp with Tamaki Commercial and the official match in November, we’ll borrow a microbus from the school. Of course, if we have practice games before then, I’ll negotiate with the school. I’ll carry all the gear and balls.
So—”
“Let me drive you all the way to that Tokyo gym at the start of the year!”
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