After another strong month of joshi pro wrestling action, we’re back again to cover the wonderful fantasy league sponsored by RESURA! There were a lot of great performances from many wrestlers on the scene this month, and again for the third straight month we have a new points leader at the top!

When it comes to the wrestlers who scored the most points in the league during the month of March, the top two were from Cosmic Angels, but they may not have been the two wrestlers you’d expect from the outside looking in. This month was the rise of young kouzen with Sayaka Kurara leading Aya Sakura at the top of the points standings, followed by Kaori Yoneyama, HANAKO and Rina Yamashita to round out the top five.

We also had the team of “Outlet Wolfpack” score the most points by a team for one singular month by scoring a whopping 216 points! The previous high before that was “The Icon & Friends” strong start in the month of January that had gotten them 195 points. It really pays to have new title holders from your team, or wrestlers who are able to defend their titles often since it gets you those bonus points on top of the standard three or two points you’d get from a match win.

For the first time all season, we didn’t have a team that scored less than 100 points for the month, however the team that did bring up the rear this month was none other than “God’s Sigh” that only scored 127 points. I think they’ll be looking to improve that soon, though having Chi Chi recently go down to injury won’t help their case. A lot of the teams also took advantage of the waiver wire this month, dropping wrestlers who weren’t scoring enough points, and adding wrestlers who were doing better, or that they saw a brighter future in for the upcoming months. It will be interesting to see how many of the teams continue to make changes as the year goes on.

With all of that said, we might as well move onto the current team standings so that you can get a better picture or where things sit after the first 90 days of the year…

TEAM STANDINGS

As you can see above, the top four teams all stayed up in the thick of things, but “Outlet Wolfpack” used their really stellar month to work their way up to the top spot. My team “Oedo Tai” stayed put in third place while outscoring both “Mad Dog Military” and “The Icon & Friends” for the month which really brought the teams closer together. It looks to be a pretty tight race between the top four, but even with a 50 point gap between fourth and fifth, there’s still a chance that both “TCS 4 Life” and “Rebel X Run” could start reeling in those top teams up above them as the months roll on.

On the more negative side of things, it was another tough month for the likes of “Alex’s Warbitches,” “God’s Sigh,” and “Fart Editing” as all of those teams struggled to keep up with teams above them while posting the lowest totals for the month.

Alex has been working hard to try to get their team up into the top tier by making many changes, and I do think that it will pay off eventually, you just have to hope that they haven’t fallen back in the standings too far already to make that come back.

“God’s Sigh” has been struggling for a few months, and a good portion of that could be attributed to the number one pick in the draft Sareee not really doing much to start the year. It seemed like she was going to be poised to have a big year after being the talk of the scene last year, but instead she’s been a bit quiet so far. Hard Editing has recently gotten a strong wrestler YUU back who has always been known for not only working a lot of matches, but also winning a lot, so hopefully that return will help them catch up a bit in the point standings.

When it comes to the most wins of a certain type of match this month, the wrestler who won the most singles matches out of everyone was none other than Azusa Inaba with six, who not only took advantage of staying busy in STARDOM, but also in her home promotion of JTO. DASH Chisako, Misa Kagura, Rina, and Sayaka Kurara all came in second with five singles match wins for the month.

In tag team action, the big winner this month was Rina Yamashita who won a total of nine tag team matches. I think she was helped by a few matches that went for a super short amount of time, but a win is a win right? Saya Iida came in second place with eight wins, and that was followed up by seven wrestlers who all tied with seven tag team wins respectively.

It will be interesting to see how the trip to the United States affects a lot of the wrestlers during the month of April, as that will be a time frame where some wrestlers simply won’t get a chance to work. There have been quite a few announcements of STARDOM wrestlers wrestling on quite a few shows in the states, but the wrestlers left at home may have nothing to do unless they have a random event scheduled for their picked through roster. We also have one of the biggest shows of the year coming up for the aforementioned STARDOM, which is already looking like it will be filled with title matches, meaning that a lot of points could swing in many different ways. It’s all something that we definitely need to keep an eye on.

Now that we’ve established that, let’s take a look at each team one by one at the three month mark.

POSITION: 1st | TOTAL POINTS: 515 | MARCH POINTS: 216

The big winner for the month was definitely the “Outlet Wolfpack” with their high mark of 216 points scored for a single month. You would have thought that Pedro’s team couldn’t follow up a month where one of his talents scored 39 points by herself with an even bigger month, but his team all pulled together and showed up big time!

