Quidditch gets running start on campus

The Utah State Quidditch Club had its first open practice Saturday on the Quad, just one week after becoming an official school club. The practice session served as an introduction to the game for new players, as well as a way for experienced players to sharpen their skills.

“I came to the training session last year,” said Devon Anderson, a sophomore studying finance. “I really liked it and wanted to keep playing. I guess the initial interest came from liking ‘Harry Potter.’”

Dakota Briggs, a junior studying secondary education, has played quidditch for almost four years. He started when some of his friends invited him to play Seeker in their game. Until the end of the last season, he played for the Utah Crimson Fliers, a team based in Salt Lake City. He decided to start a team up at Utah State because Utah only had one team.

“We need more,” Briggs said. “No one else would do it.”

Briggs wants to get enough players to have an A team and a B team. His long-term visions for the team include having four teams playing at Utah State, working for spots on the travel team.

Quidditch started in 2005 at Middlebury College in Vermont when Xander Manshel and his friends started looking for a way to add some excitement to their normal weekend activities. Over the last nine years, it has gained popularity and the seventh annual World Cup was held in South Carolina this April.

Tya Johnson, a sophomore at Utah State studying history, was introduced to quidditch at Middlebury’s clinics in Ohio with her family. She has the most experience playing Beater, because she “was the only one at the clinics who wasn’t afraid to get hurt.”

Each quidditch team has seven players. Three are chasers; they handle the Quaffle (a deflated volleyball) and work together to get past the keeper, who is basically a goalie, and score through one of three hoops. Each score is worth ten points. Two beaters on each team attempt to temporarily disable opposing players by “beating” them with a “bludger” (really throwing a dodgeball at them, forcing them to run back and touch their team’s hoops). The Seeker’s job is to grab the “Snitch,” an unbiased player who is dressed in yellow and has a tennis ball in a sock hanging from his waist. The game ends when the Snitch is caught, and it is worth thirty points.

“Scoring is fun,” said Christian Ballack, a sophomore studying aviation technology. “It’s kind of like football in another way.”

-olivia.webb@aggiemail.usu.edu
Twitter: @OliviaWebb77