Now, my sports were cross country and track, the 400-meter dash being my best event of the latter (Being a very small school, we all ran multiple races). Both sports are very different from volleyball, as while they are technically team sports and they can technically involve elements of strategy, for the most part, what the athlete does and how well they do it is a more individual thing. That is, in cross country and some of the track events, you basically just have to run really fast. There aren't really plays in which you need to work closely together with your teammates to score points or anything like that.
Haikyu!! is full of characters who embody the virtues of living, breathing, eating and sleeping volleyball; in fact, one of the endearing qualities of protagonist Shoyo Hinata and his rival-turned-teammate Tobio Kageyama that is often played for laughs is that their brains are so full of volleyball there's seemingly little room in them for anything else.
And of the dozens of volleyball players we meet over the course of the series, many of them talk and think about practicing more and training harder in order to get better (Hinata and Kageyama, for example, are yelled at by their team captain to leave the gym and go home at one point, for example). While potentially inspiring, I don't think that would have made me any better of a runner, as, with long distance running, there's really only so much you can do—that is, run—and so much of it you can do, the amount of hours in the day and your body's own physical limits preventing you from doing any more.
And certainly some of the stuff the characters do, like Hinata starting to carry a volleyball around with him constantly so that he is always touching one, in order to become as intimately familiar with the ball as a physical object as possible, wouldn't apply to running sports.
But the stuff about mental toughness, the joy of the sport, the drive to compete, the passion to excel, a positive mental attitude, team spirit, camaraderie with your teammates? I think all of that stuff, peppered throughout the book and expressed by various characters in various ways at different points? Well, I think all of that would apply to cross country or track...or any sport...or life in general.
Anyway, repeatedly while making my way through Haikyu!!, I wondered what high school sports might have been like had I read the series when I was 12 or 13 or 14.
And then I hit the panel above, and wondered if having read this manga as a pre-teen might have also helped cure my anxiety disorder?
(Don't laugh; kids glom onto weird things...I still remember a scene from the original 1987 DuckTales cartoon where the heroes are menaced by a magical cloud that generates images of their worst fears, and the nephews ultimately realize the only way to defeat their fears is to directly confront them, a scene that would often come to mind a teenager and twenty-something; I mean, that's basically what I've read in multiple self-help books about dealing with anxiety as an adult, including the one that finally helped me make a break-through).
The character pictured is Akaashi Keiji, the setter for Fukurodani Academy and the friend and partner of the team's explosively outgoing, voluble ace Kataro Bokuto.
His thoughts in the narration box are these:
Task focus.
The end result of a game. The referees' judgements. The actions of the opponent.
These are things outside of any one player's control.
What a player can control......is their own thoughts and actions.
You can't tell in the image I posted because I edited it so you couldn't see my fingers holding the book open to that page, but Furdate has an attribution for this narration after an asterisk along the bottom of the pane. It reads "Reference: Volleyball Mental Kyoka Method by Eiji Watanabe (Iikyo No Nihonsha)". Given that, perhaps Keiji is quoting the book verbatim...?
At any rate, when I got to that panel it occurred to me immediately that the words can apply to much more than just volleyball, or sports in general. \
There is a great deal in life you can't control and, in fact, there are only a few things you can, including your own thoughts and actions. Focus then, not on what you can't, but what you can; focus on your own thoughts.
I've heard variations of that my whole life, of course, but not necessarily in comics. What that panel speaks of isn't just volleyball philosophy, but mindfulness in general. It sounds to me, an adult who has read so many self-help books and attended so many hours of therapy, as cognitive behavior therapy boiled down into a couple of sentences.
Could reading Haikyu!! as a kid made me a better, more competitive runner? Maybe.
Could doing so have made me a healthier, happier human being as an adolescent and adult? It sure sounds like it!
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