Ohzu High School

2026 season

Currently 8th in the Premier League WEST with 18 points from 12 matches (6W 0D 6L, 19-17). Updated daily.

Playing style

The football is built on what the programme calls three speeds — physical speed, ball speed and thinking speed. The first is the capacity to keep repeating transitions for ninety minutes; the second is moving the ball faster than the opponent can shift across; the third is the one the coaches talk about most, summed up in the instruction "the player moves before the ball does".

Underneath that sits an older idea. HIRAOKA Kazunori, who arrived as a teacher in 1993 and is now director of football, expresses performance as a multiplication: heart × technique × body. If the first term is zero, the product is zero however good the other two are. The club's job, in his description, is to build a mind that does not shrink under pressure.

Honours

At the 104th winter tournament in January 2026 the side beat Aomori Yamada — the most decorated school team of the past decade — 2-0 in the second round, before losing 2-1 to RKU Kashiwa in the quarter-finals.

History

• 1923 — The school opens as a prefectural middle school; it becomes Ohzu High School in 1948.
• 1972 — The football club is founded, and spends twenty years constrained by what a public school has: one pitch, a small budget, no specialist coach.
• 1993 — HIRAOKA Kazunori arrives as a physical education teacher, the same year the J.League begins. A former captain of Teikyo High School with two national titles as a player, he starts building a development method rather than a team.
• Late 1990s — The club's two guiding phrases are settled, and it becomes a regular at national tournaments.
• 2014 — Runners-up at the Inter-High, beaten in extra time in the final.
• 2021 — Runners-up at the 100th winter championship.
• 2024 — WEST champions, then national champions. YAMASHIRO Tomohiro, who also works as an assistant coach with Japan's under-17 side, is the head coach.
• 2025 — Runners-up at the Inter-High, beaten on penalties by Kamimura Gakuen.
• 2026 — Inter-High semi-finals, and a season in the Premier League WEST as the team everyone wants to beat.

Development pathway

Three things make this programme unusual, and the first two are responses to being a public school rather than despite it.

• The 100-minute training session. Floodlights and pitch time are limited, so sessions are deliberately capped at 100 minutes. Knowing exactly when training ends changes how players work inside it: concentration and intensity go up because there is no spare time to drift. It is a constraint turned into a method, and it lines up neatly with what sports science calls a constraints-led approach.
• Two phrases that do a lot of work. *Nenju mukyu* — chase the dream all year round — is a habit of reframing: turning "this is impossible" into "this is not possible yet". *Bonji tettei* — do the ordinary things completely — means greetings, punctuality and cleaning done to a standard that sounds excessive until you see that the same players make better decisions under pressure.
• "One-second words". Players are taught to give each other short phrases — thank you, it's fine, good try, good job — continuously. The stated purpose is psychological safety: a squad where a mistake is not punished socially is a squad where players will still try the difficult pass in the 88th minute.

Five behaviours are drilled over three years: give everything, challenge, stay positive, be independent, be disciplined. Graduates tend to describe those, rather than any tactical instruction, as what let them survive a professional career.

Former players

More than fifty former players have reached the J.League. Among them:

• TANIGUCHI Shogo (defender) — a Japan international selected for the 2026 World Cup, his second. Long-serving captain of Kawasaki Frontale before moving to Qatar and then to Belgium.
• UEDA Naomichi (defender) — a Japan international at the 2022 World Cup, dominant in the air, with a long career in Europe.
• MAKI Seiichiro (forward) — played at the 2006 World Cup, the archetype of the hard-working Japanese centre-forward.
• KURUMAYA Shintaro (defender, Kawasaki Frontale) and TOYOKAWA Yuta (forward), both with international experience.
• ICHIMI Kazunari, SAWADA Takashi, KAWAHARA So and SUGIYAMA Naohiro — current J.League professionals.
• KAKOI Kentaro (goalkeeper) and NODA Hiroki (defender), who was registered with a J.League club while still at school.

A striking number of them end up captaining their professional clubs, which the school treats as evidence that the part of its programme that is not football is the part that lasts.

Players to watch in 2026

Players worth knowing in the 2026 season:

• WATANABE Yuto (defender, third year, no. 7) — joint captain, from the local Solesso Kumamoto club.
• YAMAMOTO Tsubasa (midfielder, third year, no. 10) — the other captain, also from Solesso Kumamoto, and scorer of the opening goal against Aomori Yamada at the winter tournament.
• NISHIMOTO Eiji (midfielder, third year, no. 13) — called up to the Japan under-17 squad in September 2026, and a scorer at the Inter-High.
• KIMURA Taiyo (forward, third year, no. 9) — the side's reference point in attack.
• KOMORI Taito (defender, third year, no. 4) — played every minute of the 2026 Inter-High run and scored in it.
• NISHIMURA Amaru (goalkeeper, third year, no. 1) — first choice through the summer.
• IMOO Ryo (midfielder, third year, no. 6) — almost ever-present at the Inter-High.
• EGAMI Kohaku (forward, second year, no. 17) and TANAKA Jin (forward, second year, no. 18) — the next group, both scoring regularly in age-group football before arriving.

Players are given places by what they can do rather than by year group, which is how a first-year ends up registered for the Premier League.

Notes

Full profile in Japanese, with the current squad list and every result: 大津高校.

Where a player has no official English spelling published by the JFA or the J.League, the name is shown in Japanese.

See also: Premier League standings and how youth football works in Japan.