Misora’s lacrosse stick and big smile on the cover of volume 1 of Cross Manage tells you this isn’t your average sports manga. It's a feel-good, beautifully illustrated sports manga about an unusual sport and its even more unusual players!

Available now as a digital-only graphic novel, Cross Manage began near-simultaneous serialization in Japan and the U.S. in October 2012. If you’re caught up to the current chapters, you may be asking, how did this crazy lacrosse manga start again?

Our protagonist Sakurai fumbles through the end of his first year in high school, unable to pick a club to replace the one he had to quit (for a pretty sad reason). As these things tend to go, he finds his answer when he’s not looking.

His answer is Misora Toyoguchi, a lacrosse fanatic who accidently hits him with the ball during some embarrassingly ineffective after-school practice. Because he’s oh-so-smooth with the ladies, Sakurai manages to insult Misora and dismiss lacrosse within minutes of meeting her, leaving them both kind of sore about each other.

Their second meeting goes a lot better. Sakurai gives Misora a few pointers, and TA-DA! she finally shoots the ball correctly. And just like that, she decides Sakurai is the manager she’s been looking for to lead her high school girls’ lacrosse team to victory.

The first chapters deal a lot with Sakurai’s understandable reluctance to join a girls’ club. The female lacrosse players aren’t too thrilled to have some random dude around either, especially when he keeps walking in on them half-dressed!

It’s only thanks to Sakurai’s resourcefulness and his inability to give less than 100% that he sticks around long enough to prove himself to the team. The truth is, Sakurai wants to give lacrosse his all, Misora wants to play her heart out, and underneath their rough and bumbling exterior, the team wants to win.

There isn’t a ton of lacrosse action in this volume, although Fujioka’s first game against future rival Choran shows just how awesome lacrosse can be in the hands of skilled players like cool Namine Chihara, best player in the country. 

Towards the end, the mystery surrounding Sakurai’s abrupt departure from his previous club comes to light in a way that makes Misora seriously regret roping Sakurai into lacrosse. It’s a great lead-in to the next volume, where Sakurai will have to cut ties with his past to stake everything on his new team.

But why a manga about lacrosse? Lacrosse is actually the fastest-growing sport in North America and is more popular in Japan than anywhere outside North America. So although lacrosse manga seems unusual now, maybe future Eyeshield 21s and Slam Dunks will take a back seat to the fast and furious action of series like Cross Manage.

Cross Manage volume 1 is available at VIZmanga.com!

by Hope Donovan