Watching sports anime over the years has really made me realize that the physical education teachers I had in school were really just giving the bare minimum of effort. It’s not great when you learn more rules and techniques from a sports anime than someone paid to teach a sport.
Now, it should be said that not all sports anime are educational. I mean something tells me that you won’t find much applicable knowledge about playing basketball in Basquash, an anime about playing basketball in mechs. However, some anime series, even the “super-powered” sports anime series full of outlandish plays can have some applicable knowledge about the sport in question.
If you are looking for sports anime that can be as educational about the sport as they are entertaining, then check out these great series.
Educational Sports Anime
Haikyuu
Sure, everyone remembers Haikyuu for the large cast of unique characters and the addiction-forming intensity that makes or breaks popular sports anime. However, no one remembers Haikyuu for those times when it actually taught you that volleyball was more than just ”hit ball over net.”
Perhaps if you have played on an actual volleyball team yourself, then you know basic information like what the positions on the court are supposed to do, but I can confidently say that most people probably don’t know. As Haikyuu follows a player that has all the love for a sport, but has never actually played officially before, it allows them to drop quite a few informative tidbits as it is carrying out the character dynamics that everyone loves so much.
As the players grow more experienced and play more experience players, Haikyuu moves into more advanced strategies. Although, admitted, a good number of those strategies are exploiting the special skill of one of the characters. As such, Haikyuu does offer diminishing returns in terms of being informative as it focuses more on character abilities.
Hajime no Ippo
Almost all anime about martial arts are often ridiculous. It’s not that they can’t be educational, but it is more that they are interested in entertaining violence. Hajime no Ippo, as a sports anime about boxing, could have been big grand slug-outs with ridiculous characters like Baki or Kengan Ashura, but it isn’t.
Instead, Hajime no Ippo is every bit a sports anime that just happens to be about a martial art. It follows a boy who is constantly bullied getting saved by a boxer. After being taken to his gym to be patched up, the boy becomes interested and later full-on enamored with the sport.
As the main character starts from nothing, the first thing you and he learn is how to correctly throw a punch. From there, he learns his jabs as quickly as they are simple, and moves onto the more advanced, but powerful uppercut. Once you have the basic moves down, it isn’t so much learning the basics anymore, but learning how Ippo will counter a particular boxer’s unique style of fighting.
Yowamushi Pedal
What’s there to know about cycling, really? Get to the finish line, get there the fastest. As you can guess, there is actually a lot of finer details that go into cycling competitively. You just don’t see them when watching cycling, but watching a show about cycling? Oh, they’ll show you all the details.
Yowamushi Pedal follows an otaku that gets scouted by the cycling team at school after learning he pedals himself across Tokyo to Akihabara every week. This gave the nerd a set of seriously strong legs and, eventually, he falls deeply in love with the sport of cycling.
As the main character is falling in love, he is getting taught every basic bit of information, from types of bikes to types of competitive cycling styles. You even get to see more interesting competitive aspects like how cycling as a team works.
Yowamushi Pedal can really draw you in on the intensity of its characters alone, their passion becoming addicting to watch, but it is actually teaching quite a bit as it carries out that story. It’s an impressive feat.
How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift?
Perhaps it is generous to call How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift a sports anime. Not because weight lifting and general physical fitness aren’t sports per-say, but because How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift is clearly just trying to inspire people to go to the gym.
I believe the term is “edutainment,” which is used to describe educational anime that is aiming specifically to teach you while also being entertaining. How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift follows cute girls getting into shape at the gym. It does so in a lingering, lewd way on occasion, but mostly in an above-board educational way.
This series essentially helps you answer a lot of general physical fitness questions, exploring the topic through a girl new to going to the gym and thus imparting that knowledge to the audience as it is imparted to the main character.
As How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift is “edutainment” anime, it is easily the most educational of any sports anime on this list, but it doesn’t have the same character stories and burning hot passion that you will find in other, actual sports anime.
