<turday, October 28th, Quidditch was officially revived as a club at Carleton with a series of games on the Bald Spot. Quidditch first became an intramural sport on campus in 2010. A few years after that, the Carleton community lost interest in the game.
The founders of the revival, Christopher Jabbarpour ’20 and Anders Bruihler ’20, petitioned CSA for funding to restart the club last spring. Through CSA backing, Jabbarpour and Bruihler were able to buy the hoops, balls and brooms and start recruiting members.
They have begun practice and aspire to compete with other teams soon. At the moment, the team is called “The Night Bus,” after the bus of the same name in Harry Potter, but they are still deliberating on the name. According to the United States Quidditch Association, Quidditch is a sport “with a unique mix of elements from rugby, dodgeball, and tag.” Jabbarpour defines Quidditch as a sport that has been adapted from the Harry Potter books and “brought to the Muggle world.”
According to Jabbarpour, a group of Middlebury students founded the sport of Quidditch and began playing with pipes connected to hula hoops as nets and dormitory cleaning utensils, such as mops and brooms to serve as the brooms that wizards in the Harry Potter series ride.
Soon after its invention, other colleges began playing Quidditch and the International Quidditch Association (IQA) was born. The IQA has created a rule book and all organized Quidditch teams, tournaments and rules and its changes are run through them.
Many of the rules of the sport are very similar to those in the Harry Potter series. There are seven players per team on the field: one keeper or goalie, three chasers or players who try to score with the Quaffle or deflated volleyball, two beaters who throw Bludgers or kickballs at their opponents, aiming to hit players off their broom and a seeker who searches from the Snitch, a non-partisan player who wears yellow and runs around with a tennis ball in a sock velcroed to their pants.
The major difference between Quidditch in the books and on college campuses is that people are not flying on broomsticks, but rather run around with them between their legs. “They serve more as handicaps,” Jabbarpour explained, so that people can only play with one hand. Referees call fouls are on those who grab another player’s brooms and tackle with two arm (although tackling with one arm is allowed). Each game has four to eight referees to watch the plethora of positions. Snitch is the only player that the rules do not apply, to according to the United States Quidditch Association.
At this point, approximately 90 students subscribe to Jabbarpour’s and Bruihler’s email list, and the two hope to recruit new members to the team. According to Bruihler, the level of involvement of these members drastically varies. Some members participate in all possible events, while others come whenever they can. Motives also vary: some members play because of their love for the Harry Potter series, while others play to be active in a competitive sport.
The 20 members of the team hope that the program can become a member of the IQA and participate in games with other institutions, since they are only currently able to practice against one another due to lack of membership and skill. The team hopes to scrimmage with the St. Olaf team in the near future.