[DeepL Translation - needs review] This is the story of how we became the best in the world. Nagi Asagiri, a junior high school student, is a gifted tennis player. Using her agile legs, she is steadily winning national doubles tournaments. However, she is not very good at socializing with others. Nagi's partner is Isamu Koyama, who can get along with anyone. He is cheerful and friendly, and although his personality is opposite to Nagi's, they make a great team. She made a promise with Isamu ...
Promising
Third-year middle schooler Nagi, a quiet kid who loves to be alone, is on his way to become a star tennis player thanks to his amazing speed on his feet, until he loses both legs in an accident. Having promised his doubles partner and only friend, Isami, that they would reach the top of the tennis world together, he's desperate to return to the sport on prosthetics and play the same way he always did... but Isami knows that it's impossible, and finds another path for Nagi to follow to their dream: wheelchair tennis.
From a learning perspective, this felt alright. Being a sports manga, the focus is often on the action and the text is not that dense. There is only furigana on names and the occasional rarer word, and the main characters being teenagers, there's some casual phrasing. But otherwise, there were no dialects or crazy speech patterns in this first volume, most of the sports- and disability-specific jargon is presented in a way that's easy for readers to understand, and I found the dialogue generally clear with regard to who was speaking and what was being spoken about.
I really enjoyed this, entertainment-wise. I'm not really familiar with sports manga as a genre, so I can't say how it ranks or if any of the tropes it uses are overwrought, but this first book got me invested in the friendship between Nagi and Isami, and how they are both moving through grief for each other. The majority of the book is set-up about their promise to each other, Nagi's accident, and Isami's discovery of wheelchair tennis, so this volume is pretty light on the sports stuff that will likely ramp up in the future, but it does very well at establishing their characters and making their devotion to tennis compelling (said as someone who doesn't care about sports). I'd like to return to this series when it's further along and see how it develops.