At the university, Quidditch, the dominant school sport in the Harry Potter book series, isn’t just a sport for wizards, it may be a Muggle sport too.
Freshman Topher Rooney says he created a Facebook group to put together a Quidditch team for the spring after he realized he missed playing sports.
College Quidditch started at Middlebury College in Vermont as an intramural sport a few years ago and then expanded to other schools.
“One of my best friends from high school goes to Boston University, and he started playing for their team,” Rooney says. “I thought it was the coolest thing ever and I wanted to start it here, so I started a Facebook group.”
Toni Yavorski, a member of Rooney’s Facebook group “UD Quidditch,” says she started following the sport a couple of years ago after reading an article about the first intercollegiate match between Middlebury and Vassar College. She says she has been keeping up with the sport by visiting the Intercollegiate Quidditch Association Web site and watching matches on YouTube.
“I was looking on the actual Web site for college Quidditch and they said Delaware had a team, so I searched it on Facebook,” Yavorski says.
If the university gets a team up and running for the spring, Yavorski says she is interested in playing and hopefully at some point entering the Intercollegiate World Cup.
“Middlebury was the first school to have a Quidditch team, and they hold the World Cup,” Rooney says. “This year, 13 schools came.”
Rooney says even though the sport has only been around for a few years, it is already very organized.
“At the World Cup this past year they had officials and different events aside from the actual games,” he says. “Characters from the books were announcers, and a chemistry professor did magic demonstrations.”
Rooney has not seen a match in person yet, but like Yavorski, he says he has watched the matches on YouTube.
Rooney is not the only university student that had the idea to start a Quidditch team at the university. Freshmen Sarah Campanelli and Kat Locke started a Facebook group, “Almost Official Quidditch Team,” at the beginning of the school year to try and get a team together.
The IQA had to make some adjustments to the rules in the novels so that college students were able to play the sport, Campanelli says.
“There are three people who have to make the goals who are called the chasers, and the beaters throw dodge balls at them and try to stop them from making the goals,” she says. “In the books, they have a ball that they have to catch, so for the college version they have someone run around as the snitch, and the seeker tries to catch that person.”
Rooney says brooms are a requirement for the game, which can be purchased at the Five and Dime on Main Street.
“You can’t play without the broom, it’s a rule,” he says.
Campanelli says she is a big fan of the Harry Potter book series and found out about the IQA from a friend who goes to Richmond University and plays on its Quidditch team.
“Kat and I wanted to start something but we didn’t know if we wanted to make it official with the school,” Campanelli says. “So we talked to our RA and she said we could or we could just do it for fun.”
After getting several of their friends to join the group, Campanelli and Locke held a meeting but did not get enough interest to pursue the endeavor further.
Now that there is interest from other students on campus, Campanelli says she is open to trying to start a team again in the spring.
Rooney, who was unaware there was already a Facebook group for a potential Quidditch team at the university when he created his, says he is interested in working with Campanelli and Locke to get a team going. He says he hopes to make Quidditch an RSO so he can get funding from the university and free advertising to expand the organization.
“I don’t think it would qualify as a club team right away, but it would be a club that would start as an intramural,” Rooney says.
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