His top point-getter was the tallest current joshi on the scene HANAKO who scored 26 points, but she was closely followed by the young duo who recently won tag team gold in Miku Kanae and Kirari Wakana who scored 48 points combined. Saya Iida also had a strong month getting over the 20 point mark with a score of 21.

Unfortunately one of the top skilled wrestlers that Pedro has on his team, Takumi Iroha, ended up scoring zero points for the month, which is way under what would normally be expected from the Marvelous “Ace.” Momo Watanabe continues to struggle a bit as well as she only scored nine points during March which is quite a bit less than most would expect, especially since she was Pedro’s first round pick in the draft.

Right now, Utami Hayashishita is sitting on top of the points standings for the team with 48 points, showing good consistency while not popping off for a huge month yet. All in all, the overall make-up of the team seems to be quite balanced which has allowed Pedro’s team to raise up the rankings month after month.

CURRENT POINTS

POSITION: 2nd | TOTAL POINTS: 496 | MARCH POINTS: 145

Unfortunately for Dylan, his team didn’t generate as many points as they had the prior months, which caused his team to drop down to second place. The team is still pretty stacked with talent though, and there’s a good chance that April may end up turning out to being a great month for the team to get him back towards that top spot.

The top point performer for the month was Kaori Yoneyama, who scored 26 points, and has now tied two other wrestlers with 74 points overall for the season, which is the top for the league. The 26 points was also good enough to tie her with HANAKO for 3rd place in most points scored for the month. Starlight Kid, AZM and Saori Anou all scored between 15 points and 20 points this month, which is decent output, but not to the standard established so far this season.

On the low side of things for the team, there were nine competitors who scored under 10 points for the month, which is probably the biggest attribute to the lower number of points overall. Hiroyo Matsumoto and Maya Yukihi being mostly injured for the month definitely didn’t help things, and Kizuna Tanaka also recently returned from injury, which didn’t allow her to score a lot of points for the month.

Dylan will be looking for a bigger performance from MIRAI this next month as she shouldn’t be in that lower group with how high of a pick she was, and the type of talent she is.

The “Mad Dog Military” has two of the three top points scorers for the season in Kaori Yoneyama and Starlight Kid, both tallying up 74 points respectively. They have also gotten good contributions from AZM, Saori Anou, and Mei Seira who have all scored right around 50 or more points this season. That group of STARDOM stalwarts will have to keep up their great pace to keep pushing this team forward.

CURRENT POINTS

POSITION: 3rd | TOTAL POINTS: 488 | MARCH POINTS: 178

While my team didn’t make a jump up the standings, they had another pretty good month that was third best when it comes to team points scored, and it helped my team not only pass “The Icon & Friends” but also almost catch the “Mad Dog Military” who was previously in first place. This month was led by Rina Yamashita who scored 25 points, which was good enough to be tied for fifth in the league. Both Saya Kamitani and Miyuki Takase scored over 20 points this month as well, which was really clutch to help push the team farther up the standings. The likes of Hazuki, Hyper Misao and Tam Nakano also had strong months scoring more than 15 points respectively.

On the flip side of the coin, there were eight members of the squad that scored under 10 points, though one of them was on injured reserve the entire month as we await Kouki Amarei’s return to the ring. Kiyoka Kotatsu being sidelined also didn’t help since she scored zero points for the month. I’ll also be hoping for better output from Arisu Endo, Ram Kaicho, and Maika Ozaki in future months as well as they’ve been falling behind where I expected them so far.

When you look at the team overall for the season, right now Rina Yamashita is leading the pack with 60 points scored. It definitely helps that she does quite a few intergender matches while in Japan, so it keeps her pretty busy. Saya Kamitani, Hazuki and Tam Nakano have all also scored just above 50 points which is a good output to start the season. Obviously, with the looming career vs. career match coming up between Tam and Saya, one of them may be retiring at the end of April, so I’ll have to figure out who to possibly replace them with when the time comes.

CURRENT POINTS

POSITION: 4th | TOTAL POINTS: 485 | MARCH POINTS: 149

Scott was much like Dylan when it comes to the output that his team had for the month. The amount of points scored was good for sixth overall for the month, but it probably wouldn’t be considered a strong month in comparison to the last two.

Leading the way for “The Icon & Friends” was actually the highest point scorer in the entire league for the month Sayaka Kurara, who gained those points through winning singles matches on her way to winning the Cinderella Tournament. You definitely have to be pretty thrilled to get that output from a wrestler chosen in the 13th round of the draft. Unfortunately no one else on the team scored over 20 points for the month, but Hanan, and Miyu Amasaki both did score over 15 points.

