According to Kennilworthy Whisp’s Quidditch Through the Ages, the popular pastime of witches and wizards was first played in Queerditch Marsh in the eleventh century. This is a known fact thanks to the diary of Gertie Keddle, who regularly expressed her displeasure at “that lot playing a stupid game on their broomsticks” that involved throwing a ball in an attempt “to stick it in trees at the end of the marsh” while “two big heavy rocks fly around trying to knock them all off their brooms.” In Keddle’s mind, it was “pointless rubbish.”
One thousand years later, a different kind of quidditch – one geared towards muggles as opposed to witches and wizards – was first played at Middlebury College in Vermont on October 9, 2005. Players wore painted cardboard arm guards, carried worn-out brooms between their legs, and tried to grab a tennis ball stuffed in a sock that was tucked into the waistband of a cross country runner’s shorts. While there was no twenty-first century Gertie Keddle on hand to capture the moment, the game caught on within the world of muggles just as it had with witches and wizards a millennium earlier.
For the uninitiated, the game of Quidditch appears in the books and films of Harry Potter, a popular-yet-fictional sport that features players flying on broomsticks and a magically enhanced ball with wings the size of a walnut – called the Golden Snitch – that buzzes around the field until caught, ending the game. Amazingly enough, students at Middlebury College found a way to not only transform this fictional pastime into an actual real-world activity but develop it into a nationwide, as well worldwide, sport played by thousands.
In October 2005, Xander Manshel suggested to fellow freshman Alex Benepe that instead of their traditional Sunday afternoon bocce game they give quidditch a try. Benepe was skeptical, but Manshel had already worked out the basic rules and skepticism soon turned into intrigue. That intrigue then became excitement as Manshel’s rules perfectly meshed the magical elements of Harry Potter with the shortcomings of the real world to form a sport that may have been a little bit “goofy” – as Benepe often says – but physically demanding and fun to play nonetheless.
The reason why muggle quidditch – spelled with a small “q” to distinguish it from the Quidditch of Harry Potter – was able to catch on and become the fastest growing collegiate sport a mere ten years later falls squarely on the shoulders of Xander Manshel and Alex Benepe. While others may have previously attempted to adapt Quidditch for the real-world, for instance, the game and rules envisioned by Manshel were the first that actually worked.
It was Benepe, however, who saw the potential of quidditch and with a dash of showmanship – as well as an innate ability to generate media attention – transformed it from a mere quirk at Middlebury into a legitimate outlet at other colleges and universities. Taking over the reins from Manshel in 2006, Benepe then recruited enough players to keep the movement going and even gained coverage of his efforts in The Wall Street Journal the following year.
Alex Benepe’s next feat was to invite a second quidditch club – started by a friend of Xander Manshel at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York – to compete against Middlebury in the first ever World Cup that wasn’t fictional. USA Today covered the event, but Benepe’s master plan had only just begun. “My vision is to get a couple vanloads of Middlebury players,” he told the newspaper. “All of the necessary equipment and snitch runners, and travel to four-to-five colleges in the Northeast and get some games going.”
Alex Benepe submitted his idea to MTVu, which was looking for unique spring break activities to broadcast. MTVu accepted the proposal, and in April 2008 Benepe and seventeen quidditch players from Middlebury College climbed aboard two vans and visited Bard College, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Vassar College, and Amherst College. In addition to MTVu, both ESPN and CBS covered the road trip as well.
The previous articles in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today resulted in sixty schools across the country contacting Alex Benepe and expressing interest in forming their own quidditch clubs. After the coverage from MTVu, ESPN, and CBS, that number jumped to 180. Benepe not only kept the tradition of a World Cup being held at Middlebury College but attending teams jumped from the initial two in 2007 to twelve in 2008 and twenty-two in 2009.
Having by now graduated from Middlebury, Alex Benepe was faced with a dilemma – find a job in the real world or continue to build quidditch into a legitimate college sport. He ultimately decided on the latter, incorporating the International Quidditch Association as a non-profit in 2010 and relocating the World Cup tournament from Middlebury to New York City that same year.
It was a brilliant move as almost every news outlet in the United States covered the event, from student newspapers to the New York Times, the New Yorker to Time magazine, ESPN to CNN, and ABC, CBS, and NBC as well. Forty-six teams from twelve states and one Canadian province participated in the fourth World Cup, proving that quidditch was now a legitimate phenomenon sweeping the country.
Just as Kennilworthy Whisp’s Quidditch Through the Ages outlines the many changes that the Quidditch of witches and wizards went through after its initial appearance in the eleventh century, the same holds true for muggle quidditch. The rise of quidditch teams in Europe, for instance, led to US Quidditch spinning off from the original International Quidditch Association incorporated by Alex Benepe, while the US-based World Cup was likewise renamed the US Quidditch Cup in 2016.
Within the books and films of Harry Potter, meanwhile, Quidditch features both male and female players, a concept that Alex Benepe and the International Quidditch Association believed was important for muggle quidditch to incorporate as well. While the first quidditch teams were co-ed oriented during practice, however, on game day the field primarily consisted of male players. The IQP thus instituted Title 9 ¾, which stated that out of the seven players competing, a minimum of two must be from the opposite gender.
In 2011, the rule was changed from 5-2 to 4-3 but was quickly met with resistance, including from quidditch clubs at all-female colleges. The rule was thus changed again to read “excluding the seeker, a team may not have more than four people who identify as the same gender in play.” By including the word “identify,” quidditch became the first sport to openly embrace gender identity – including non-binary – as part of its official rules.
Muggle quidditch has likewise discovered that it needs to walk the fine line between “sport enthusiasts” – who are drawn to the game based on its physical demands and hybrid combination of soccer, dodgeball, and rugby – and “Harry Potter enthusiasts,” who are attracted to quidditch solely because of Harry Potter.
“Many teams have more people who don’t come to it because of Harry Potter,” former Carnegie Mellon University quidditch captain Emily Anne Gibson explains in the 2015 anthology book Playing Harry Potter. “There are a lot of people who never read the books – who saw people on our campus playing and thought, ‘That looks bizarre and also very awesome and I’d like to be a part of that.’ But I think for everybody in the game, it’s all about team playing. It’s all about loving to play the game. It’s a very intense game so if you just like Harry Potter and don’t develop a love for the game, you’re not going to be around for very long. The majority of it is game play, and when you’re in the game you’re not pretending to be a wizard, you’re not pretending you can fly. You’re playing this game that requires all of your attention and all of your energy.”
From the Quidditch pitch at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to a muddy field at Middlebury College, the Quidditch of Harry Potter has successfully become the quidditch of muggles across the country and around the world. As Kennilworthy Whisp exclaims at the end of Quidditch Through the Ages, “Long may future generations of witches and wizards enjoy the most glorious of sports!”
(In 2022, the quidditch of the real-world officially changed its name to quadball.)
Anthony Letizia