When Middlebury junior Alex Benepe offers to show you the broom closet, it's more than just buckets and mops. Benepe's broom closet houses gold spray-painted hula hoops, lacrosse goggles crusted in mud, a homemade broom rack of mahogany-handled brooms worth $70 each and a painted Middlebury Quidditch poster.
Three years ago, Middlebury junior Xander Manshel started a Quidditch club on campus. He adapted the fantasy sport J.K. Rowling made famous in her Harry Potter series to be played by grounded humans. Since its beginning, the club has taken off and evolved into intercollegiate competitive game play.
Broom's up!
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The Snitch and a member of Middlebury Quidditch proudly hold the banner during the fall World Cup they hosted. (Photo courtesy of Angela Jane Evancie) Click on the photo to view a multimedia of how Quidditch is played |
“Other people have played Quidditch before with different rules here and there,” says junior Alex Benepe who is presently organizer of the nationwide Quidditch league. “But mostly we’re the first ones to try and get all the other schools playing by the same rules, so we can play against each other.”
Since its conception, the club has passed down from Manshel’s hands to Benepe.
“I’ve definitely pulled a lot of all-nighters and skipped a lot of classes in the name of Quidditch,” Benepe says.
Quidditch started as simply a dorm sport. It was something to do on Sundays, which are traditionally homework days. It broke up the monotony of the day, he says.
When the club first started, it was only 30 people. Today, the club has become an intercollegiate sport, and Middlebury alone sports 400 members, he says. Middlebury hosted a Quidditch World Cup this past fall and ventured on a weeklong spring break tour to play and spread the word about the club.
“It was a combination of teaching and playing,” Benepe says. “We made all the teams these shield banners with their schools colors on it as a gift to them. It was sort of like a promise that they’ll come to our World Cup.”
Middlebury won’t have trouble recruiting schools to come play the sport next fall. There are already 130 colleges around the country that play by the rules adapted by Manshel and Benepe, he says.
“It’s completely student-run,” Benepe says. “Technically we have a faculty adviser, but that’s just on paper. There’s a lot of faculty that help us out a lot, but they don’t organize anything.”
The students fund 70 percent of the whole operation, which they finance by various forms of fundraising. And supporting their sport is no cheap task. The World Cup cost $5000-$6000 and their spring break tour cost $2000. The club supplies all the lacrosse goggles worn during the games as well as the costly brooms purchased from alivans.com.
“We supply the brooms,” Benepe says. “It’s not BYOB (bring your own broom)”
Each team is given a $40 stipend to pay for uniforms, which consists of merely a cape and whatever else they choose to adorn themselves with, Benepe says.
“There’s one team called the Mollywobbles, which is Arthur Weasley’s pet name for his wife,” Benepe says. “They were sorta like housewives so their capes are checkered apron material.”
Freshman Shannon Engelman’s team modeled its uniforms after characters introduced in the third book: “The Prisoners of Azkaban.”
“For the World Cup, a team from my hallway decided to be the ‘Prisoners of Azkaban,’ she says. “Our uniforms were, from shoes up: black athletic pants of some sort, white tee with bars spray-painted across them (resembling an inmate uniform), and a black cape that had a serial number and ‘Property of Azkaban’ spray painted on the back. “
“The sport isn’t about being a Harry Potter nerd, but just for fun we make a lot of the teams have this tradition of doing puns on Harry Potter terms,” Benepe says.
Popular Potter
In the books, there are seven players on each team: A keeper, who guards the goals which are actually vertical hoops off the ground: two beaters, who beat the possessed bludger balls at members of the opposing team to distract them: three chasers whose sole purpose is to score and a seeker who tries to catch the snitch, a golden ball with wings that scoots around the pitch. Once the snitch is caught, the game is over.
All of this is performed on magical broomsticks.
“I've read all the books, and unfortunately I'm guilty of making occasional Harry Potter jokes and puns at all our games,” sophomore and seeker Chris Free says . “The cool thing is that the club is in no way composed of ‘Harry Potter nerds.’ We've all read the books and are as much a fan as the next person, but I think Quidditch is more the result of our creativity than of an obsession.”
No doubt, the club’s popularity has exploded this year. With 12 teams on campus accounting for only 150 of the members of the club, the room for growth is exponential, Benepe says.
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The snitch being chased by a seeker during the World Cup. The job of the seeker is to catch the snitch. Once the snitch is caught, the game is over. |
The members of the club all point to one reason why Quidditch is so fashionable – because it is ridiculous to watch and to play, he says.
“College kids generally take themselves too seriously and Quidditch provides us the chance to let go and have some raw and innocent fun,” Free says. “You can't play or watch Quidditch without laughing and having a good time because it is absolutely ridiculous.”
Engelman adds: “I mean c’mon, we’re playing a fictional game and running around with brooms between our legs.”
Freshman Donny Dickson is the second-string snitch and agrees that it is the silliness of the entire game which is so attractive.
“The way in which we play, with brooms between the legs, and with a human snitch, is unlike anything else,” he says. “It is fun seeing people maneuver with the handicap of impeded motion, and the antics of the snitch.”
Engelman, who plays the position of the beater, says the best part of the game is all the snitch stunts.
“We’ve had the snitch come back to the field in a truck, on a unicycle, or even running back with a box of bagels in his hand that he bought while we were playing,” she says. “The stunts make every game unique and the crowds love them.”
Golden opportunity
“I think with each year you're going to have more and more people whose lives have really been inundated with Harry Potter from an early age so there's going to be more people into this as the years go by,” Benepe says.
Starting a Quidditch team is simple. First a coordinator needs to be delegated at the school. Then the coordinator just e-mails the school’s information to Benepe, and he will put the information on the official roster, he says.
The roster is sent out to all the schools who participate so they know who is in their region to set-up games. A girl from Louisiana State Universtiy even made a Google map showing where every participating school in the nation is, he says.
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Alex Benepe patrols the pitch during the World Cup. He organized the entire event and spent the whole day dressed to the nines in a top hat. (Photo courtesy of Angela Jane Evancie) |
In the 40-page rulebook, which is prefaced with a forward written by Benepe proclaiming that “Quidditch is more than just a game; it is an attempt to reclaim the fun that used to accompany sports,” there are also tips to starting the club sport.
The rulebook states that to start a club, “the number one thing you need is people.”
Even as the sport grows and there are attempts to make it a legitimate intercollegiate sport, Benepe hopes it will never be taken too seriously.
“While I want Quidditch to be legitimate and taken seriously, at the same time I don’t want it to be too serious,” Benepe says. “I think the strength of it is it’s almost like a parody of other sports. It’s all about playing the game. When it gets to the point where teams are practicing for the sake of competition, I think it’s crossing the line a little bit.”
Dickson agrees.
“Don't knock it until you try it,” he says. “The main aim of what we do is to have fun. We know we look silly, and we think that's hilarious.”