Ladies and gentlemen, start your broomsticks! Campus swept up by a new sports league
POTTER HEADS Taking a cue from the pages of Harry Potter, quidditch players ride broomsticks in a game that combines elements of rugby, dodge ball and capture the flag.
The sport’s non-magical version combines elements of rugby, dodge ball and capture the flag with broomstick riding. In the Harry Potter version of the sport, the broomsticks help players fly.
Journalism student Andrea Hill got Carleton’s team off the ground in January. “I was really concerned, when we had our first meeting, that we were going to have three or four people show up,” she says, “and as soon as they found out there was physical contact or any exertion involved in the sport, they would go back to playing Dungeons and Dragons.”
Instead, the room was packed to overcrowding with eager would-be quidditch players, more than enough for the seven players required for a team.
Hill says the team is open to jocks and Potter fans alike. “Right now everyone who is on the Carleton team is a fan of Harry Potter,” Hill says. “On the McGill team, there are a few people who had never heard of quidditch, had never seen the movies or read the books until they saw people running around on campus with broomsticks.”
Carleton’s team is part of the International Quidditch Association, which counts hundreds of university and high school teams among its members.
Carleton won its first exhibition match against the McGill University team in the spring.
In October, the team will take their play to the next level by competing in the annual Quidditch World Cup in Middlebury, Vt.
This story was published in the Fall 2010 issue. Tags applied to this article are: Athletics. Leave a comment, bookmark the permalink or share the following short URL for this article via social media: http://cualumni.carleton.ca/magazine/?p=52
Love it! I definitely need to see how they play.
I enjoyed the article. Can someone give me a contact name/e-mail so I can find out the rules of the game? It might be something I can use with my Scout and Cub groups.
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Kathryn: cu.quidditch@gmail.com