Baby Steps is interesting in that in its early episodes/chapters it doesn’t drive home the theme of competitive tennis, but rather heavily focuses on having Ei-chan learn how to play tennis, right from the basics of setting, the stance, serves as well as rules to the game. It’s similar to Ookiku Furikabutte (I just finished that series, so a review is likely!) in the sense that both of them go into extreme detail about their sport, but unlike Oofuri that has at least 38 episodes to go into ridiculous detail into baseball (and oofuri doesn’t even start with the basics!), Baby Steps has an entire cour less, and I’m honestly worried the anime won’t be able to capture the magic of the manga with such a limited episode count. Baby Steps is literally about taking Baby Steps in a sport, but so far it’s doing a great job.
This week we see a near-obsessed Ei-chan spending hours upon hours perfecting his form by hitting the ball against the wall, checking and taking down more notes. Halfway during practice though he sees Natsu and Takuma together and almost mistakes them for being a couple, and the sight of them sent him into great confusion over how he felt about Natsu. His good friend Kageyama’s quick to point out what Ei-chan’s feeling, and his bewildered reaction was quite amusing to watch. He clearly knows nothing about love, having being cooped up at home studying all the time, so it’s all a brand new experience for him and he doesn’t know what to do.
His improvements in tennis are clear as day, and his efforts are recognized by those around him – Natsu, the coach at the Tennis Club, they’re all impressed with Ei-chan’s speedy improvement, and he moves up to Court D in the STC as a result. His new coach asks him to observe Court A’s serves – lo and behold, Takuma exhibits his extremely fast and powerful serve, and Ei-chan’s overwhelmed by his ability. The two get into a fight later on as Ei-chan asks whether Takuma wants to go pro. It’s clear there’s something more to Takuma regarding his potential ambition to go pro seeing how he reacts to people mentioning his talent being wasted on his laziness, but it’s clearly spoiler territory so I won’t say much else.
There isn’t much else to talk about regarding the series this week, Baby Steps is slow, methodical, accurate to a T when it comes to tennis, and goes at its own comfortable pace. But it’s shaping up to be a really great anime, as was how I felt about the manga when I first read it.