Too Fun for Fiction

As a rule, it’s fair to say being ambushed by someone hiding in the tree above you is… As a rule, it’s fair to say being ambushed by someone hiding in the tree above you is unexpected.

But this is Quidditch, and you must expect the unexpected.

Sitting on the sidelines of the pitch at last winter’s Quidditch World Cup at Middlebury College in Vermont, Pitt freshman John Battaglia watched as the man in gold sneaked in from the outfield and hid under the cover of a tree.

Well, he thought he hid, anyway.

Seconds later, a seeker who dropped from the tree above flattened him, tackling the gold-clad snitch runner and stealing his tennis ball snitch for 30 points to end the game.

‘It was amazing — the snitch didn’t see it coming,’ said Battaglia, laughing as he recalled some of the pros’ more memorable antics.

The ‘pros,’ for all intents and purposes, are the members of the Middlebury College Quidditch team, the first team to adapt the sport made famous by a bespectacled boy wizard — J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter — to non-magic persons, or ‘muggles.’

It began innocently enough in 2005, with a suggestion tossed around between Middlebury students Xander Manschel and Alex Benepe.

Probably a ‘Ha!-Wouldn’t-it-be-funny-if-we-(insert crazy idea here)?’ kind of a thing.

But then they got brooms.

Brooms are to Quidditch — yes, even muggle Quidditch — what horses are to polo: They are largely uncomfortable, lead to weird inner-thigh bruising and are completely mandatory.

But they also have a bit of magic to them.

When Colleen O’Connor arrived at the Cathedral lawn two Sundays back for her first scrimmage with Battaglia’s newly formed Quidditch squad, it was her broom that got her into the game.

‘It’s funny,’ said O’Connor, ‘I was so confused by how we were playing when John was explaining it, but as soon as I got a broom between my legs and caught the quaffle, it all just made sense.’

Battaglia, the leader of Pitt’s Quidditch team and its resident expert, first learned of the game in high school following the end of his track season.

With the end of the school year, the runners on his track team found themselves bored, in excellent shape and with loads of newfound free time.

They heard about Quidditch teams, by then popping up all over the country at both high school and collegiate levels, and looked up the rules published by Middlebury and the Intercollegiate Quidditch Association.

The association serves as both the educating and regulating body for muggle Quidditch teams, and its rulebook, written by Benepe, adheres to the same principles Rowling outlines in Harry Potter, with a few necessary amendments for the inherent inferiority of muggles.

In action, the sport plays something like a combination of rugby, handball, dodgeball and full-contact spring cleaning.

Two teams of seven competitors mounted on broomsticks compete to get a volleyball-sized ball through one of three of their opponent’s Hula Hoop-sized rings mounted on a 5- to 6-foot-high pole, unless they catch the snitch. But we’ll learn about that later.

Because of the lax regulations on fouling in wizard Quidditch, it’s very difficult to discern who’s done what, what with the players zipping around on brooms hundreds of feet above the field. The rugby-like aspects of the game also apply to every player on the field.

But in the name of safety, Benepe’s rules outline several fouls earning either a yellow wand warning or a red wand suspension, which apply to such shady maneuvers as ‘cape grabbing’ (yellow wand) or ‘assaulting, impeding or any way molesting the snitch’ (flagrant: red wand; questionable: yellow wand).

Similarities to handball come mostly from the three ‘chasers,’ the forwards in the game whose primary goal is to pass and shoot a ball called the ‘quaffle’ through the hoops for 10 points per goal.

Their secondary goal is to keep from getting pegged by ‘bludgers,’ three four-square balls thrown by defensive players called ‘beaters,’ who aim to prevent chasers from scoring.

If hit by a bludger, the chaser is out of the play until he has run around his own team’s goal.

This little chore is meant to account for the amount of time it would take a player in authentic Quidditch to recover after being knocked off his broom and falling to the ground.

There are three bludgers per game and two beaters per team, which means one team always has an advantage, but no team can have a monopoly.

With their different game balls and objective, beaters think of Quidditch as just a big game of dodgeball wherein all of the targets are constantly distracted.

During Pitt’s scrimmage, chasers on the cusp of scoring were beaned in the head, pounded in the stomach and knocked from the side by bludgers, the unlucky chasers rarely remembering that half the field is after them.

The last line of defense from scoring — should a team’s chasers lose possession and beaters fail to knock them out — is the keeper.

The keeper’s job is to protect the goal by swatting the quaffle away from the goal zone, but without breaking the boundary of the goal line with his hands (think basketball — you can’t block a shot by punching a sinking ball up out of the net).

Amid all this is the epic battle of seeker vs. snitch.

It is the seeker’s job to catch the snitch and the snitch’s job to thwart him.

Possibly the most creative circumvention of the whole muggles-can’t-fly conundrum in non-magic Quidditch, the role of the snitch is filled not by a flying ball, but a cross-country runner recruited for just such a purpose.

Broomless, surly, defiant and dressed in gold with a tennis ball-filled sock hanging from his shorts, the association describes the snitch as ‘essentially an asshole whose sole task is to humiliate the seekers.’

According to Benepe’s rules, there is no foul too foul for the snitch. He may taunt, trip, slap (lightly, please) and otherwise tick off the seekers who pursue him, preferably in the most obnoxious, exasperating way possible.

Once, while serving as the snitch with his high school team Ives Pond (so named for the state park in Buffalo where it played), Battaglia decided to up the jerk ante by stopping off at the little league fields next door for a Slurpee.

‘I was standing there in line, dressed entirely in gold, and all of a sudden this little kid comes around the corner and spots me,’ said Battaglia. ‘He looked straight at me and went, ‘There he is!”

Battaglia politely asked the concessionaire to pick up the pace on the Slurpee and made a dash for it just as the seekers tore around the corner after him.

Broomed madmen streaking across the outfield after Battaglia hurdled several fences and disturbed a few little league games, but in the end, the disruptions were justified, given that a snatched snitch propels the seeker’s team forward 30 points and ends the game.

At Pitt, with the main pitch set up on the Cathedral lawn, the snitch’s boundaries range from Bigelow Boulevard and Bellefield Avenue to Forbes and Fifth avenues — plenty of room for the snitch to make a nuisance of himself.

While the rest of the players stay concentrated between the sets of three goals on either side (essentially three Hula Hoops mounted on top of PVC pipes at various heights), the snitch and seeker engage in a battle of the wills anywhere but indoors.

Still growing, Pitt’s team scrimmaged Sunday sans snitch.

Snitch excepted, Battaglia’s efforts during spring break ensured that the team was well outfitted.

He provided brooms, instead of opting for the B.Y.O.B. route suggested in the rulebook, and homemade goals adhering to the regulations put forth by the International Quidditch Association.

The 14 players who came out for Sunday’s match made it clear that intense Harry Pottermania is no way required in order to saddle up your broom and hit the field.

While he admits he is a fan of Rowling’s series, Battaglia said he and the group describe themselves more as ‘fans of nonsensical fun,’ always looking to add to their numbers.