Recruitment had become one of the two most pressing tasks for the Seido High School Baseball Team, and Zhang Han had quietly become one of its most visible faces.
Over the course of the period, he had helped Takashima Rei receive seven or eight prospective junior students. Miyuki and Yuuki had also taken part, though with fewer visits to their names.
The division of labor had settled into a natural pattern. Miyuki handled mostly pitchers. Yuuki focused on power hitters and technically skilled players whose reputations hadn't yet spread far enough to attract wider attention. Zhang Han, as the most publicly recognizable face on the roster after Koshien, handled the broadest share.
Takashima Rei had gone into the recruitment season believing that reaching Koshien would make everything easier. The reality had been more complicated than that.
Most of the genuinely talented players had made their school decisions almost immediately after the Summer Tournament ended, and at that point, Seido had not yet advanced to Koshien.
By the time Seido's name was being talked about nationally, those players had already committed elsewhere. What remained were the undecided, the late bloomers, and the overlooked, and the Seido coaching staff was not always interested in those either.
Even so, the season had gone better than the two years before it. They had secured five or six players with documented junior high results, at least double the number from previous recruitment cycles. It wasn't everything Takashima Rei had hoped for, but it was real progress.
Whether any of those players would develop into something meaningful was, of course, a separate question entirely.
Recruitment could show you a portion of what a player was. It couldn't show you where their ceiling was, how they responded to pressure over time, or what kind of competitor they became once the demands of rigorous training were placed on them consistently. The current Seido roster was full of examples of that truth, in both directions.
Yuuki was perhaps the clearest one. When he had first arrived at the school, he had announced that he could play every position and didn't want to be confined to just one. The coaching staff had been intrigued. Then they had watched him play, and discovered that his claim was accurate in the most technically disappointing way possible. He could play every position, and he was equally limited at all of them.
Nobody had expected much from him.
That same player was now the most important core of the Seido High School Baseball Team's lineup.
Zhang Han and Miyuki had arrived with more reputation attached to their names, but even they had not been at the very top of their age group when they enrolled. Now, by any honest accounting, they were among the best first-year players in the country. Potential was visible. Achievement was not. That gap between the two was where the real work of developing a team happened.
With recruitment winding down, the Fall Tournament had moved to the front of everyone's attention.
The structure of the tournament was its own kind of trial. First, every team in Tokyo participated in a round-robin phase, grouped in clusters of three or four. All high school programs across both East and West Tokyo had to fight their way out of those groups to reach the knockout stage. From more than two hundred teams, only sixty-two would survive to the draw. Adding the East Tokyo and West Tokyo champions, who entered directly, brought the total to sixty-four.
Reaching that stage meant a team had already eliminated roughly three-quarters of their competition. In terms of the Spring and Summer Tournament equivalents, it placed them in the range of the third round of a major competition.
From there, the draw operated without seeding. Anyone could face anyone. It was not unheard of for the East and West Tokyo champions, teams that had just fought each other to the edge at Koshien, to find themselves paired against each other again in the very first round.
The Fall Tournament champion earned a place in both the Jingu Tournament and the Spring Koshien. Those were meaningful opportunities. But the Directors of the powerhouse schools tended to hold the Fall Tournament at a slight remove from their most serious ambitions. The team was still adjusting after the summer, still reshaping itself after graduations and lineup changes. Intelligence on opponents was thin. The uncertainty was too high to make firm demands of the result.
There was also the matter of what the Spring Koshien represented compared to the summer version. The Summer Koshien carried more weight in almost every dimension. The selection process was harder. The teams that reached it were more fully developed. The stakes for third-year players, for whom a loss meant the end of their high school baseball careers, gave every game an emotional current that the Spring tournament simply couldn't match. Spectacle, intensity, consequence, the Summer Koshien held all of it in a way that left the spring competition playing a secondary role.
But the Spring Koshien was still Koshien. No one with any investment in the sport could fully dismiss it, however much they told themselves the autumn was primarily a developmental exercise.
That was how powerful school Directors tended to approach it publicly. Outwardly, training and experience. Privately, serious preparation. If the results came, they acknowledged the players' hard work. If they didn't, they cited the team's youth and turned their attention to the summer. It was a posture that kept expectations manageable and avoided the trap of backing the program into a corner where only one outcome would be acceptable.
As the West Tokyo champions and Koshien quarter-finalists, Seido entered the knockout stage with one concrete advantage. They were granted direct entry into the top sixty-four, bypassing the group phase entirely and moving straight to the draw.
The draw itself had been kind to them.
Between their entry point and the top sixteen, there were no opponents that gave the coaching staff particular concern. That said, the Fall Tournament had a well-earned reputation for producing dark horses. Without reliable intelligence on unfamiliar teams, the possibility of an unknown program defeating a powerhouse on a good day was always present. The draw offered no guarantees, only a favorable arrangement of probabilities.
Their first genuinely complicated opponent would likely appear at the top sixteen stage, assuming that opponent made it there without any surprises of their own.
The quarter-final bracket was also worth noting. Depending on how the bracket played out, their potential opponent in that round would be the winner between Inashiro Industrial and Teito High School, the East Tokyo champion. That was a matchup with enough history and name recognition to generate its own tension.
And if Ichidai Third High School navigated its side of the bracket without stumbling, they would only meet Seido in the finals.
When the grouping results went up, the collective exhale across the Seido clubhouse was almost audible.
The draw had treated them well. Captain Yuuki's luck, as it turned out, had not been understated.
"Good luck."
The word passed between teammates quietly, with real feeling behind it.
Based on how the bracket had fallen, their chances of making a deep run were genuine. The path was not clear of obstacles, but it was as manageable as anyone could have reasonably hoped for going into the draw.
Someone near the front of the group leaned in and read the first-round listing aloud.
"The first-round opponent is from East Tokyo. Seisenji Academy."
A beat of silence followed.
Nobody recognized the name. With Seido's history and the breadth of their scouting network, an unfamiliar name at this stage was worth noting.
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