Not Harry Potter? Not a Problem
Katie Stack has been enchanted with Harry Potter and his magical escapades since the fourth grade. She spent hours reading the series and reenacting the boy wizard’s adventures with her friends.
She is in college now, but Stack (CAS’11) continues to live out her childhood fantasies. She plays Quidditch, the international sport of the wizarding world, which has players zooming around on broomsticks and using balls to score points and knock one another off course.
The earthbound variation is called Muggle Quidditch. The sport originated in 2005 when a student at Middlebury College adapted the game for the nonmagical world. Its popularity quickly spread, and today more than 150 colleges throughout the United States have Quidditch teams.
Sean Culleton (CAS’10) founded the BU team last spring, and by this fall the sport had taken off. The team holds scrimmages every Sunday afternoon on the BU Beach and in October competed against 11 other schools in the second annual Intercollegiate Quidditch World Cup, held in Vermont, at Middlebury.
“The entire season has been leading up to this event,” says Raven Villegas (CAS’12). “The World Cup is the ultimate Quidditch experience, and I’ve been dreaming about it for months.”
While the wizards in the
Potter series play Quidditch on flying broomsticks, Muggles (author J. K. Rowling’s word for nonmagical people) run holding a broom between their legs. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and just as awkward, says Stack, who is team captain while Culleton is studying abroad.
“We’re a small, kind of ragtag group,” she says. “Not everyone has brooms yet, so some people play with Wiffle bats or lacrosse sticks. And we only have two hoops. You’re supposed to have three on each end of the field.”
As in the fictional game, each Muggle Quidditch team has seven players: three chasers, two beaters, a keeper, and a seeker. Chasers score points by throwing a quaffle, or volleyball, through one of three hoops (worth 10 points) while trying to avoid bludgers, or dodgeballs, that are thrown by beaters. (If chasers are hit by a bludger, they must drop the quaffle.) The keeper’s job is to protect the three goalposts, while the seeker must capture the snitch — a sock stuffed with tennis balls carried by a person (typically a cross-country runner) dressed in gold. Capturing the snitch nets an additional 30 points and ends the game.
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Broomstick massacre? 