“The Icon & Friends” had ten wrestlers in total score under 10 points, which is definitely a big reason why the overall team score was quite low in comparison to the teams above. One of those is excused because it is Xena who’s still out injured, but the likes of Victoria Yuzuki, Suzu Suzuki, and Maki Itoh all scored less points than you’d probably expect. Scott also moved on from NORI (who simply wasn’t wrestling often enough) to pick up Senka Akatsuki, who is one of the most promising rookies on the scene, so hopefully she’ll score quite a few points going forward.

When you take a look at the team overall for the year so far, Miyu Amasaki is tied for the lead with 74 points scored overall, which shows how especially strong she was for the first two months of the season. Other than Miyu, Victoria Yuzuki is the only other competitor on the team who has scored 50 or more points, but Scott has quite a few who have scored over 40 which shows how relatively balanced the team is. His faith in the young generation of wrestlers on the scene has paid off in some ways, but not in others, so it will be fun to see how it continues to play out going forward.

CURRENT POINTS

POSITION: 5th | TOTAL POINTS: 435 | MARCH POINTS: 183

It was one hell of a good month for “TCS 4 Life” as they scored the second most amount of points for the month of March with 183. Dave’s team had struggled through the first two months of the season, but it seems that the team is now all starting to put it together. While none of the roster members were in the top five for the league, Dave did have 7 wrestlers who all scored 15 points or more. That’s some pretty balanced scoring! The leader for the team was Azusa Inaba who has continuously been impressive through the first few months, this time scoring 22 points for the month. She was followed by her tag team partner Rina who scored 21, and VENY who scored 19 points. If the team continues to have that balanced scoring, there’s no doubt that they’ll find their way up into the thick of things going forward.

On the disappointing side of things, the first round draft pick Giulia not only lost her title in NXT, but also went on the shelf with an injury, which led to her only scoring two points during the month. The former points leader on the team Sumika Yanagawa only scored three points after a strong start to the year. With Mina Shirakawa moving to the United States and AEW soon, it will be interesting to see how many points she ends up generating, as many of the other joshi talents in AEW haven’t scored many points thus far this year.

Overall for the team, they don’t have any wrestlers who have scored over 50 points for the year, as their current number one is actually Kakeru Sekiguchi who has scored 43 points thus far. Azusa Inaba is right behind her at 42, and VENY is close by with 39 as well. The real secret is that the lowest point scorer for the team so far is Konami who was recently picked up at four points, but other than that, the lowest scorer is actually Mina Shirakawa with 18 points. It shows that having a balanced line up can help make up for not having a superstar leader in points.

CURRENT POINTS

POSITION: 6th | TOTAL POINTS: 430 | MARCH POINTS: 174

“Rebel X Run” was one of the four teams who scored above 170 points for the month, meaning that they were able to gain some ground on the teams above them in the standings. That was helped by the team having the second best overall performer for the month in Aya Sakura who scored 28 points with her win of the Sendai Girls Junior championship being a big part of it. Xavi also got some good performances out of SAKI and Misa Kagura who both scored over 20 points respectively. Hanako Nakamori, Chihiro Hashimoto, Makoto and Mai Sakurai also scored a respectable amount of points by scoring 15 or more.

The use of freelancers and indie wrestlers has been one of Xavi’s hallmarks this season thus far, and I believe that those wrestlers may end up being the key to the team success because sometimes they work more shows, and they have more possible titles that they could win.

When you look down lower at the bottom feeders of the team for the month, you unfortunately see two wrestlers who are currently injured with Mio Momono who no doubt would score quite a few points if she wasn’t injured, and Tsukina Umina who’s battled injuries since the start of the year. Going along with them in scoring zero points was KAZUKI who Xavi picked up right at the end of the month. Hopefully KAZUKI will be able to get back into her good form that she had to start the year with some singles victories. The likes of Yuna Manase, AKARI, and Riara all scored five points or less during the month, which will need to improve if “Rebel X Run” are going to make a run towards the top.

