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Rikkaidai, for short, is a team both admired and challenged by schools all across Japan. To give you a sense of how great they are, they've won Nationals twice, and have won the Kanto Championships for 15 years, consecutive years, I might add. This is why Kirihara admires the team so much, and desires to be in it. Led by Yukimura Seiichi (a player who is said by Takeshi Konomi[creator], to be better than Tezuka Kunimitsu himself), they follow a strict training regimen. Most teams follow a strict training regimen, but Rikkaidai is special. They don't even have a coach. Yukimura, the captain, is the one who plans out their training carefully. You can kind of compare this team to Seigaku [Seishun Gakuen], in a way. Seigaku may not be champions (but sure as hell would be, knowing them), however, Rikkaidai also suffers from an absence of a very important captain. You see, Yukimura, too, has to be hospitalized, and was diagnosed with Guillain-Barrè
Syndrome. Therefore, with a disease like that (and believe me, after reading about it, you cannot possibly play tennis with it), he needed to undergo surgery (which happened successfully during the Kanto finals, Rikkaidai vs Seigaku). Tezuka, too, was absent from the Kanto finals, but both teams set that out of their mindset, and kept playing, for an ambition to become number one in Kanto. But that's not all there is to our dear Rikkaidai. Their tennis club is HUGE. It's huge for a reason. Many peers of the Rikkadai regulars share a common ambition, to become a regular on the Rikkaidai tennis team! The tennis team who's taken Japan by storm with their alarmingly amazing skills! To be one of the best in the Kanto region! -gasp- Besides that, with so many people in the club, the regulars have a hard time standing out. So they do weird things before matches, in order to make themselves different from everyone else. We don't really know what Kirihara does [at least I don't remotely remember..], but what distinguishes him is his demonic face and blood-shot eyes, when he starts to get seriously angry. Rikkaidai, in my opinion, ranks as one of the more popular schools among the series, who probably follows up with Hyotei. The players, with visuals, are listed below. Hover over the image for their full name.
