I really miss quidditch--the real-life sport that I've been playing (and was interviewed for in a documentary) for a few years now. Due to the strains of being a dad, a teacher (and quidditch coach), a husband, and a writer, I couldn't find a way to continue to justify the time expenditures of practice and travel with people I deeply cared about to play a sport I never knew I would love so much.
The miracle of quidditch came into my life when I, partially joking, asked the Harry Potter Winterim I was teaching (January 2012) if they would like to play the sport. The rules had been invented a few years before out at Middlebury College, and the sport had really taken off (no pun intended). It took a little bit of research to figure out the rules and what I could do to get a team started at my school, but before the end of the 2012 school year, I was hooked.
My brother and I found a community team in Salt Lake, fell in love with the people and the sport, and have been avid fans ever since.
Quidditch has broadened my ability to empathize with people. As a true-bred Ravenclaw, I could never understand the joy of playing a sport. P.E. classes were always an embarrassment, a frustration, or a chore--I could never see why people would want to devote so much energy to getting sweaty. I had very little skill, and even less desire, so I didn't put any effort into improving my basketball game, throwing my football better, or swinging a bat with anything approaching worthwhile efficiency. Nothing about sports appealed to me, and I couldn't understand what made people care about any one of the myriad of athletic experiences offered.
But once I started to understand quidditch, I realized why people played games. There's something rewarding about scoring, about moving, about trying as a team in an extended improvisation routine. And, in the case of quidditch, there's nothing like persecution to build a tighter community.
Sure, it bothers me that people laugh at my sport when they haven't tried it--when they mistake it for a LARPing exercise. I don't appreciate people yelling "Gryffffffffindor!" from their car windows as we're trying to practice. And I have yet to find it funny when someone asks, with all their egotistic naivete, how we fly.
Of course, I can admit that playing a sport with a broom, aside from being rife with euphemisms, is a new take on how a game should be played. But the broom is as integral to the sport as dribbling in basketball, not falling over in football, or skates in hockey. The equipment is how the sport is played the way that it has been created, and since every sport is, at its basic level, a collection of arbitrary rules that the players have agreed to follow, there's little critique against quidditch save its newness.
I had some students try to argue that quidditch can't be a sport in some argumentative papers they wrote for me. They got very low scores, not because they attacked quidditch, but they were trying to make an argument that they couldn't win: There are no grounds for disqualifying quidditch as a sport that wouldn't apply to every other sport, with the one exception of newness--and that seems like the kind of objection that's overruled by the inevitable passage of time.
I suppose the largest detraction that I have towards athleticism in general is this tendency toward tribalism. I find it toxic, and the fact that most sports seem to foster this sort of thinking--consider, for example, what is called the Holy War in Utah, when Brigham Young University and the University of Utah have a football match--has long repelled me from sports. Quidditch can be that way (as I demonstrated above; I become intensely defensive of the perceived slights against my sport, and I'm unapologetic for it), but only in terms of a defense mechanism from incredulous onlookers. As players, we are friends. On the pitch, things can get heated, but almost always, the afterparties are huge affairs filled with people from all over the country, talking, drinking, and enjoying one anothers' company. Some hard feelings inevitably creep in, but the us versus them mentality is not tightly embraced within the quidditch community.
And, if there's any marker of how much it means to me, I feel a wellspring of sadness every time I think of the sport and the fact that my life can no longer include it. Still, I'm blessed for having had it, even if it was only for a few short years in my late twenties. At least I got it at one point.
The miracle of quidditch came into my life when I, partially joking, asked the Harry Potter Winterim I was teaching (January 2012) if they would like to play the sport. The rules had been invented a few years before out at Middlebury College, and the sport had really taken off (no pun intended). It took a little bit of research to figure out the rules and what I could do to get a team started at my school, but before the end of the 2012 school year, I was hooked.
My brother and I found a community team in Salt Lake, fell in love with the people and the sport, and have been avid fans ever since.
Quidditch has broadened my ability to empathize with people. As a true-bred Ravenclaw, I could never understand the joy of playing a sport. P.E. classes were always an embarrassment, a frustration, or a chore--I could never see why people would want to devote so much energy to getting sweaty. I had very little skill, and even less desire, so I didn't put any effort into improving my basketball game, throwing my football better, or swinging a bat with anything approaching worthwhile efficiency. Nothing about sports appealed to me, and I couldn't understand what made people care about any one of the myriad of athletic experiences offered.
But once I started to understand quidditch, I realized why people played games. There's something rewarding about scoring, about moving, about trying as a team in an extended improvisation routine. And, in the case of quidditch, there's nothing like persecution to build a tighter community.
Sure, it bothers me that people laugh at my sport when they haven't tried it--when they mistake it for a LARPing exercise. I don't appreciate people yelling "Gryffffffffindor!" from their car windows as we're trying to practice. And I have yet to find it funny when someone asks, with all their egotistic naivete, how we fly.
Of course, I can admit that playing a sport with a broom, aside from being rife with euphemisms, is a new take on how a game should be played. But the broom is as integral to the sport as dribbling in basketball, not falling over in football, or skates in hockey. The equipment is how the sport is played the way that it has been created, and since every sport is, at its basic level, a collection of arbitrary rules that the players have agreed to follow, there's little critique against quidditch save its newness.
I had some students try to argue that quidditch can't be a sport in some argumentative papers they wrote for me. They got very low scores, not because they attacked quidditch, but they were trying to make an argument that they couldn't win: There are no grounds for disqualifying quidditch as a sport that wouldn't apply to every other sport, with the one exception of newness--and that seems like the kind of objection that's overruled by the inevitable passage of time.
I suppose the largest detraction that I have towards athleticism in general is this tendency toward tribalism. I find it toxic, and the fact that most sports seem to foster this sort of thinking--consider, for example, what is called the Holy War in Utah, when Brigham Young University and the University of Utah have a football match--has long repelled me from sports. Quidditch can be that way (as I demonstrated above; I become intensely defensive of the perceived slights against my sport, and I'm unapologetic for it), but only in terms of a defense mechanism from incredulous onlookers. As players, we are friends. On the pitch, things can get heated, but almost always, the afterparties are huge affairs filled with people from all over the country, talking, drinking, and enjoying one anothers' company. Some hard feelings inevitably creep in, but the us versus them mentality is not tightly embraced within the quidditch community.
And, if there's any marker of how much it means to me, I feel a wellspring of sadness every time I think of the sport and the fact that my life can no longer include it. Still, I'm blessed for having had it, even if it was only for a few short years in my late twenties. At least I got it at one point.
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