Even International Quidditch Has a Concussion Problem
Mother Jones
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If you want to make it as a snitch in the fast-growing sport of Muggle Quidditch, there are a few simple rules to live by. Keep the two people with yellow headbands in your sight at all times. Call fouls when you see them. Don’t let your showboating get in the way of your performance. And keep your booty shaking. “You gotta do a little duck waddle—stick your butt out,” advises Austin Nuckols, a lanky University of Richmond student with curly hair in a Spiderman-inspired Quidditch jersey. “That’s right, get a little twerk going,” he says. “Work on your twerk!”
Nuckols in offering a tutorial in snitching in a back room at a convention center in downtown DC for the second day of the third annual QuidCon, the only convention focused on the nuts and bolts of starting or managing a Quidditch team. Conceived eight years ago by a small group of students at Middlebury College in Vermont, the International Quidditch Association now boasts 225 official teams in at least 13 countries, in addition to wheelchair Quidditch and several varieties of “kidditch.” Even as the Harry Potter books and movies that first popularized it fade from view, the sport has begun to find its legs.
But like angsty, teenage Harry Potter in book five, competitive Quidditch is finding that its new powers come with some growing pains—in the most literal sense. Muggle Quidditch has a concussion problem.
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