Baby Steps

A straight-A student who's never gotten less than a perfect score, Eiichirō Maruo has also never really done anything else. No hobbies, no sports, just notebooks full of meticulous notes. When he joins a tennis club on a whim to get some exercise, he's terrible. Like, genuinely bad. But here's what makes Baby Steps different from most sports anime: Eiichirō doesn't have some hidden talent or supernatural ability. What he has is an obsessive need to analyze everything. He starts filling notebooks with observations about angles, footwork, opponent patterns — basically treating tennis like an exam he can study for. And weirdly, it starts working. The 25-episode TV series follows him from complete beginner through his first real competitions, alongside Natsu Takasaki, a naturally gifted player chasing a pro career. Their dynamic is grounded and genuinely sweet without being the whole point of the show. If you liked Haikyuu for its realistic depiction of athletes actually improving through hard work, this scratches that same itch but with a more cerebral angle. And if The Prince of Tennis was a bit too flashy for you, Baby Steps is the grounded counterpart — no glowing moves, just strategy and grit. Studio Pierrot's adaptation isn't the flashiest thing visually, but the character writing carries it. It's the rare sports anime where you believe every single win was earned, not gifted.