So far this season, Mai Sakurai has definitely been the MVP of the team scoring 66 points, which is 15 more than the next best wrestler on the team SAKI who has scored 49. Misa Kagura and Aya Sakura have both been pretty good, scoring 45 or more points for the season, and I could definitely see both of them continuing to put up good points going forward. Chihiro Hashimoto, Xavi’s first round pick is still off to a bit of a slow start, but now that she’s captured the Sendai Girls World championship, the hope is that she’ll be working more matches, and picking up more wins which will in turn score a lot more points. After all, she’s known as being one of the most protected wrestlers when it comes to her win/loss record, so it just comes down to her not wrestling often enough.

CURRENT POINTS

POSITION: 7th | TOTAL POINTS: 413 | MARCH POINTS: 158

Unfortunately for “Casa Royale” and Fernando, this month was pretty good, but not spectacular. Finally his first round pick Iyo Sky was able to make some noise, winning the WWE Women’s World championship which helped propel her to the team’s best score of 19 points. That was definitely a long time coming as Iyo is one of the best in the world, but unfortunately WWE is known for not putting their wrestlers in a ton of matches, so sometimes wrestlers chosen from that company are pretty quiet points wise at least. Let’s hope she survives WrestleMania as the champion and can get some good title defenses going forward. Other than Iyo, Miyu Yamashita, Mika Iwata, and Koguma all scored 15 or more points for the month which is pretty good at least.

On the flip side of things, Fernando had to deal with no Natsupoi for a good portion of the month as she was down due to injury, but she did end up scoring four points, so every little bit counts! The likes of Yuki Aino, Wakana Uehara, Ayano Irie, and Chie Koishikawa all scored six or less points for the month, which isn’t where they want to be, but better things could be in their futures. Fernando also added Miya Yotsuba from ChocoPro during the month to score a couple of points while Natsupoi was on Injured Reserve, and she might have a strong future ahead of her.

So for the wrestler who has scored the most point for Fernando has been Koguma who has been great in tag team action, already picking up 18 wins, which has helped her to a score of 50 for the season. Miyu Yamashita isn’t too far behind scoring 47 points, but then there’s a bit of a drop off down to Mei Suruga who has scored 38 points thus far. While the entire roster other than the recently added Miya Yotsuba have scored over ten points for the year, Fernando will need some bigger performances from some of the roster to really gain ground on the above teams. It’s not something that has to happen overnight, but if the team has another somewhat uneventful month or two, they could find themselves outside of the race for first for the rest of the year.

CURRENT POINTS

POSITION: 8th | TOTAL POINTS: 401 | MARCH POINTS: 143

Alex has been by far the most active general manager of a team thus far as they’ve made quite a few changes to try to help generate points. After making three roster changes last month, this month they only made one which was adding Akane Fujita while dropping AKINO, but there’s already another one queued up for the start of April as well. The leader for points on the team for the most was actually a tie between two wrestlers, YuuRi and DASH Chisako who both tallied 21 points. DASH’s big points gain could be attributed to her five singles match wins, which was second best in the league, and YuuRi mostly found success in tag team action, but since she works quite a few shows, the wins stacked up. Below those two was Manami Katsu who had another decent month after starting the year strong, as she scored 15 points for the team.

While the month wasn’t as bad as the first month for Alex’s team, it was still the third lowest total team score, which is definitely lower than I’m sure they’d like. While no one on the team scored zero points other than Mayumi Ozaki (who was on Injured Reserve for the entire month), there were a lot of roster members who scored 10 or fewer points, which is not what you’re looking for. Some teams are able to make up for that by having a wrestler or two have big months, but when that isn’t the case, you need every point you can muster. Yuki Arai continues to be a bit of a disappointment as she hasn’t been active enough in TJPW to have a ton of matches, but we all know that she’s booked strongly when she does wrestle. Now that she’s graduated from being an idol at the end of the month, we can hope that she’ll start wrestling more often, and therefore pick up more wins. After starting the year pretty strong, Kyoko Inoue had a pretty quiet month. She defended her DIANA Queen Elizabeth championship twice in the month of January, but hasn’t defended it since, which has lowered her point output quite a bit.

Manami Katsu has definitely been a really strong pick for Alex and their team as she’s scored 56 points to get things started. Ice Ribbon may be struggling a bit when it comes to attendance, but Manami Katsu has been a great wrestler for their company, and hopefully she’ll continue being used as such. YuuRi and DASH Chisako have both scored over 40 points this year which is pretty good, but could be better, and if they start acquiring some gold, I think that will help quite a bit. Picking up Hina when Alex did was pretty clutch, because it was right before she picked up the Future of STARDOM championship, which has gotten her on the right path. If her reign is anywhere near as good as her two sisters’ reigns, then many points will be scored no doubt!

