His Warrior Queen: A Haikyuu!! Novel (Tsukishima x OC)

Chapter 79: Get Back

Nakano smiled as the boys took a fifteen minute break.  They'd just finished their regular Wednesday receiving drills, and their captain had kindly granted them fifteen minutes before they would begin working intensively on serves.

When Daichi had come to her initially to discuss his plan for the five days that Kageyama and Tsukishima would be away, the coach and the captain had almost come to blows.  Well, not really, but the discussion had gotten a little...intense.  Daichi felt strongly that the team really needed to step up their serving game - their matches against Oikawa and Ushiwaka had proven that their serves were sub-par, and that powerful serves could really drive a game forward.  Nakano had agreed wholeheartedly, until her captain had said they should drop the normal drills for the week in favor of concentrating on serving.

She pushed back against this idea, hard.  "Cap, I get what you're saying," she'd said to him after sparring back and forth for several minutes, both of them getting progressively louder.  She'd taken a very deep, slow breath, and forced her volume down.  "But I think ignoring our regular fundamentals and only drilling serves is a mistake.  Serves alone won't win at Nationals.  We need to improve our serves, yes.  But you'll notice that we beat both Seijoh and Shiratorizawa even with our serves as mediocre as they are right now.  We are not so skilled that we can ignore our basic training needs, Cap.  We need to keep the regular drills in place, or when we try to get back to them, it will be that much harder."

"But Nakano, it's only for this week, if we really focus..."

"Cap, why can't we do both?  I'll run my regular drills just like always.  You run practice, like always.  And if you decide practice consists of a ton of serving drills, well, there ya go.  Think of my drills like part of our warm ups.  You wouldn't agree to letting the team practice without warm ups and cool downs, would you?"

Daichi had looked at her and laughed aloud, clapping her on the back.  "Alright, Coach Legs, you got me there.  We'll keep both, and you'd better prepare yourself to hear a lot of complaining."

He wasn't wrong about that, and the team hadn't even been told yet that they would spend the better part of practice today doing serving drills.  Sugawara, Yamaguchi, Narita, Tanaka and Nishinoya had decided that today was a good day to step up their 'Coach Legs is an evil slave driver' routine to a new level.  Nakano figured it was because Kags and Tsukki were away, and she'd not been entirely able to hide how much she missed them, especially the tall megane.  And then Hinata had also failed to show for practice today, which had everyone a little worried.

Nakano had a sneaking suspicion about where the little ginger was.  She kept that to herself...no point in upsetting everyone with that idea.  She was pretty sure Suga was also thinking along the same lines she was, given the look he'd exchanged with her when the team first noticed their decoy was missing.  If Hinata had decided to crash the Shiratorizawa training camp, they'd all find out soon enough.

Meanwhile, the 'cutie pies,' as the strawberry blonde had come to sarcastically call her five teammates who loved to tease her about her 'sadistic' coaching style, had really let her have it today, in the most loving way possible, of course.  She looked over at them as they hydrated, all together in a bunch, looking like they were planning out their next verbal assault on her.  She couldn't help but chuckle, wondering exactly how over the top they would go when Daichi made his announcement.

They didn't disappoint.

"Alright," Daichi called out, his voice firm, "We're going to spend the rest of this week on an intensive of our own.  We're focusing on our serves, gentlemen.  Everyone is going to be drilling serves until you can put them where you want them and how you want them to be moving.  We've got a month left, gentlemen.  Let's make it count.  We're all going to be able to serve volleyballs in our sleep."