Article 17: Sports
Like many young, active, and potentially superpowered beings, some of the students of MSF High are driven by the desire to compete. While some are drawn to the pure one-on-one spectacle that the battle arena offers, others prefer a little less possibility of death along with their chance to win a competition. For students like these, Miss Kim and the later-year Gym teachers sponsor a variety of sports teams which any student is free to try out for.
Of course, because of the specific oddities at play in Mahou City, these sports teams aren't exactly the same as they are in your average school. For one, just about every student has enough aptitude to get recruited to at least one sports team, with at least half of the schools nearly one thousand students participating in at least one sport, about a fifth of them in two or more teams, and a few students in each year's classes who insist on being in as many of the team-based competitions as possible. The exact numbers are hard to pin down, but this means that for the half-dozen sports the school offers, there are generally either four or eight teams for each school year, each of which are given a name that seems at first random but generally comes to embody the play dynamics between the team's captain and their teammates. These names are generally presented as an adjective and a noun, and can range from something as simple as the red tigers to the gorgeous snipers. Each team has two two-hour practice sessions in any of the school's gyms or its multiple outdoor sports fields each week on Monday through Thursday and a game against another team from the same year on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, though many teams find ways to practice during other times to try and get the edge on their opponents. Even when students live as close to each other as MSF High's do, they can still form intense athletic rivalries, and the citizens of Mahou City often flock to the various sports events to root for their favorite teams.
One of the sad paradoxes of life as an athlete at MSF High is that while you have the potential to be one of the top athletes in your field for the entire galaxy, you won't be able to show it to that galaxy at large. Though a few alumni do manage to pull together their own teams of high-powered competitors that they bring in for the occasional tournament and some of the villages farther out in the world produce their own teams, there's not much in the way of competition from outside of the city. Furthermore, not every sport has an even set of two, four, or eight teams, and there will often be no one to pair a team against. For these reasons, as well as the occasional desired variety, a teacher might create magical construct teams of various types to oppose the students. This is most prevalent in tournaments, where each real team will have to get past one or two fake ones to advance to the point on the ladder where they're playing against another actual team. This effectively eliminates the "bye" as concept in Mahou City sports leagues. This is used in another way as well--once a team has reached the top of their tournament bracket, in order to officially "win" they must take on and defeat a magical copy of the last season's winners at their then-peak performance, directed by a random Gym teacher. This can lead to the possibility of a team having to play against copies of themselves for the right to win a trophy from themselves. The citizens of Mahou City particularly love watching any of these construct matches, as there's a greater sense of unity when everyone is cheering for the same team. As previously mentioned, in your average semester, there are usually six sports which get enough interested students that they are able to form a complete league of teams. While this can vary from year to year, the most commonly popular sports at MSF High are as follows:
Dodgeball: For years, Miss Kim used this sport to torture her students with countless magically-boosted variations, but a few years ago when Althea, the first Legion Queen, took a heavy interest in the sport, a huge percentage of the school's Legion began to follow suit and since then dodgeball has been moved from the "maybe you'll get official teams this year" list to the "Always at least eight teams" list. I'm not sure how you could possibly be unfamiliar with Miss Kim's particular brand of dodgeball, but for those of you who apparently just arrived at the school reading this newspaper as your first experience here, imagine regular dodgeball, but with a number of special balls that can cover themselves in spikes, catch fire, magically track your opponents, or do any of a dozen other effects.
Soccer: This is a fairly simple sport, and one which has galaxywide popularity. Each team tries to maneuver a ball into their goal on the opposite side of a field, without using their hands. This sport is also one of the few sports that Nagas and other armless races can compete in without the need for temporary transformations or mahoutech prosthetics.
Volleyball: While most of the school's sports take place in the gym or the fields outside, this one instead is held on the beaches just to the south. It's one of the few sports where the practices are watched just as intently as the games themselves, as the competitors are often some of the more physically fit beauties of the school.
Basketball: Teams compete to drive a bouncing ball through a net at the end of the court. Though spells are disallowed during gameplay, many athletes manage to develop powerful techniques that practically emulate them through sheer willpower. Trick shots, concealed plays, and other acrobatics are encouraged. Baseball: This is a popular sport in many planets in the outside galaxy, but due to thousands of subtle variations on the basic concept of a pitcher throwing a ball that a batter attempts to hit to make runs, Mahou City's baseball leagues have a very strange bent to them. For many players, their actual skill at the game is overshadowed by their ability to argue for or against the refs' calls. What might normally be a very boring game can instead erupt into what is basically a courtroom drama over whether something called the "infield fly rule" can be enacted.
Cheerleading: Quite a meta sport in itself, teams of cheerleaders will often attach themselves to other specific sports teams and provide moral support in the form of rhythmic chants, acrobatics, and attempts to sway the crowd to their side. A mediocre team can be made a dangerous threat with the assistance of a skilled cheer team, while an already skilled team can become champions. Cheerleaders attend other sports' tournaments themselves, and win trophies of their own if their chosen teams manage to emerge victorious.
If you are interested in joining any of these teams, make sure to head down to the gym after classes and speak with the teacher there. It's very likely that a sport that you can excel in is waiting for you! Not me, though. I have little stick-arms and trip every time I try to run.
