Anyone who’s seen my first few articles (or knows me in person) can tell I thoroughly enjoy sports. I’m not a particularly athletic person, but there is a lot about sports to enjoy. I only truly follow hockey (as the other sports include too many numbers for me to actively follow), but I love to watch other sports. Even the ones a little more… eclectic (looking at you, Handball).
And while I may not be a particularly athletic person myself, I do play one sport. It is a sport often met with the question “How does that work?” or even the occasional “Wait that’s a real thing?”. It is something I love and it is something that I can talk about forever, but I will do my best to keep this brief.
I play Quidditch for Fredonia State University.
Many people do not know that it is capable for Muggles to play Quidditch and that’s perfectly fine. I hope I can make people understand that Quidditch is so much more than “That made up sport from Harry Potter.” (Please don’t actually say that to Quidditch players, that one kinda cuts deep.)
Quidditch is indeed played on brooms, players run around with broomsticks (sometimes even fashioned from lengths of PVC pipe) with multiple different balls and objectives. Anyone who has ever read Harry Potter knows that Quidditch is played with three balls, the Quaffle, the Bludger, and the Golden Snitch (a partially deflated volleyball, partially deflated dodgeball, and guy in yellow shorts with a tennis ball in a sock Velcro’d to the back of his pants, respectively). Chasers are the equivalent to forwards, wearing green headbands and passing the Quaffle between them with the intention of passing it through the other team’s hoops for 10 points per score. Trying to stop them are opposing chasers (who are allowed to tackle, as long as it is done safely), and opposing beaters. Beaters wear black headbands and throw the bludgers at any player on the opposing team to “beat” them, which makes the beat player dismount their broom, touch their own hoops, remount, and get back in the game.
This occurs in a Quidditch match for 17 minutes. At 17 minutes, the Snitch is released, followed by the Seekers being released at 18 minutes. The Seekers’ goal is to pull the tennis ball sock off of the back of the Snitch’s pants. However, this does not just happen, as the Snitch is allowed to do almost anything to keep the Seekers from pulling the Snitch and ending the game. Pulling the Snitch ends the game and adds 30 points to your team’s total score (it’s 150 in Wizard Quidditch, but that’s something of a pretty steep point differential for Muggles).
That’s a brief rundown of the game, but in reality there’s so much more to it than that. For anyone looking for more information you can Google “Quidditch Rule Book 9” for a more lengthy rundown on the facets of the game. To find Quidditch played near you, you can also Google “U.S. Quidditch”, which will direct you to the largest Quidditch league in the country. There are elements of rugby, soccer, football, and many more in this game (and yes, with the rugby comes the violence). Quidditch is incredibly fun to play, but is also fun to watch, explain, talk about, analyze, and anything else you can do with a sport.
I love Quidditch because so many of us players are phenomenal, easygoing people. At many tournaments I’ve stood in groups of people I had never met before and we all spoke like we’d known each other for years. That’s one of the amazing things about any sport, but especially collegiate sports. It’s easy to view anyone as an equal when you watch them get on a field and leave everything they’ve got out there, no matter what their talent level is.
With all of this said, I urge people to find Quidditch. It is available here in the Muggle world and in looking for a sport you didn’t know existed, you could potentially find a new way to exercise, get physically fit, or even just have fun and meet new people. Despite many people not knowing it exists, the sport has experienced extremely rapid growth in the last couple years and just a little searching by a few more people could give this fun, entertaining, difficult, and extremely special sport the recognition it deserves.
I play Quidditch for Fredonia State University and yes, Quidditch is a real thing.
