5 Things You Need to Know About Real-Life Quidditch.
Alternatively, my love letter to sportsball.
It’s not cosplay.
I know when you hear the word ‘quidditch,’ the first thing that comes to mind is the Harry Potter books and the flying sport within them. Rightly so! That’s where the sport came from. However, there’s an enormous difference between meticulously pulling together and crafting an excellent Viktor Krum or Ginny Weasley cosplay and playing the sport I’ve been involved with for the last four years. Both of these things are time- and money-consuming and may result in various levels of injury, but only one of them is under the jurisdiction of an international governing body. And thank goodness, too – I don’t need anybody telling me that there are regulations on my Star Wars/Harry Potter crossover costume. Fight me.
Capital-Q Quidditch is the sport played yards above the verdant, sloping lawns of the Hogwarts grounds. Lowercase-q quidditch is the sport played in cleats on grass and turf fields around the globe. Quidditch is an English sport at its core because its creator is English (bless you, Joanne). However, quidditch was first played in New England and is now played on every continent – barring Antarctica (we’re working on it). We don’t wear capes anymore, and our brooms have lost their bristles.
It’s not just a few teams of hobbyists sprinkled here or there.
I’m friends on Facebook with people who play this sport in the US, Canada, Brazil, Japan, England, Ireland, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Argentina, Uganda, Denmark, Australia, and more. These countries and then some have national governing bodies that belong to the congress of the International Quidditch Association. It’s incredibly widespread and immensely popular. The IQA Quidditch World Cup was hosted in Frankfurt, Germany in July 2016. 21 nations were represented, and Team Australia finally took the crown from the reigning champs, Team USA. The sport is becoming competitive enough worldwide to give the country where it started a legitimate and excellent run for its money. We’re coming for you in 2018, Australia (just kidding – but naw, really).
There are now all-star leagues popping up. Major League Quidditch has sandwiched its season in the summer between the most populated months of the USQ season and allows for athletes to play on teams with and against folks they might not get to in the regular season. The Quidditch Premier League, the UK’s version of MLQ, is set to start its first season in July of 2017. The usual fantasy tournaments that run during the summer aren’t enough anymore — people want organized competition, and they want it year-round.
It’s bone-breaking work.
At a one-day tournament including pool and bracket with, let’s say, four pools of four teams each and a single-elimination bracket built for twelve of those teams, the teams that face off in the championship game will have played six games by the time they face each other. And, more often than not, those championship matches are incredible to watch – even after a full day’s play. For many people, quidditch is the first sport they’ve ever played competitively. Training to get your body to the point where it can play an entire weekend’s worth of games at a breakneck pace is no joke; it takes dedication and zeal. Even those folks who have been playing sports all their lives need to work hard to maintain their competitive edge and improve.
I hate to use injuries to justify the fact that our sport is indeed a sport but, for so many people, that ends up being the thing to spark their curiosity. Over the last almost-four years, my team has weathered multiple broken thumbs, broken hands, one famous class three ankle sprain, cracked ribs (hi, I have one of those), broken noses, a class two separation between clavicle and scapula, and endless bruises, scratches, and scrapes. I have watched and refereed games that ended with broken bones. Did you know you can hear a clavicle snap? I didn’t. It is just as much a sport as basketball and rugby and football are, just with less (read: no) paid leagues and less (read: fewer, because there actually are sponsors) sponsored teams.
It’s heartbreaking.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried over all the hard work my team and I have put into this sport only to feel like it’s been for naught when we lose a game we thought we had in the bag, and we’re all still fairly new to the sport. Watching my friends who have been playing for five, six, seven years – all the way through college and then onto community teams, playing quidditch like they’re paid to play – work their tails off, qualify for our national championship, and hit something heartbreaking once they make it there. A key player experiences an injury, a snitch runner makes a mistake, the team can’t seem to hit their stride. And then it’s all gone. Months – years, sometimes – of work, thousands of dollars, that season’s hopes and dreams: all up in flames.
There are few things in life that can break your heart like the dousing of a flame carried amongst friends. Seeing people you’ve sweat and bled with over and over again brush their fingertips against your shared goals but fall short is heart-wrenching in a way that’s unique to team endeavors. Watching those teams sprint headlong into their next season, however, is one of the rawest and most emotional forms of motivation I have ever seen. Learning to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and head right back into the fray has been invaluable.
It’s life-changing and so, so worthwhile.
About six months after my friends and I founded the Time Turners, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. I’ve had generalized anxiety disorder for years now, but the depression diagnosis – while, frankly, unsurprising – was hard to deal with. My grades slipped and dropped out from beneath me and my social life disappeared. The only thing I could seem to get myself to do was go to quidditch practice. I could hardly get myself to eat some days, but I’d’ve been damned if I’d have missed a roster submission. Quidditch kept me afloat when I was otherwise drowning and I don’t think I would’ve made it out of the fog I was in for almost two years without the structure I sometimes struggled to uphold and the support system my teammates provided.
As I watch my university career approach its end at what feels like terminal velocity, I find myself reflecting often on the importance of what my friends and I have done. Yeah, sure, we brought a new sport to Knoxville. I’m very proud of that, don’t get me wrong. But the thing that I’m proudest of? The thing that will forever define my most gilded memories of being at UT? That will always be the family I gave myself, that we all made together. Quidditch has been the most diverse, thought-provoking, mentally and physically challenging thing I have ever undertaken, and it came to me at the perfect moment in my life and with the perfect group of people. This sport blew into my life three Novembers ago like a whirlwind of opportunity, and I’ll be forever grateful for that.
