CAMPUS

Quidditch on campus
By Andy Currie
Reporter

For those of you wishing you could shed your Muggle chains and soar in the skies like your favorite student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, take note. A group of magically-minded individuals is taking steps to create a collegiate Quidditch team on the W campus. 

“I first saw this on MTVu,” Julie Roach, senior chemistry major said. “Middlebury University started a Quidditch team and the idea quickly spread throughout the collegiate community. I mentioned the idea to friends and they supported the notion of starting a Quidditch club on campus.”

Roach has completed authorization paperwork, searched for an adviser from the MUW staff and composed a club constitution. A 25-member Facebook group called “MUW Quidditch” has supported these actions. While this group appears to hold more than enough members to solidify an MUW Quidditch team, Roach is still looking for prospective members, freshmen and junior-transfer students especially. 

Although the group is still not officially a recognized campus organization, it has support from both students and staff on the MUW campus.

Asked about the formation of a Quidditch team, junior English major Sarah Crump said, “That sounds awesome.” 

Nicole Aranda, Community Director for North Campus, is supportive of MUW Quidditch and is not surprised that others are as well. 

“It promotes physical activity on campus,” Aranda said. “It makes sense that we’d be for that.”

Quidditch is a game played in the fictional Harry Potter universe, which consists of seven books written by British author J. K. Rowling. In the game, two teams of seven players on flying broomsticks face off in a game that is similar to a mix of rugby and soccer.

Three players on each team act as Chasers, who pass one of Quidditch’s three game balls, the Quaffle, to each other in an effort to throw it through one of their opponent’s goal rings. Each goal scores 10 points for the team. The Keeper on each team is charged with the task of defending the goal rings from opposing Chasers. Two other balls, Bludgers, are enchanted to indiscriminately attack players to distract them from the rest of the game. To combat this, each team has two Beaters, players armed with short bats, who hit the balls away from their own teammates and toward players of the opposing team. The final ball is the Golden Snitch. It is small, fast, and extremely hard to see. This makes the job of the final team member, the Seeker, quite difficult. Seekers are responsible for catching the Snitch, which earns their team 150 points and officially ends a Quidditch match. 

Obviously, several modifications must be made to allow Quidditch play by Muggles, or non-magical people, for the uninitiated. First of all, since people can’t fly on brooms, the action is placed on the ground, but the broom must still be held as if it is being ridden. The Bludgers are dodge balls thrown by the Beaters. When a player is hit by a Bludger, he or she must take a “penalty lap” around the length of the field before re-entering the game. The Snitch is simulated by attaching a tennis ball in a sock to the back of a preferably small and agile runner. This “Snitch Runner” is free to leave the Quidditch field and stay away for as long as he or she sees fit. Also, the tennis ball attached to the runner is what must be caught, not the actual runner.

Despite these somewhat silly rules, Quidditch has actually taken a startling hold on college campuses. Schools as far south as MUW and as far north as Princeton are taking actions to create an inter-collegiate Quidditch league to rival the size and intensity of the more typical college-level clubs and sports. To date, this has culminated in a Quidditch World Cup, held on the Middlebury College campus on Oct. 20.

With the release of at least three movie adaptations of the final two Harry Potter novels in production, the fandom craze popularly known as “Pottermania” is showing no signs of stopping.  Does this mean that Quidditch will soon become as popular as college football? Not even a Seer’s crystal ball can make a certain prediction.

 

The MUW Common Reading Initiative book this year was Rick Bragg’s ‘All over but the Shoutin’.’ Students had the opportunity to compete in an essay contest with topic options about the book. This years winners are: First-Place, Bridget McAdam; Second-Place ,Kristen Barnes; Third-Place, Keslie Brock.

Following is the first-place winners essay:

CRI Essay Contest Winner
Lessons of a Reluctant Carpetbagger
By Bridget McAdam

There was bacon in my potato salad. Horrified, I stared at the odious bit of pink flesh marring my perfect bite of creamy yellow deliciousness. “I hate the South,” I muttered as my fork landed with an unceremonious clatter on my “vegetable plate”. I was a surly thirteen-year-old vegetarian and my family and I were sitting in one of the many “Southern-style”, mom and pop cafes that lined the thirteen-hour route from our home in Dumont, New Jersey to our new house in Suwanee, Georgia. And though I had been born in Richmond, Virginia and would soon come to arrive at what is now my eighth year of living in the south, I couldn’t help but to glance at my fellow café patrons with a mixture of contempt and anger. Contrary to whatever my birth certificate might say, I was and am not a Southerner. Beyond frustrated with my father for uprooting my whole life in the all too pivotal last year of middle school (I was going to miss the eighth grade formal!), the inclusion of pork in a vegetable dish just solidified my feelings on my “new home”. These people sitting around me, talking in an unfamiliar, twangy drawl, and this place that served alien-sounding food (Just what were collard greens? And how was sweet tea any different from regular old iced tea?) were so different from anyone I had ever known or anything I had ever experienced in northern New Jersey. But while I was wallowing in the misery of living in a place that was apparently a vegetarian’s nightmare and wondering whether of not every boy in my new school was going to wear cowboy boots like the man sitting at the next table, I failed to see the tremendous opportunity my father’s transfer had given me. Moving away from the only place I had ever known as home forced me to confront a new way of living and interact with a diverse group of people that would have never entered my small circle of comfortable experience had I never left New Jersey.

By the time we reached the end of what seemed like our insanely long road trip and rolled into “Ruby Gables,” the subdivision we’d now be calling home, I’d been relegated to the third row of our SUV, squished between the family dog and various boxes we couldn’t force into the moving van. Staring glumly out the side window, coolly ignoring the excited chatter of my family, I remember being puzzled by a strange occurrence. As we drove past the endless rows of cookie cutter homes, I’d see people out mowing the lawn or walking their dogs. But these people weren’t acting like any people I’d ever encountered up North. Instead, they did a strange thing as we drove past. Every one of them, from the woman juggling the leashes of her three collies to the man standing dejectedly besides a pathetically smoking lawnmower, raised their hands in greeting.

“Uh, Dad?” I called out wondering what could possibly explain this repeated occurrence. “I think your tire must be flat or something, because all these people are trying to flag us down.”

While I was not in fact addressing her, my younger sister was kind enough to reply with a “They’re waving, you idiot.”

To which I frowned in thought as I continued to watch these strange people go by. If what my sister said was true, why were these people waving at us? They couldn’t know who we were, we hadn’t even moved into our house yet. In New Jersey, we just didn’t walk down the street waving indiscriminately at people we didn’t know. Yet here were all these people acknowledging total strangers with a simple welcoming wave. Little did I know these small bits of unexpected “Southern hospitality” would pop up all throughout my first days in Georgia. On our first night in the house, I stood bewildered at the door when a neighbor brought over a casserole to welcome us to the neighborhood. Later on my first day of school, I meekly chatted with the secretary when she insisted she needed to “get to know me” before handing over my schedule. These were instances that had ever occurred back home. It’s not that everyone up North is selfish or disinterested in other people. The South is just really a different world. People up north aren’t raised with the same expectations of showing unnecessary warmth and kindness to complete strangers. In the South I learned that’s just the way of life down here. It’s a way of getting to know the people you see day in and day out that someone outside of this Southern culture would generally ignore. When I reflect on all the people I’ve come to know and love across the South, it’s something I’m incredibly thankful I was thrown into so unexpectedly that first day.

During my first few days of living in the South, I was not only confronted with a new way of living, but also a new group of people with whom to share that life. After my sister and I spent weeks arguing who would get the bigger room, my family finally settled into our new house which unfortunately coincided with the end of my first dry, Georgia summer and the dreaded first day of school. Almost eight years later, I can still remember the first moment I stepped into my new classroom on that terrifying first day. Like any other teenage girl, I had spent the previous night agonizing over what clothes and shoes would make me look the coolest, while still imparting the great sophistication of my thirteen years. So when I first entered the classroom I did not immediately look at my fellow students, but was instead focusing on flattening the collar of my shirt. Assured that my collar was folded perfectly, I chanced a glance and was stunned. I had never seen so many different people in one room. Now many people may assume that being from the North, I lived in a diverse urban setting. While I spent many years of my adolescence wishing that was true, nothing could be farther from the truth. In my entire town, there was one African-American family and a few Asian families. I spent the first ten years of my life not really knowing a person could be anything other than Catholic or Presbyterian. Yet this classroom was filled with a more diverse group of people than I had encountered in my entire life. Throughout my years in the South I have lived amongst this diverse population. I have gotten to know so many people with different families, different backgrounds, and different experiences and I have learned so much from these differences. It’s an environment that has taught me to respect and treasure the uniqueness our society and it’s something I’d never have learned without leaving home.

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