Check out team capsules for boys basketball, girls basketball and wrestling.

YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan – James Bailey has been in this situation before: taking over a two-time Far East champion team that just so happens to have one of his children playing on it.

The 2024-25 DODEA-Japan season finds Bailey at the helm of Yokota’s boys basketball team. The Panthers have won the last two Division II titles, giving them four overall dating back to 2015. And Jai Bailey, a senior, is the reigning tournament Most Valuable Player.

“It’s not new for me,” said the elder Bailey, who took the Panthers’ girls team’s head coaching post in 2016, after Yokota had won two straight titles. He coached the Panthers – including daughter Jamia - to the 2016-17 championship, part of a string of four straight.

There are some holes to fill on a Panthers team that lost nine seniors two years ago and three more after last season.

But the younger Bailey returns, and the PCS Plane blessed the Panthers over the summer with Adian Jones, a sophomore who comes in from Hohenfels, Germany.

“He’s the real deal,” James Bailey said, adding that Jones reminds him of former Panther Hunter Cort, who now plays for second-tier Gifu in Japan’s pro leagues. “He’s a tall body, he understands the game.”

Jai Bailey, for his part, has been working on options other than the three-point goal and the dribble drive, which his dad says opponents will be watching for this season.

“He knows they’re going to guard him,” James Bailey said, adding that Jai has been working on 15- to 18-foot jump shots, “short-range jumpers. He’s looking really good.”

Beyond that, the Panthers have enough support, especially in the middle, with Brailyn Ivey and Baron Reed and guard play in Rodrigo Negron and Kysiem Banks.

“Rodrigo is the key to the whole thing, defense and outside shooting,” James Bailey said. “We have some height. I think we have the pieces.”

He says he knows he’s filling some big shoes. Longtime mentor Dan Galvin decided not to coach this year.

“But I know the boys, they know who I am, they know of any expectations. We’re going to try to three-peat, but it won’t be easy.”

The Panthers aren’t the only defending Far East champions based in Japan that face challenges to repeat this season. Robert D. Edgren won the D-II wrestling dual-meet title last January, as did E.J. King’s girls basketball team for the first time since 1997. And Nile C. Kinnick’s boys won their second Division I basketball title and first since 2018.

The Red Devils boys lost pretty much their entire backcourt, including D-I MVP Vance Lewis, but there are still strong backcourt numbers along with height in the likes of veteran Nicholas Whyte and junior Isaiah Kimbrough, who transferred to Yokosuka from Hawaii.

“He’s going to add a lot to the team,” longtime Kinnick coach Robert Stovall said, adding that he’s not focused too much on a repeat.

“We try not to think about that too much. We just focus on the two questions,” Stovall said of the two questions he always asks his teams following games: Are you proud of the way you played and did you play as hard as you could?

The Cobras girls must get by without their D-II MVP, Maliwan Schinker, who graduated as did Lewis.

But coach McKinzy Best does return his senior twin-daughter tandem, Moa and Miu Best, along with senior swing player Pia Lagrito and junior post player Joanna Hall, a skilled rebounder.

The Cobras aren’t deep, but “we’re still going to play our game … so we don’t drop off from last year,” Lagrito said, adding that the team needs to work on “basic mechanics and confidence. The more we play together, the more confidence we develop and the play will develop.”

Depth is historically a problem for Division II wrestling teams, where enrollments are thin. But the numbers are up in every wrestling room so far this season, in particular among girls: Kinnick has 10 girls in its practice room, King has five and Yokota has seven.

“I didn’t even have to ask,” Panthers coach Theo Kuntz said. “I had just two last year and we advertised a lot. This year, I didn’t even ask and we had seven come in. It takes people on the team to encourage others to do it.”

One girl wrestler who returned after taking a season off is Zaylee Gubler, a pitcher for Yokota’s two-time defending D-II softball title team who decided to give wrestling one more go in her senior year.

Should DODEA-Pacific add girls wrestling as a sport as DODEA-Europe is doing this winter? Kubasaki and Kadena are adding girls teams as a pilot program, and Gubler said it would be nice for the other districts to add it as well.

“It would benefit everybody,” Gubler said. “It would give girls a comparison of their skills and more opportunities, instead of just getting beat up by the boys.”

Edgren has one girl in its wrestling practice room, but back at the coaching helm for a 19th season is Justin Edmonds, who said he was retiring last February after his 12th Far East D-II title and 14th coaching title overall.

“They tricked me,” Edmonds said, half-jokingly, about how his wrestlers talked him into coming back. “So, here I am.”