CURRENT POINTS

POSITION: 9th | TOTAL POINTS: 382 | MARCH POINTS: 127

“God’s Sigh” found themselves down at the bottom of points scored for the month by a team by only scoring 127, but their top scorer Shoko Nakajima had a pretty good month scoring 19 points on her own. Coming in second place was Ryo Mizunami who scored 16 points, proving that she was a good pick up in the draft even though she was picked so early. It should be no surprise that those two wrestlers are also the top two point scorers for the year for this team as well. Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends.

When you include Haruka Umesaki who has been on Injured Reserve for quite some time to start the year, “God’s Sigh” had 11 wrestlers not hit double digits in points for the month. That’s not the type of output you’re looking for, especially from high picks in the draft like Sareee and Syuri. To start the season, both have been quite disappointing, and honestly you could even add Maika to that list as she has scored a decent amount of points each month, but not the amount you’d expect from someone that some see as STARDOM’s new “Ace.” Getting five or less points from Sae, Sareee, Natsuki, and Emi Sakura needs to be remedied for next month to see this team start making a turnaround.

As a whole it’s been a rough year for Ryan and his team, and honestly it’s not looking up too much with the recent possible long term injury for Chi Chi who had been one of his best performers during January and February. You still have to imagine that Syuri, Sareee, Rika Tatsumi, and Maika will start pulling their weight more as the year goes on, but at the same time you can only spin your wheels for so long. It would be interesting to see Ryan make a trade with another team to try to shake things up a bit, but we’ll have to see how it shakes out.

CURRENT POINTS

POSITION: 10th | TOTAL POINTS: 366 | MARCH POINTS: 141

While things have been tough for Hart Editing to start the year, this month was a bit better, but maybe not quite what he was looking for. This month was a good one for Raku who scored 23 points which was good for seventh best in the league, and she was followed by Risa Sera who scored 21 points. Hart was able to get some decent performances from Nanae Takahashi and Mari Manji as well who both scored over 15 points for the month. It’s something pretty good to build on, but there’s still quite a few wrestlers on the team who simply haven’t put it all together to score enough points yet, so if that gets fixed, Hart Editing could see their team start shooting up the standings, though they have a long way to go to get to the top.

Unfortunately, Hart still find themselves down at the bottom of the standings and that isn’t helped by getting zero points from Yuka Sakazaki who did a good bit during January, but has been pretty much invisible since. Hart’s first round pick Miu Watanabe also had another subpar month only scoring six points in the month of March. Meiko Satomura has been making waves on the scene as she nears her retirement, and she had been scoring quite a few points up until this month, but unfortunately she only tallied 5 this month. There’s some heavy hitters who didn’t win enough matches, that’s all there is to it, but that doesn’t mean that they will stay quiet forever. You just have to hope that the turnaround comes sooner rather than later.

The best wrestler on the team thus far has been Nanae Takahashi who has passionately scored enough wins to acquired 56 points to start the year. Sadly, she’ll be retiring in a month or two, so eventually that well will run dry. Bozilla had also been a great pick up for the team, but it sounds like her time in Japan will be running out soon, and while she’ll still get points for wrestling she does outside of the country, she may end up working less matches overall which will hurt her totals. Risa Sera has also been good to start the year, gaining 43 points already. There’s a lot to like about the team, they just haven’t performed up to the level expected I’d say.

CURRENT POINTS

FREE AGENTS

There were a few free agents who had a pretty good month of March in the league, and it wouldn’t surprise me if one or two of them end up getting picked up sometime within the next month if they continue their positive results. The leader for the month was none other than Waka Tsukiyama who tallied 18 points for the month, which was no doubt helped by another title defense of her New Blood Tag Team championships. Coming in second was a tie between Aki Shizuku who very quietly had a good month, and ZONES who scored 15 points. ZONES may or may not have gotten picked up already for April, but you’ll have to wait to see that for yourself next month when that article goes up.

TOP 5 IN OVERALL POINTS (FREE AGENTS)

This month was kinder to some than others, but it was a strong month overall for the joshi wrestling scene as there were many events and many matches, which means we’re all winners in the end. The top teams continued to be in top form, the team in the middle of the road gained a little ground, and the teams at the bottom are still looking for answers on how to gain points to make their way up the standings. I hope you’ve enjoyed this look into the RESURA fantasy league, and we’ll be back again next month to give you the next update. While you wait for that, feel free to follow the wonderful members of the league with their links below!