Schools
Chestnut Hill College and Quidditch: An Interesting Pair
The college hosted the second annual Brotherly Love Cup, a Quidditch tournament, on Sunday.
Muggle Quidditch is the ground adaptation of the magical sport in J.K Rowling’s popular series Harry Potter. (In the books muggles are non-magic folk).
Xander Manshel, a student of Middlebury College in Vermont, adapted the game for muggles in 2005. Since then it has really taken off, no pun intended. Alex Benepe, a friend and classmate of Xander, assisted in creating the game. He is now the Commissioner of Quidditch and the CEO of the International Quidditch Association, a non-profit dedicated to “promoting the sport of Quidditch and inspiring young people to lead physically active and socially engaged lives.”
In the novels, Quidditch is played in the air on brooms. The object of the game is to get the quaffle into a hoop for points. The art of flying on brooms has unfortunately not been perfected…yet, so in muggle Quidditch players are required to keep a broom between their legs at all times.
Find out what's happening in Chestnut Hill-Mt. Airywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
There are four positions chaser, beater, seeker and keeper. The chasers, three for each team, are the scorers. The beaters, two for each team, throw bludgers, dodgeballs for muggles, at opposing chasers to disrupt the game. The seeker, one per team, is required to catch the coveted golden snitch. The snitch is a person dressed in all yellow with a tennis ball in a sock hanging out of the back of their shorts. When the snitch is caught, the game ends. For a full explanation of the rules visit the IQA website.
has been playing Quidditch since the spring of 2008 when the Chestnut Hill Activities Team introduced it. Max Kaplan, class of 2011 and CHC Quidditch Commissioner, remembers it was no easy task.
Find out what's happening in Chestnut Hill-Mt. Airywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“At that point barely anyone outside the existing ten or so quidditch schools had heard of the sport's college adaptation, so warming college kids up to the idea was both exciting and terrifying.”
Kaplan, now the PR director of the IQA, can’t believe how far it has come. “Had you told me in 2008 that, almost four years later, we'd be making Inquirer headlines, I'd probably laugh and say ‘You silly muggle.’"
