Classmancers - A MOBA Esport Story - Part 3

Vol.19 Ch.3: One Student, Multiple Clubs

In St. Mary's Junior High for Ladies, sports were a complicated topic. The school strived to educate "proper ladies", and different people had different opinions about whether a "lady" had any need for something sweaty and competitive like sports. In particular, many of the older staff often voiced their displeasure on this topic.

Nonetheless, in the world outside, women's sports have been becoming more and more popular. Not only professionally, but also among kids and teens.

As such, it became common to expect schools to provide support for such activities. In fact, for some parents, it was a deal breaker when a school didn't have any sports clubs.

To not lose too many "customers", the school had no choice but to adapt. So, about two decades ago, St. Mary's started supporting sports clubs. There was some internal strife among the education staff on the topic, and to this day there were some teachers who didn't look favorably on sports activities. But fortunately, most of the fraction was gone by now.

And so, St. Mary's adopted sports and made them available for those who wanted to partake in them. However, the school had relatively fewer students than the average school, and only a portion of them were interested in sports in the first place. This naturally led to a limited number of club options.

Soccer and basketball were the two most popular sports among teens these days, but these two didn't appeal to girls as much as they did to boys. As such, though there were some attempts to form such clubs in the past, these projects never kicked off because they failed to attract enough students.

In the end, most of the girls who joined sports clubs went for track and field. It was a sport with the least direct confrontation between competitors, and it also offered a broad variety of activities so it was easier to find something attractive there.

Nonetheless, there was one ball game that managed to become relatively popular among the girls: volleyball. Out of all the ball games, this was the only one that managed to get a club in St Mary's.

Despite its humble beginnings, this club quickly made a name for itself at the regionals. The school invested in a proper female coach for the club, and the results spoke for themselves.

Alas, with the school being so small, it didn't have a stable influx of talent every year. As a result, the team had some years in which it underperformed greatly.

The coach noticed this concerning trend and came up with an unusual solution. She requested the school to permit students to attend multiple sports clubs at the same time if they so desired. This was rather unorthodox compared to how things operated in other schools, but it made a lot of sense.

At the middle school level, athletic talent was sometimes more important than specialized practice. For example, a talented girl from the track and field club, who already trained hard on a regular basis, could easily outshine many members of the volleyball club at their own game. Somebody like that, who already had a great athletic affinity, might need far less volleyball training than others in order to perform well at the regionals.

This was simply a matter of having undeveloped bodies. Almost nobody in the volleyball club went through enough years of specialized training to be considered a "volleyball specialist". Their bodies hadn't yet rebuilt themselves to specialize in the sport, therefore anybody who was athletic enough had a chance to do well.

In fact, Fiona's success in so many sports was largely thanks to this factor. Her intense regular training regime built up the core of her body in such a way that allowed her to perform well in anything.

However, she was like a jack of all trades and a master of none. Some coaches had already warned her that dividing her focus between so many sports would eventually come back to bite her.