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The story
At Tochigi baseball powerhouse Sakushin Gakuin, it has emerged that head coach Takahiro Kobari (43) made about 20 first-year players kneel in seiza on the ground for roughly an hour starting around 9am on August 20 — a fact that surfaced through an anonymous tip sent to the Japan High School Baseball Federation, and which has now led to the coach being pulled from coaching duties. While the school called it “inappropriate coaching by today’s standards,” it also offered the excuse that “he simply forgot to tell them they could relax into a more comfortable position.” On the forum thread, discussion ranged from how weak that excuse sounds, to fact-checking that the weather that day was actually cloudy with a temperature around 28°C rather than blazing sun, to the fact that the same coach had broken a player’s finger last year by having him field the ball bare-handed.
It was learned on the 25th, through reporting on the school, that Takahiro Kobari (43), head coach of the baseball team at Sakushin Gakuin (Tochigi), has been removed from coaching duties over inappropriate coaching — making about 20 first-year players kneel in seiza for roughly an hour during practice in August.
The matter came to light via an anonymous tip sent to the Japan High School Baseball Federation. After confirming the facts with Coach Kobari and others, the school concluded that coaching out of step with the times had taken place, and said it would decide how to handle the coach in line with the federation’s judgment.
According to the school, the incident in which roughly 20 first-year players were made to kneel in seiza for about an hour took place around 9am on August 20. At the time, the second-years were away watching a Koshien broadcast, leaving only the first-years to handle grounds maintenance and practice prep. Sensing a lack of focus — the first-years working too slowly and sloppily on the grounds, with balls even left lying around the field — Coach Kobari gathered them beside the dugout to tighten up their attitude, said “let’s sit down here for a moment,” and had them kneel in seiza on the dirt infield.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
An hour of seiza kneeling in the blazing midsummer sun
Yeah that's a foul, lol
It was cloudy though
Utsunomiya around 9am on 8/20 was cloudy, about 28°C
That's a stretch 🤔
> The school says: "[Coach Kobari] forgot to say 'you can uncross your legs and sit comfortably while we talk,' so as a result the students had no way of knowing it was okay to loosen up."
He's really bad at admitting defeat, it's funny lol
Sakushin Gakuin's Coach Kobari had a player field a fungo bare-handed, broke his finger, and got pulled
https://medaka.5ch.io/test/read.cgi/hsb/1749822556/
That's rough, lol
Making the catcher field bare-handed is way too far though
Yahoo News comments do seem to skew older than 5ch
Probably mostly people 75 and up
There was a great reply to one of the comments defending the coach — something like "oh, so this builds character for becoming a corporate slave later?" ("shachiku," slang for an overworked company employee treated like livestock) — dead on, honestly
Well yeah, the average age on Yahoo comments is past 50, lol
Dunno about now, but 30 years ago you'd genuinely get beaten bloody
This school's always been unhinged
Seems irrational and unnecessary for training athletes
If you're going to reject them outright, you'd better have solid grounds for it, or it just turns into coddling
For last year's incident, people were pointing out — why was the ball even coming in fast enough to break a finger during a bare-handed catching drill in the first place
The manager who resigned over assaulting his daughter
[Yomiuri Giants] Farm team loses to Waseda… Manager Abe has the whole team run punishment laps: "Those guys balance it with studying, too…"
https://hochi.news/articles/20200323-OHT1T50017.html?page=1
Guess it takes hitting exactly the right distance
Ichiro alone isn't going to change baseball at this point
He's only got 7 innings left in him anyway
"This is off the record."
"If you report this, that player is finished."
"You'll never set foot on this field again — you sure that's what you want?"
Being skilled at wielding intimidation and psychological pressure like that is apparently what makes a "legendary coach" in baseball
Try sitting like that for 20 minutes — it hurts so much you can't take it
Monks can do a full 60 minutes no problem while chanting sutras
A lot of monks and rakugo storytellers end up with bad legs
It's basically an occupational hazard from sitting seiza all the time
I used to take calligraphy lessons, so 2 hours is nothing for me
Why wasn't he fired back then?
He's the one who built them into a powerhouse, so realistically Sakushin doesn't want to let him go
He must be seriously unpopular with someone
Isn't this just the tip of the iceberg
He was probably doing even worse Showa-era spartan coaching that never came out
"This is all it took"?
Why don't you go kneel in seiza for an hour yourself, in the blazing midday heat of August
Background and key points of this discussion
The Japan High School Baseball Federation has a system that lets third parties anonymously report inappropriate coaching, and that’s how this case came to light. Thread users fact-checked that Utsunomiya’s weather around 9am on August 20, when the seiza punishment happened, wasn’t actually blazing sun but overcast with a temperature around 28°C — worth noting that the real point of controversy wasn’t the heat itself, but the shape of the coaching: lining up only the first-years and making them kneel for about an hour while the second-years watched the Koshien broadcast. On top of that, the same coach caused an incident last May in which a player broke two fingers after being made to catch bare-handed, meaning this isn’t his first controversy. The school’s explanation — that he “simply forgot to tell them they could relax out of the position” — still concedes that he made them kneel in the first place, and it’s worth noting that, separate from whether the coaching itself was justified, many questioned how consistent that explanation really is.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports Express+) thread “[High School Baseball] Sakushin Gakuin’s Coach Takahiro Kobari removed from coaching duties after making players kneel in seiza for about an hour, deemed “inappropriate by today’s standards” — last year he had a player catch bare-handed.”
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