Chapter 5 - Starting Position, Get! (1/2)

The next day after the match, at the end of the practice, the coach announced.

Coach: ”We are having a change in the starting lineup, effective immediately Kageyama Shun would be playing as a starting member on the first-string team as the small forward. His position might be small forward, but he will cooperate with Ishida in making plays as well. That will be all, dismissed.”

What followed was a barrage of congratulations and envious looks, but Shun was happy.

With that, the club activities were over, of course not before cleaning the gym.

When he got home, Shun told his parents about his day, and Shun's mother promised him to make something a little less healthy during lunch on the weekend, dinner/supper at the Kageyama household didn't have a place for fatty food in it.

Days passed as Shun practiced at the club to improve his skills and played as a regular starting member in practice matches.

The next event on Shun's list was the Nationals - Middle school division. Unlike high school where there were two significant tournaments; Inter-high and Winter Cup, Middle school only has one significant tournament.

Japan has forty-three proper prefectures, two urban prefectures(Osaka and Kyoto), one territory(Hokkaido), and one metropolis(Tokyo). In total, there are forty-seven prefectures who send out forty-nine schools(Two from Hokkaido because of its massive size and two from Tokyo because of the number of schools in Tokyo).

Preliminaries for Tokyo has two blocks(A and B). Winners from each block get the ticket to the Nationals. Each block has three initial rounds, semi-finals, and finals.

Top eight teams from the last preliminaries get seeded and skip the first initial round. Tokiwadai and Teiko were among the seeded schools as usual.

Practice and drills became a little harder because of the upcoming preliminaries, and Shun could see that all noticeable members had developed something special for it.

Otsubo's timing for jumping for rebounds got better.

Aone learned to balance between muscling in and driving in with speed according to the situation.

Ishida's outside shot accuracy and shot placement improved.

Most importantly, Mibuchi had finally developed his Heaven shot, a high fade-away jumper, and was even showing hints of developing his Earth shot, shooting while drawing a foul.

Shun also worked hard to improve his post moves so that he could play in the paint without any difficulties. Post moves were becoming less and less popular in modern basketball as guard positions started to hold more dominance in scoring. Shun knew that but still choose to polish them as he knew he would have to go against Murasakibara in the paint.

While practicing and improving, Shun realized how less did Kise took advantage of his ability. Perfect Copy was able to copy a move after seeing it once, and Kise used it just like that, but Shun used it differently.

What Shun did was; when he copied a move he would image it like a structure made of legos, and he takes out, and replace the pieces that could be improved, forming a better structure.

Shun: 'But that could be attributed to his circ.u.mstances, Kise kept changing sports when he was able to beat the people around him, and he didn't need to put the extra effort. Plus he had quite less experience with basketball than others, and because he couldn't copy other miracles at the start, he made it his goal to copy their moves as a challenge, and didn't consider the route I am taking.'