A Fateful Encounter in Badminton: The Journey to Competing in a Tournament

Hello,
this is Yasuda.

This is a story about a meeting through badminton a few years ago and
the journey leading up to competing in a tournament.

I started playing badminton again on a whim.

Around the age of 26,
I moved to Kobe,
and that is where I resumed playing badminton.

I don't know what I was thinking,
but on my way home from work,
I suddenly thought, 'Shall I play badminton?'
and headed to the sports store DEPO.

Since I'm the type who likes to get the gear first,
I bought sportswear, shoes, and a racket.

Even though I hadn't decided on a club to join yet.

I have a habit of
taking action as soon as I think of something...

Anyway,
I found a badminton club in Kobe
and started playing again.

An anime nerd has a fateful encounter.

I'll say it right away:
It was an encounter with aman, haha.

The fateful encounter was with aman!

However, we later became close enough
that he invited me to give a friend's speech
at his wedding.

The days I spent playing badminton,
or rather, the days I was obsessed with it.

I met S-kun.
S-kun was two years older than me.

He had originally played both soft and hard tennis.

He was incredibly athletic,
had great looks,
excellent communication skills,
and was over 180cm tall.

Hey, hey...
He was a perfect superman straight out of a picture book.

The only thing I could beat him at
was badminton.
(I'm such a small person for using my experience to assert dominance...)

At least in badminton,
I had a pride
I couldn't let go of.

Since Yasuda is the eldest son, he looked up to older brothers, and
S-kun, who was a little older,
was like an older brother figure to him.

The way he became friends with S-kun
started with a single LINE sticker.

Yasuda owns an absurd amount of
anime-themed stickers.

About 60 of them, to be exact.

It's crazy, right?
Yes, I am aware.

While chatting with S-kun,
it just so happened that I owned the same sticker
that he sent!

And it was a talking anime sticker, too.
I had no choice but to send the same one back.

Can you guess what happened next?
We ended up having a blast talking about anime, haha.

Because of that, S-kun and I
started playing badminton together once or twice a week.

We decided on the team name 'Assari' (Light/Simple) at a family restaurant.

About two years after I started playing badminton again,
I started going to practice in Osaka from Kobe,
and I made friends with all sorts of people.

However, since Yasuda's communication skills were at an (E) level back then,
I felt like I was just tagging along with S-kun, whose communication skills were SS.

I ended up talking with a girl I met there
about entering a tournament.

There are many badminton tournaments,
but we were entering a doubles team competition.

Three men,
three women,
a team of six in total.

Men's doubles,
women's doubles,
mixed doubles,
we competed for rankings based on the results of these three matches.

The men were S-kun, me, and another guy three years younger,
and the women were a trio of high school classmates,
so that was the team we entered with.

Scouting the members
is something I wouldn't imagine doing now,
but I was the one mainly doing it back then.

And so,
S-kun, one of the girls, and I
held a strategy meeting and decided on our team name at a family restaurant.

Strategy
Just win, no matter what
(Are we elementary schoolers?)

Team Name
"Assari" (Light/Simple)

What is this?

The team name
was really decided on a whim

The common
"Yasuda and His Merry Friends"
I absolutely hated that, so I firmly rejected it!

Although various ideas were proposed,
S-kun only came up with silly names
(mostly names to tease Yasuda)
There were some that were too embarrassing to even write down

Since the team name is called out over the PA system at the tournament,
I kept rejecting anything obscene or joke-like
because it would be too embarrassing

We couldn't decide,
and the three of us were starting to get careless...

If I recall, the dish we were eating
had "clams" (asari) in it,
and someone said, "How about Asari, or maybe Assari?"
and it just became the team name lol

This team "Assari"
is going to storm the Osaka tournament!

This has become long, but the results will be carried over to next week

And so, the story leading up to the tournament has become quite long...

I will share the tournament results
next week,
so please look forward to seeing
what kind of result Team Assari achieved

Who would have thought clams would be the origin of our team name

Thank you
for reading until the end
Yasuda