Terrestrial Quidditch for Muggles

On Oct. 16, history was made on the Quidditch pitch at Carleton College: For the first time ever, the team that captured the Snitch lost the match. In a battle of dormitory floors, 4th Burton had amassed 60 points on goals before 3rd Goodhue secured the tennis-ball-in-a-black-sock, ending the game but leaving the goal-less 3rd Goodhue side 10 points shy of victory.

"Yaaay," Maurice Chen, a senior from Brooklyn and 4th Burton's "seeker," exclaimed moments after he had shouted "Damn you, Snitch Runner!" in exhausted exasperation.

No matter the score, the earthbound Muggle (non-wizard) version of the "Harry Potter" game, a rough-and-tumble amalgam of dodgeball, rugby and hide-and-go-seek, is every bit as spirited and spunky as the three-dimensional Hogwarts rendition.

"It is a blast," said Tyler BoddySpargo, a freshman from Friendship, Wis. "When I first heard about it, I thought it was going to be amazing. And playing it is even more awesome than I expected. They made it work without the magic, absolutely."

The magic has enraptured BoddySpargo's generation. Worldwide sales of the seven "Harry Potter" books surpassed 400 million in June, and the five movies have earned a cumulative $4.5 billion worldwide. But last time Carleton students checked, the Recreation Center's inventory did not include a flying, mind-of-its-own golden Snitch nor levitating brooms. So this past spring, a couple of students at the Northfield college took matters into their own wands, er, hands.

"My friend Jimmy Dreese had a friend at Middlebury [Vermont] College," said Brianne Wooldridge, a junior from Hill City, S.D. "and he noticed on her Facebook page that she was doing Quidditch, so he checked into it. Then we decided to make it a campus-wide event, and we had seven teams show up."

The turnout for the games prompted Mikki Showers, director of recreational sports, to approve Quidditch as an intramural sport, with Wooldridge serving as "czar." Carleton now is one of about 100 colleges with active Quidditch programs, joining the likes of Princeton, Vassar and Grinnell College in Iowa.

During the first set of games in the spring, one of the Carleton teams strived especially hard for verisimilitude. "We had some players come out in cloaks like in the books," said Wooldridge, "but they found after about 10 minutes they got really, really hot."

Now the coed teams dress in (semi-)matching T-shirts, part of an overall practical-Midwestern approach that's far different from their peers at Middlebury. That Vermont school has an "authentic" Quidditch oval where no other activities are allowed, sponsors the game at the club level and even hosts an intercollegiate tournament. At Carleton, the teams represent dormitory floors, the field is rectangular, and the rule book is four pages long, compared with Middlebury's 20.

"We just went with the stuff the players really need to know" said Wooldridge, who refereed this fall's first weekend of games to teach the players how to police themselves. "We also toned it down a bit. In their rules you could throw the ball at people's heads and tackle them around the neck. We're like, well, Carleton's very competitive and somebody's gonna get really hurt. So our rules are, like, nothing above the shoulders."

Still, the games get quite physical. "We fight a lot," said Lingerr Senghor, a sophomore from Gambia. Terrestrial Quidditch is a full-contact sport replete with bumping and grabbing and kicking and tackling. "The rules are funny," said Jolene Walter, a freshman from San Diego. "It's like, 'No scratching -- but you can take somebody out.'

"But the great thing is, you can just play games. The only thing you have to practice is growling. Rrroww!!"

Many of the rules are the same as in the books. The games begin with the command "Brooms down, eyes closed," followed by the snitch taking off, a long pause, the command "Heads up, brooms up" and a sprint for the balls. There are seven players per side, including a keeper (goalie) and a total of five chasers (who try to score goals with a Quaffle/volleyball) and chasers (who try to temporarily sideline opponents with a Bludger/kickball). Players who get hit must run around the goal, the rough equivalent of falling off and remounting a broom.

The seventh player is a seeker, who goes off in search of the Snitch Runner. These participants basically can meander anywhere on campus except inside buildings, although the Snitch Runner must come back within sight of the other players every 7 1/2 minutes.

But there are major differences between the Carleton and J.K. Rowling versions, starting with scoring. Capturing the snitch merits 50 points rather than the books' 150. "We did that because it makes what these guys are doing out here [on the pitch] more important," said Wooldridge. "We figured that would bring more people in, because otherwise it would be, well, if I'm not going to be the seeker, what's the point?"

Then there's the equipment, starting with the balls and the goals: three Hula-Hoops attached to the top of pipes. The brooms are actually plastic broomball sticks, and though they cannot airlift the players, all hands must keep the stick between their legs as they run around. Which can lead to a bit of, uh, chafing. "One day some of the women were, like, this kind of hurts," said Wooldridge. "The guys don't like to talk about that part of their body."

The Carleton Muggles also have a 30-minute limit rather than an open-ended game, an important consideration given that the Snitch Runner spends the entire time running.

"I didn't hide very well. We're still working out the strategies," said Kevin Hallman, a freshman from Oak Park, Ill., who already had participated in swim-team practice and would be playing in the evening's second Quidditch match. "I took the bad plan of trying to run through the Arboretum, and got a lot of thistles.

"If I could fly, it would make my job a lot easier."

Bill Ward • 612-673-7643