Muggle Quidditch

By Marsha Jackson and Rick Salee

Earlier this year, a group of students gathered in a gymnasium on the University of Evansville campus, equipped with an array of sports balls, including a fist-sized rubber ball dubbed the “Golden Snitch.”

Their court was divided into two regions, one of which was off-limits to team members called the “keepers.” Clad in an assortment of garb, the players hovered and darted around Hula Hoops positioned as goals. To an outsider, the game looked like a chaotic combination of basketball, soccer, and dodgeball with a dose of “keep away” thrown in.

But to players and fans – divided into deeply loyal “houses” – the event was a good game of “Muggle Quidditch.” Modeled after the magical airborne game in J.K. Rowling’s immensely popular Harry Potter literary fantasy series, the UE undergraduates were engaged in an earthbound version of the enchanted sport popularized by the characters who inhabit Rowling’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Among the players were UE student Samantha “Sam” Knapp who signed on to play in the human version of the sport after she arrived on campus two years ago from her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, and discovered the university had a student-run Quidditch Club devoted to all things related to the Harry Potter series. Like many of her UE classmates, Knapp was raised on the book series, which made its debut in 1997. “It was very cool to come to Evansville and find a group of people who were as obsessed with it as much as I was,” says Knapp, an archaeology major who picked up her first Harry Potter book in grade school.

Unlike Rowling’s magical characters, Knapp and her fellow players are forced to compensate for their lack of supernatural powers when playing the sport. In the books, Quidditch is played by adolescent wizards, storming through the air on flying broomsticks with names like Nimbus 2000, Comet Two-Sixty, or Cleansweep Seven. Two teams of seven players compete in a sort of enchanted polo game with four different-sized balls, trying not to commit any of 700 different kinds of fouls. At either end of the field are three 50-foot tall golden poles with hoops through which players attempt to send the Quaffle (that’s how you score points). The game ends when the Golden Snitch, a bewitched walnut-sized ball with silver wings, is caught.

The sport was picked up by Muggles – Rowling’s term for non-wizards – in online fantasy leagues not long after her first book was released, but it was popularized on college campuses when the series’ earliest fans came of age. The self-proclaimed Ground Zero for Muggle Quidditch is the East Coast at universities like Middlebury College in Vermont, home of the annual Middlebury College Quidditch World Cup. The popularity of the sport spread like wildfire on campuses across the country late last year after The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story on the college version of the game. ESPN The Magazine also featured the game in its pages. There’s even an Intercollegiate Quidditch Association, which posts rules for the Muggle version of the game on its Web site.

The Quidditch matches at UE are part of a larger obsession with the book series. At UE, Quidditch Club members start the school year in typical Hogwarts fashion, as they are sorted into one of four houses. In the books, the sorting is done in a ceremony in which a magical hat is placed on each student’s head and the hat then speaks the name of the house in which the student will reside. At UE, the hat placed on a student’s head also “speaks” the name of the house with the assistance of a walkie-talkie hidden inside it.

Calvin Wertman, a Holland, Ind., native and English education major, launched the human version of the sport on the UE campus and initially developed his own rules for the game. He says playing the Muggle version of Quidditch was the next logical step after the UE Quidditch Club was formed in 2002. The club had already begun sponsoring trivia contests and other competitions in which the houses could compete for points and began developing plans for an annual Yule Ball like the one described in the fourth book of the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

The club appealed to students like Wertman and Knapp, who arrived on the UE campus knowing few other students. “It’s cool when you come to campus, and you immediately have 100 other people here you can relate to,” Wertman says.

That spirit traveled all the way to England earlier this year where many of the members of the UE Quidditch Club are now attending UE’s British campus, Harlaxton College. Among them are Lierin Holly, a history and archeology major from Coral Springs, Fla. and former UE Quidditch Club president who helped form “House Harlaxton” when she arrived on the British campus in January. Holly says many of her fellow students have even started referring to the grand castle-like manor house of Harlaxton as “Hogwarts.”

To learn how to play the Muggle version of Quidditch, Wertman and Knapp turned to this world’s nearly omniscient tool, Google. What they found were many similar sets of rules for the non-magical, non-wizard version of the game. In some campus versions of the game, the prized Golden Snitch is played by a student, who roams beyond the playing field and occasionally darts into the game. At colleges like Middlebury, Marlboro, and Vassar, teams play the game outside on broomsticks. At UE, the game is played in one of the campus gymnasiums. Erin Heckman, current president of the UE Quidditch Club, says the flexible rules of the earthbound version of the game is part of the appeal. “All you really need,’’ she says, “is a bunch of Harry Potter fans.”

The university, meanwhile, has embraced the Quidditch Club and its Muggle matches in its own fashion. While it’s not a sanctioned sport, the university did include it in its profile posted on the Web site of the U.S. News and World Report which named UE to its list of “America’s Best Colleges 2007.”