The Prince of Tennis: National Championship Chapter

Name: The Prince of Tennis: National Championship Chapter
Genre: Sports
Released: 2006-03-24

テニスの王子様 Original Video Animation 全国大会編 (Tennis no Oujisama: Zenkoku Taikai-hen)

7.9(26,761)

MAL Score

Ranked #972

Popularity #3630

Sports

Episodes: 13
Duration: 23 min per ep
Aired: Mar 24, 2006 to Mar 23, 2007
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Ryouma Echizen and Seishun Academy’s boys’ tennis team have finally earned a place at the National Tournament, arriving with their sights set on the championship. Their opening challenge comes from Higa Middle School, an Okinawa squad known as a tournament “dark horse” and already notorious for winning with underhanded tactics.

Determined to answer that approach with honest, hard-fought tennis, Seishun steps onto the national stage where every match carries weight. Waiting in the quarterfinals is a familiar name—Hyoutei Academy—an old rival looking to reclaim its pride after the Kanto Regionals and to justify its presence at Nationals after qualifying via special invitation. As the tournament begins, Seishun faces opponents old and new, each bringing a different philosophy about how the game should be played.

Otaku Consensus

The National Championship Chapter is broadly treated by fans as one of the franchise’s sharper post-TV installments, reflected in its strong 7.88 MAL score and steady 75/100 AniList rating despite its niche OVA-era visibility. M.S.C’s 13-episode format gives the tournament a denser rhythm than the long TV run, with the Higa opening stretch and the Hyoutei rematch benefiting most from the tighter pacing, while the recurring criticism is that it assumes deep prior attachment and pushes the series’ super-powered tennis further from grounded sports drama.

Why You Should Watch

Watch this if you want a pure school-club sports shounen that skips genre clutter and lives inside competitive momentum. The National Championship Chapter scratches the same itch as Kuroko’s Basketball in its willingness to turn athletic technique into near-special-move spectacle, but its one-on-one tennis structure gives every match a cleaner tactical identity. Compared with the original long-running Prince of Tennis TV series, this OVA is leaner: 13 episodes released across a year, built for viewers who already know the team dynamics and want the payoff without weekly-anime downtime. It is especially rewarding for fans who like rivalry brackets, character-song culture, and male-cast sports anime where pride, style, and technique matter as much as the scoreboard.

Key Characters

R
Ryouma Echizen(VA: Junko Minagawa)
Ryouma remains compelling because his confidence is not explained through speeches; the OVA lets his court presence, timing, and refusal to overreact define him.
K
Keigo Atobe(VA: Junichi Suwabe)
Atobe is the kind of rival fans remember by aura as much as by tennis, turning Hyoutei’s return into a performance of pride, leadership, and theatrical self-belief.
K
Kunimitsu Tezuka
Tezuka’s appeal comes from restraint: his quiet authority makes lineup decisions and match pressure feel heavier without needing melodrama.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
M.S.C produced this as a 13-episode OVA rather than a standard weekly TV season, which gives the Nationals material a compressed, match-forward structure with far less decompression than the original television run.
2
The season’s structure places Higa’s rough-edged, rule-bending tennis next to Hyoutei’s prestige-driven rivalry, creating two very different tests of Seishun’s identity within the same compact installment.
3
Cher Watanabe’s music and Takuya Hiramitsu’s sound direction keep the franchise’s character-performance culture close to the matches, reinforced by theme-song performers including Junko Minagawa, Junichi Suwabe, Souichirou Hoshi, and Taiten Kusunoki.
4
AniList’s tag spread captures the OVA’s specific flavor: Tennis at 79% and Shounen at 60%, with Super Power at 20%, placing it between sports tactics and exaggerated signature-technique spectacle.
5
Akiharu Ishii’s character design work helps maintain visual continuity with Takeshi Konomi’s original manga designs while fitting the cleaner, direct-to-video presentation of the mid-2000s OVA format.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The OVA aired from March 24, 2006 to March 23, 2007, meaning its 13 episodes were released across almost exactly one full year rather than within a single broadcast cour.
Fun fact 2: Takeshi Konomi is credited as the original creator, making this installment a continuation of the manga-driven Prince of Tennis franchise rather than an anime-original spin-off premise.
Fun fact 3: Its MAL rank of #972 contrasts with a much lower popularity placement of #3630, a useful sign that the viewers who seek it out rate it strongly even though the OVA is less broadly sampled than TV entries.
Fun fact 4: AniList lists only 51 favourites for the title, which underlines how specialized this chapter is within the larger franchise despite its respectable 75/100 user score.
Fun fact 5: Hideyo Yamamoto is among the credited episode directors, while Yukiko Nojiri handled editing, two production roles that matter especially in a sports OVA where match rhythm depends on timing cuts, reactions, and point-to-point escalation.