Kaylee Hunkins
Multimedia Director
The favorite sport from the world of Harry Potter comes alive at Keene State College.
Soaring to great heights is KSC campus’s quidditch teams as it hopes to gain more players.
If anyone has every read the books or watched the movies of the Harry Potter, by J.K. Rowling, they may say this is impossible considering the main component of the game is flying on broomsticks.
Quidditch has been transformed for those muggles (non-magical people) that can’t fly and KSC is not the first school to field a team.
According to the International Quidditch Team website the United States alone has a total of 396 teams, while Canada has 35, and United Kingdom has 11.
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New Hampshire has no Quidditch team as of now, but schools like Yale University, the University of Vermont, Boston University, Harvard University, and Middlebury College each have at least one team, if not more.
Captain of Slythendor, Paul Driscoll, helped start KSC’s teams. Driscoll said the game is very action orientated.
“You’r always running up and down the field,” Driscolle said. “A lot of different things can happen and there are a lot of aspects to the game.”
In the Harry Potter series there are four teams Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw.
KSC has three quidditch teams Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slythendor. KSC’s Slythendor team is the combination of Slytherin and Gryffindor. Since there were not enough players, the club decided to combine these two teams.
Currently the players consist of members from KSC’s Harry Potter Club on campus. The Keene State College Quidditch Cup was played on Saturday, Nov. 5 between Hufflepuff and Slythendor.
Captain of Hufflepuff, Nora Gallogly said she originally started playing quidditch with her cousins. Gallogly said she wanted to play quidditch on our campus after she saw other colleges playing.
If you have never read Harry Potter or even if you have, the game is very complex. Gallogly said the game is played with seven players on each team on the field at a time. Each team consists of three chasers, two beaters, a keeper, and a seeker.
The rules of the game follow closely with the rules explained in Harry Potter books, with slight alterations, to make the game possible to play without magic.
The players try to throw a soccer ball through the hoops to score points. The hoops function as goals in Quidditch. Some players go around throwing dodge balls in an attempt to “get out” the other team.
“The chasers are the ones who try to throw the soccer ball through the hoops,” Gallogly said. “The two beaters try to throw the dodgeball at the chasers to get them out.”
“A keeper is the person who blocks the soccer ball from going through the hoops,” Gallogly continued. “The seeker is the person who tries to catch the snitch.”
Gallogly said someone fast, typically a cross-country runner, normally plays the snitch.
Driscoll said every time a soccer ball is thrown through a hoop it is worth 10 points, and if the seeker catches the snitch, it is worth 50 points, unlike in the book, where catching the snitch is worth 150 points.
Driscoll said starting next fall the Quidditch players are hoping to make it a campus-wide club, instead of just the members of the Harry Potter Club.
Driscoll said they are looking to gain more athletes to make it more competitive.
Gallogly said the excitement of the team is what makes the games so much fun.
Gallogly said the game is exciting because it takes a game from a beloved book series, and brings it to life.
“There a lot of Harry Potter fans and they think it’s make believe,” Gallogly said. “But you can turn it into real life, I think that’s the coolest part.”
KSC alumni Briana Mangiaracina said it’s a good way to start a new sport that people love.
“It’s a game that has completely developed out of a best seller book,” Mangiaracina said. “This could hopefully become another sport that is played as familiar as basketball or baseball, it’s a physical sport so essentially it could.”
She also said, “With the rapid growth of it in almost every state and Division I schools playing this sport I think it will progress to something large.”
KSC senior Becca Casey said she went to a tournament at Middlebury College.
“I really had no idea how they were going to play,” Casey said. “It was very interesting to watch.”
The Quidditch World Cup took place Nov. 12-13, on Randall’s Island, in N.Y.C. One hundred teams from around the world participated. The winner of the Quidditch World Cup was Middlebury College, which beatthe Universtiy of Florida, 90-80 and caught the snitch.
For more information and further explanation of Quidditch, go to keene-equinox.com and view the video “KSC Quidditch.”