Confessions of a Quidditch Player

I never played organized sports as a kid. Not really. I suppose you could count gym class and some catch and stickball with my Dad and sister, but that's about as far as it went. I have one trophy from my first eighteen years and it's for choir. Yeah, I'm that girl. I played intramural soccer and volleyball in high school, but that was more of a joke than anything. Sometime during college, I got it into my head that I was going to play on the softball team, but one introductory meeting later I realized I couldn't make the time commitment. After college I studied martial arts, but team sports were still definitely missing from my resume.

Last weekend I saw Whip It, the roller derby movie starring Ellen Page. It's a fun movie, perhaps a bit long and formulaic at points, but still a rollicking good time. It made me want to join a roller derby team, and I was heartened by the portrayal of players who were still rolling at my age. I probably won't join a team since I work so damn much (and if I find something else to take me away from writing, my head might explode). But still, that sense of camaraderie and girl power and ass-kicking fun is so tempting. Driving home from the movie, it occurred to me that I had participated in some similar ass-kicking fun.

I've played Quidditch.

Readers of the Harry Potter series and viewers of the movie will at present protest that Quidditch is a magical sport, impossible for Muggles, impossible without brooms, enchanted bludgers, and the golden snitch. Magical Quidditch is indeed impossible, but Muggles have come up with ways to play it (yes, there are multiple versions) and I have had the honor to play four times. Each time I played it was while attending a Harry Potter convention. The first was in Orlando about six or seven years ago when we were still working out how to play Quidditch. We played inside the hotel in a ballroom. On this occasion, I didn't play on a team, per se; I was a snitch-carrier. Since our snitches didn't fly, we had to run with them while the seekers chased us. There were a few snitch carriers and we carried either decoy snitches or the real deal.

A few years later, I played Water Quidditch at the Harry Potter convention in Las Vegas. My team was The Giant Squids (we called ourselves the "Squiddies") and we played and practiced in the gorgeous pool at the hotel. I was a beater on this team, but I substituted as a keeper for one of our games. I liked Water Quidditch a lot, but my favorite kind of Quidditch is Mud Quidditch.

It was October of 2005, in Salem, Massachusetts. The Saturday of the Quidditch tournament dawned gray and chilly. All of the teams in the tournament met at the House of the Seven Gables for a special breakfast. My team: the Punctuation Pixies. Our logo features a tough-as-nails pixie giving y'all the finger (the British version). We had met the previous day in person for practice and strategizing, but we'd all met months ahead of time on the interwebs. All of us are writers and/or artists so the physical part of the game was not our strong suit. Where we owned was in the attitude.

For some reason, the Pixies had a reputation as a badass team right off the bat, even though all of our people were nerds and dorks. We probably had one real athlete on the team, but there we were, with a huge cheering section. Our fans screamed the loudest and threw glitter on us as we took the field. We chanted "Mud and Blood" to get psyched up before our matches, and when people took our picture we gave 'em the finger (the British version). The rain that came down even before we started the tournament couldn't dampen our amazing pixie-ness. Or maybe it was just the sugar; we chugged pixie sticks throughout the game. We played our little dork hearts out. We played in the mud as hard as we could. Did we score? Not a single point. Not once. In either of our games. But we were ebullient anyway. After our final defeat, we dove headfirst into the mud on the pitch and rolled around, laughing and screaming and having an awesome time.

The Fizzing Whizbees ended up winning the Quidditch Cup that day, but guess which team made the front page of the Oracle (the daily paper for the convention) under the headline "MUD AND BLOOD!!" That's right, the Punctuation Pixies scored the place of honor. In addition to that, on the way from the park back to the convention (the tournament was played in a public park nearby) people began stopping us--for our autographs. Yes, the losingest, muddiest team in the tournament signed so many autographs on the way back to the hotel that the mud on our bodies hardened into a cement-like substance. Not only that, but NPR interviewed us as did some local television show. At the leaving breakfast at the end of the convention, the Fizzing Whizbees got the Quidditch Cup, but the Pixies got the most applause.

Two years after that I had the opportunity to play for the Pixies again in New Orleans. We played in a park on the banks of the Mississippi. We lost again, but once again, we didn't care because it was ass-kicking fun.
This is a frame-grab of me playing Quidditch in New Orleans. This was the moment after I made my only save of the day. It's from a video that MTV News shot (I still can't believe they managed to film my only athletic move ever). It's still up on the web, and this is the thumbnail that advertises the story. I think that's pretty cool.

Thousands, probably millions, of kids have played soccer and little league. My team sport? Quidditch. How many people can say that?