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The story
The Saga Prefecture high school rugby final was held on October 31 at SAGA Stadium, where Saga Industrial High School defeated Waseda Saga 59-5 to clinch its 55th appearance at Hanazono (the national tournament, kicking off December 27) in 45 consecutive tournaments. This year’s Saga prefectural qualifier featured only these two schools, meaning the first match was effectively the final. On 5ch, the thread focused less on the result itself and more on the nationwide decline in high schools fielding rugby teams, along with regional disparities — Fukuoka alone sent 31 schools individually (44 including joint teams), while Tokyo’s qualifier had 43 schools, and Shimane and Fukui had no qualifiers at all.
The final of the Saga Prefecture qualifier for the 106th National High School Rugby Tournament was held on the 31st at SAGA Stadium in Saga City, where Saga Industrial defeated
Waseda Saga 59-5 to win the title and secure its 55th national tournament appearance in 45 consecutive tournaments. The national tournament kicks off on December 27
at Hanazono Rugby Stadium in Higashiosaka, Osaka Prefecture.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Otherwise it'd be 'You guys are a bunch of zeros!' and getting decked for it…
Even if they win, it's 'You clearly went easy on them! That's disrespectful to your opponent!' and you get decked anyway, though lol
They're only keeping rugby going because it's a Waseda school.
Rounding up 15 players is hard enough to begin with.
Baseball only needs 9.
Basketball you can field a team with just 5.
The first match IS the final lmao
Waseda's actually closing the gap now.
Just for reference, these are the schools in the Fukuoka Prefecture tournament.
Fukuoka is the one prefecture where nearly every top prep school has a rugby club.
31 schools entered solo.
44 schools total if you include joint teams.
Fukuoka alone has more entrants than the rest of Kyushu combined (excluding Fukuoka itself).
Higashi Fukuoka High School
Seinan Gakuin High School
Kyushu Sangyo High School
Kashii High School
Tochiku High School
Hokuchiku High School
Shingu High School
Kokura High School
Tokai University Fukuoka High School
Hakata High School
Meizen High School
Itoshima High School
Yame Technical High School
Fukuoka Technical High School
Shuyukan High School
Kurume High School
Jiyugaoka High School
Kashii Technical High School
Chikushigaoka High School
Fukukodai Johoku High School
Jonan High School
Orio Aishin High School
Fukuoka High School
Kaho High School
Fukuoka Seiryo High School
Fukuoka Maizuru High School
Ukiha Kyushinkan High School
Tochikushi Gakuen High School
Chikuzen High School
Kyukoku University Affiliated High School
Chikushi High School
Joint Team A: Moji Gakuen High School / Yahata Chuo High School / Munakata High School
Joint Team B: Yahata High School / Kokura Technical High School / Nakama High School
Joint Team C: Koryo High School / Hakuryo High School / Nakamura Sanyo High School
Joint Team D: Musashidai High School / Chikushidai High School / Ogori High School / Kisho-kan Secondary School
Tokyo has around 50 schools, so that's actually a lot.
And that's with rugby basically abandoned across the Kanto region.
Checked the Tokyo qualifier — only 43 schools, fewer than Fukuoka.
Rugby's really done for.
The rugby clubroom always stank, too…
And there were 3 schools just last year.
Guess the other 3 schools couldn't scrape together 15 players even as a joint team.
This is what baseball will look like in 20 years.
Shimane and Fukui don't even have qualifiers.
Even pooling the remaining schools into joint teams couldn't reach 15 players.
Students come from all over the country — if you place in the top 70%, you get into Waseda University, so competition is fierce.
Both baseball and rugby have loaded rosters all aiming for the national tournament — looks like they could pull it off next year.
The baseball team lost in the Kyushu tournament quarterfinals, so their Spring Koshien chances are dead.
For what it's worth, Saga Kita also went out in the quarterfinals.
it's a lot like the sumo boom.
Even now there's a huge sumo boom, but the number of kids actually taking up sumo isn't going up lol
If I remember right, the highest-attendance match ever at the old National Stadium — before it was rebuilt for the Olympics — was a Waseda-Meiji rugby match.
I think.
I mean, bad cost-performance and it doesn't get you dates.
Actually the cost-performance is great.
Competition's light but it helps a ton with college admissions and job hunting.
It's easier to get into one of the prestigious 'Big Six' universities through rugby than through soccer or baseball.
We're talking about sumo wrestlers here~
Fans need to wake up already.
High school baseball needs to reset to 7 players or it has no future.
Rugby is the textbook case of self-destructing because it couldn't put the brakes on elitism.
Baseball and rugby start from totally different population sizes.
No need to worry about baseball.
Baseball's got more and more teams scraping together 9 players with borrowed help, too.
And rugby used to have way more participating schools than it does now.
Population size? Participating schools keep shrinking — even joint-team entries are declining. If public junior high clubs get abolished on top of that, it'll be disastrous. In regions where baseball isn't huge, the player base will evaporate almost instantly, leaving only private schools that recruit from Osaka able to keep a baseball team running.
Background and talking points
The National High School Rugby Tournament (Hanazono) is held every December at Hanazono Rugby Stadium in Higashiosaka, Osaka, and in some regions, like Saga, only two schools enter, making the first match effectively the final. The Fukuoka example raised in the thread (31 schools solo, 44 including joint teams) looks like a big number, but comparing it with the Tokyo qualifier (43 schools) and with Shimane and Fukui, which have no qualifiers at all, shows that entrant numbers depend not just on raw school counts but on whether joint teams are formed. It’s also worth noting that posters disagreed on how academically competitive Waseda Saga is — some called it ‘low-ranked,’ others ‘highly ranked’ — so that was never settled as fact in the thread. Some commenters also linked the decline in club membership to the future of baseball and sumo, but these are speculation, not conclusions based on actual participation data.
*This article is compiled and summarized from excerpts of the 5ch (Geisports Report+) thread “[High School Rugby] Saga Industrial defeats Waseda Saga 59-5 in the Saga tournament, securing its 55th Hanazono appearance in 45 consecutive tournaments.”
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