NEW: Quidditch Tournament Coming to Rhode Island
Thursday, September 13, 2012
No Harry Potter here: The real-life version of Quidditch is coming to Rhode Island in November. Photo: Wikipedia.
The International Quidditch Association has announced that the 2012 Northeast Regional Tournament will be held in Newport, at Fort Adams State Park, on November 17-18.
And this is no Harry Potter movie… real-life Quidditch is a fun, fast-paced game that has its origins in the widely read series of books and blockbuster films. But the games separate at the fantasy line… fundamentally, the flying broomstick line.
Quidditch on the ground
Sprung from the imagination of students at Middlebury College in Vermont, a non-flying version of the game took hold in 2005 and has grown to the point of the Association now being comprised of more than 1,000 teams and prospective teams from more than 13 countries. The game is played at more than 300 universities, according to the International Quidditch Association.
Here in Rhode Island, the University of Rhode Island Quidditch Club was instrumental in luring the event to the state, after there was concern at the national level about a planned tournament in Boston.
How it's played
In real-world Quidditch, also called Muggle Quidditch (muggles are Harry Potter author JK Rowling's terms for non-wizardly humans), teams of seven players compete on a field roughly the size of a hockey rink, carrying a medium-sized ball (the quaffle), and avoiding dodge balls (bludgers). In a nod to the origin of the game, all players are required to carry a broom between their legs.
The snitch, which any Harry Potter fan would recognize as the magically endowed globe that every Quidditch player seeks, is a tennis ball contained in a sock tucked in the waistband of the snitch runner.
November's Regional Tournament will be a qualifier for the Quidditch World Cup in April 2013. For more information on the tournament, go here and follow updates on Facebook.
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