James May
One of the many groups found on Wooster’s campus is the Wooster Scottish Nationals Quidditch Team. This group is a competitive member of United States Quidditch, also known as USQ.
As a member of the Wooster Quidditch Team, I have traveled around the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions to participate in games and tournaments. Some of the recent excursions have taken us to Morgantown, West Virginia, Toledo and Columbus.
Wooster is one of many schools now participating in this athletic phenomenon. It’s a co-ed, full-contact sport that began in 2005 at Middlebury College and has now expanded to include an international community of over 300 teams from 20 countries.
Let me reiterate a critical component of the game: the sport is a co-ed, full-contact, no-padding sport with a 170-page rulebook detailing the parameters of legal conduct. This is usually the biggest surprise for people unfamiliar with the sport — few would assume that a game born of the Harry Potter book series, a calling card for the modern bookworm, could possibly be anything except a glorified role-playing scenario. This is a problem current players are well aware of, and one that certain members of the sport’s community are looking to solve by erasing the association between the game and its literary origin.
The identity crisis is a hot topic among the Quidditch community. As my personal experience playing on Wooster’s team can attest, there’s a certain level of disbelief and mockery one encounters when they say they broke their thumb/elbow/leg playing Quidditch. Obviously, this is hugely frustrating — the game is paced like a rugby match, but with none of the reverent respect from outsiders because of the association with Harry Potter and the consequent fact that we “don’t play a real sport.”
In addition, the game has taken on a life of its own. There are official non-profit organizations with hierarchies of paid employees that govern the sport (the USQ, Fédération du Quidditch Français, etc.) and annual international and national tournaments that bring teams from all corners of the world to participate. Whether or not the sport was initially intended to be a fun hobby, Quidditch now exists in a realm of professionalism that mitigates qualitative statements about its legitimacy.
Because of this, there are calls to divorce the sport from the book series, and fairly so — hundreds of people have put in hours of work, training and management to make the game a reality just to have this reality discarded en masse as a joke. However, this threatens the community that is attracted to Quidditch because it came from the Harry Potter series. The hyper-athletic nature of the game alienates potential participants who want nothing more than to enjoy a childhood passion. There are small-scale solutions, like running consistent no-contact intramural games on campus. However, with the time commitments of practices and tournaments, not to mention the academic lives of students, prioritizing intramurals is challenging at best for an official competitive team.
It’s a hard balance to strike, one faced by all active teams including our own. However, in the meantime, Quidditch presses forward into the realm of competitive athletics.