Slam Dunk
While Slam Dunk might not be as fun to watch as super-powered Kuroko’s Basketball, mostly due to the age of the animation, it does offer you a more realistic glimpse of basketball, at least in Japan.
You will notice that team dynamics are portrayed a bit differently in Slam Dunk than most western basketball teams, but what can you expect from a series that almost single-handedly revived interest in basketball in Japan.
The series follows a tall thug that, after developing a crush on the passionate female manager of the basketball team, joins the basketball team. While the focus is initially split between the main character still acting very much like a cocky delinquent and learning the bare basics of basketball, his passion for the game does grow.
Over time, you look back on Hanamichi’s time pig-headedly shirking off dribbling practice with nostalgia as you get to watching him play like an actual team player, allowing them to carry out advanced court strategies.
Wanna Be The Strongest in The World
Wanna Be The Strongest in The World just goes to show you that education can be found in the most unexpected places. The unexpected place in this instance being a sports anime about an idol that watches a member in her idol troupe get beaten in a promotional wrestling match, quits idoling, and becomes a wrestler to avenge her idol group’s shame.
The series is as lewd as you would expect an anime about female wrestlers to be. However, in between the grunting and H-tier moans, the series is surprisingly detailed in explaining the wrestling techniques.
While there is no real kayfabe to these performances, though the series does explain how they are performances. Furthermore, they detail real wrestling moves and why they are effectively used in the situation. Those situations being… two girls suggestively pressed against each other.
Iwa Kakeru – Sport Climbing Girls
While Iwa Kakeru occasionally falls into the same trap that How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift, Wanna Be The Strongest in The World, and many other sports anime following female characters falls into where it lingers on certain lewder angles a little too long, as a rock climbing anime, it at least has a reason to do so.
Iwa Kakeru follows a gamer who, looking for other hobbies, stumbles across her school’s massive climbing wall. There, she discovers that the ledges and footholds aren’t anything but a puzzle just waiting to be solved.
Now, rock climbing looks pretty straightforward – climb the rock, rock climber. However, Iwa Kakeru shows you the various small techniques that rock climbers use to get good holds as well as how speed climbers “solve” the puzzle of climbing before even touching the wall. In essence, by giving you access to the inner monologue of the characters, you get a glimpse into the mind of a rock climber and see the intricacies that otherwise don’t come across when simply watching the sport.
Big Windup
Baseball sports anime, for whatever reason, tends to live and die following prodigies or otherwise very skilled players. This leads to fiery passion when playing and leaves time to explore intricate character stories at the cost of not imparting much real knowledge on the sport.
Big Windup is a different sort of beast. This is one of the more rare “rehabilitation” sports anime where the main character comes back to sports after losing their confidence. In Big Windup, the character was the lead pitcher on his middle school team due to unwanted nepotism. He was bullied by his team so much that he is crippled by anxiety and his above-average skill that came from practicing endlessly is near useless.
The series is about his new catcher in high school both rehabilitating his confidence, growing his skill through training techniques, and sorting out the rest of the team. Building a team of various skill levels into a cohesive unit take intricate knowledge of the game, and Big Windup lets you in on it.
Baby Steps
Going down this whole list, you will notice a sort of theme emerging. Sports anime following rookies tend to be more educational that sports anime following established players. This is because it is beneficial to the storytelling and to the audience at the same time to feed you basic rules and strategies about a sport. There is no series that better embodies that than Baby Steps.
This tennis anime isn’t jumping into space and cratering tennis balls to Earth as if they were meteors like Prince of Tennis, but instead features an average, non-athletic guy. He is an academic success, but worried about his physical health, checks out a tennis club where he becomes rather smitten by the game.
However, he knows about as much about tennis as anyone who doesn’t actually play tennis as a hobby. This means the series starts with physical conditioning, basic rules, and simple beginner techniques before it gradually works up to more advanced strategies, explaining them to you at the same time the main character grasps them.
Do you have more sports anime that you would say are particularly educational about the sport it follows? Let fans know in the comments section below.
