Bounce Into Spring With These Sports Animes
The weather’s getting nice and we’re feeling restless; it’s the perfect time to start feeling sporty with one of these sports animes.
Something about sports anime is easy to watch. With low stakes, virtually no true antagonists, and stories about doing your best and sticking with your friends, they’re great feel-good shows. Now that we’re into spring we all want to get a little more active and start feeling good. And I think these five sports animes will get you there.
Salary Man Club
Soda making business men by day and badminton players by night, if this one sounds a little silly…. Well, it is. Most of the sports anime genre follows high school students, but Salary Man Club follows, you guessed it, salary men. It has all of the same beats you want from the genre; friends, teamwork, polite rivalries, etc. But now the characters are adults with adult real-life issues. Professional deadlines and adult friendships are much more relatable to me than final exams, and if you’re in that boat, Salary Man Club is well worth checking out. Plus, how many shows are there about badminton?
Ahiru no Sora
Sora Kurumatani wants to fulfil his promise to his other and joint the high school basketball club, competing as fiercely as he can, but he’s a little lacking in the height department. And when he does get into the club, he learns that the rest of the team is made up of punks with no interest in playing the actual sport. Sora had to revive the team and show his teammates why he loves the sport so much. Every sports anime has a colorful cast, and this one is no expectation.
Aoashi
Aoashi follows Ashito Aoi, a young soccer (or football) player who wiffs it during a critical game for his hometown team but manages to get scouted for the Tokyo Esperion youth academy’s soccer team. It’s a story of a big fish in a small pond discovering becoming the small fish in the big pond and learning to grow. His teammates and friends are there to show him a thing or two and everyone exceeds their limits and plays their best. It’s a straightforward sports anime, but it does it well.
Gurazeni
Another sports anime with adult characters, Gurazeni is about a professional baseball team. Twenty six year old Natsunosuke Bonda is very numbers-minded and just wants the team to do well enough so that he can earn enough money to one day retire. It’s definitely a weird, back-door approach to supporting your teammates and helping them get better, but it’s one that I can’t help but find relatable. None of those high school athletes are worried about their paychecks or the cost of necessities, but Bonda and I are.
Slam Dunk
Slam Dunk is a pioneer of the sports anime genre, originally premiering in 1993. Hanamichi Sakuragi has an infamous temper and no luck getting dats and more-or-less accidently joins the basketball team to impress a girl. And later this year classic is getting new life with a movie. If you haven’t seen the original, now is a good time to familiarize yourself.
What’s your favorite sports anime? Have you seen all of our picks? Is there a sport you haven’t seen an anime of but keep hoping for? Let us know in the comments!
Ja Ne, Adventurers!
