"Baseball is a game of mistakes. What matters is how players cover for their teammates' mistakes." Coach Jin Nakatani of Chiben Wakayama High School, which won Japan's premier summer Koshien tournament this year, identified a surprisingly simple standard for what makes a great team. He said the ability to cover for a teammate's mistakes matters more than the number of elite players. Nakatani recently met with coach Lim Won-su of Gyeongju High School to discuss the coaching philosophies and player development methods of high school baseball in both countries. The two coaches quickly found common ground through their shared interest in baseball despite their different nationalities and languages. Gyeongju High School and Chiben Wakayama share many similarities. Both schools operate with small rosters of 12 to 13 players per grade and are located in baseball hotbeds — Korea's Gyeongsan region and Japan's Kansai region. However, Chiben Wakayama won the summer Koshien championship this year while Gyeongju High has not won a national championship in several years. Lim asked how a team with s

Gyeongju High School’s baseball team is turning to one of Japan’s high school baseball powerhouses, Chiben Wakayama, to learn what it takes to win a national title. The team traveled to Japan’s Wakayama Prefecture on Sept. 9 for joint training with Chiben Wakayama’s players. The visit went beyond a friendly exchange, offering a firsthand look at the training methods, player development and team management behind the Japanese school’s success. The two schools face similar circumstances. Chiben Wakayama is about 70 kilometers from Osaka, Japan’s fiercely competitive high school baseball hub. Gyeongju High is about 66 kilometers from Daegu, home to several baseball powerhouses. Neither has a separate budget for scholarships or scouting to recruit top players. Their rosters are also similar in size, with about 12 players per grade at Gyeongju and around 13 at Chiben Wakayama. Their national records, however, tell different stories. Founded in 1982, Gyeongju’s baseball team has become a leading force in North Gyeongsang Province but has yet to win a national title. Since finish

Korea is expected to begin its gold-medal campaign at the upcoming Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games with the women's modern pentathlon on the first day of competition, an analysis showed Tuesday. The quadrennial Asian sports event, to be held on Japanese soil for the first time in 32 years, will begin its official 16-day run on Saturday, with 469 gold medals in 43 sports up for grabs. Korea will send more than 1,000 athletes and officials in 41 sports to the Asian Games, targeting up to 45 gold medals. According to an analysis by Yonhap News Agency, Korea may expect its first gold medal from Seong Seung-min in the women's modern pentathlon on Sunday, the first day of competition. Seong won the 2024 World Modern Pentathlon Championships to become the first Korean woman to win a world title in the event. At the Paris Summer Olympics later that year, she became the first Asian female pentathlete to win an Olympic medal. Multiple gold medals are expected in swimming from Monday, with Kim Woo-min and Hwang Sun-woo leading Korea's medal hopes in the men's 4x200-meter freestyle relay and 200-meter frees

Colin Bell may have stopped coaching the South Korean women's national football team two years ago, but he loves his adopted country so much that he still lives there. And admittedly, it was "a strange feeling" to face South Korea as an opponent at the Asian Games in Japan on Monday, he says. Bell, the English tactician now coaching Myanmar, lost to his former team 5-0 on Monday to begin the Asian Games at Nagai Stadium in Osaka, some 140 kilometers west of the main host city of Nagoya. Bell coached the Taegeuk Ladies from 2019 to 2024 and took over Myanmar last month. Bell's new team proved to be no match against his former side Monday night, and he conceded defeat to a superior side. "All I could ask for my players after a couple of weeks (of) training was that they give everything they have and they did. They gave everything they have," Bell said. "But our problem was that what they have is not enough to match this quality that we were playing against. And I know the players very, very well from South Korea. It was basically my team on one side in red and my new team in white." Bell say

NAGOYA — Complaints about a shortage of accommodations for the upcoming Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games have been growing just four days before the opening, a sports official said Tuesday. As part of their cost-cutting and eco-friendly policies, organizers of the Asian Games did not build a dedicated athletes' village for this year's competition, instead providing accommodations on a cruise ship and in temporary container units, as well as hotels, for about 15,000 athletes and officials from 45 nations. The quadrennial multisport event will officially open on Saturday, with some sports, such as football and basketball, already under way. Under the accommodation plan, some 9,000 athletes will stay in hotels, while 4,000 will be housed on the cruise ship and 2,000 will stay in a complex of wooden container units. However, athletes have complained of room shortages, particularly in the container village. "For example, if the Games organizers had promised to offer 100 container rooms to a specific Olympic committee, they are short of some 20 rooms," said an official from the Korean Sport & Olympic

Hyrox co-founder Moritz Furste has apologised for the events in Beijing over the weekend, and said his organisation had begun revising event operations and updating its rule book. The commercial fitness competition has faced intense public backlash ever since elite Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk soiled herself during the solo women’s event, which she went on to win. The incident raised severe concerns over whether prompt sanitation was carried out and whether the hygiene rights of other...

Logan Morris already has 144 goals and two premierships from just 69 matches for the Brisbane Lions. He plans to add to those tallies in the weeks and years ahead.

The Toronto Raptors have secured the trade of Kawhi Leonard, who has moved from the Los Angeles Clippers.

Sydney will be without the "Pullman Five" and Callum Mills for Friday's preliminary final, but Fremantle aren't being lulled into a false sense of security.

VAFA rules state that under-19s footballers cannot have played more than 12 games in the season in question in the Talent League – the AFL’s premier junior feeder competition – to retain finals eligibility.