The Equipment and The Players

To a first time observer, Quidditch looks like an extremely confusing game. But once you come to know what each ball is for, and the role that each player has, it is extremely straight forward. We will be using this chapter to discuss the balls, and the job of each player.

The Quaffle
Originally made of leather, the Quaffle used to have a leather strap attached to it so the Chasers could catch and throw it one handed, however, with the discovery of Gripping Charms in 1875 the strap became unneccessary. After players started complaining about having to constantly dive towards the ground to retrieve a dropped ball, a second Charm was added; in the instance that the ball is accidently dropped during play, it will fall slower than a regular ball so the chaser is able to pick it up in midair.

The Bludgers
In the early days of Quidditch, these were also known as 'Blooders', flying rocks carved into the shape of a ball. This wasn't very effective because the rocks would chip on the magically reinforced Beaters' bat, leaving little peices of gravel chasing players all over the field for the rest of the game. It was after one such incident in the early 1600's that they started experimenting with different metals. They used lead for awhile, until they discovered that it was too soft, and easily dented and therefore thrown off course. Todays bludgers are traditionally made of Iron and are 10 inches in diameter. They are bewitched to chase players indiscriminately. If left to their own devices they will attack the player closest to them, that is why they have "Beaters" to hit the Bludger as far from their own team as possible.

The Golden Snitch
The Golden Snitch, originally the Golden Snidget (a small peace-loving bird) is about the size of a walnut. The Snidget met Quidditch in 1269 and was used until the middle of the following century, until numbers dropped and the bird was declared an endangered species. Bowman Wright then introduced us to the Golden Snitch which is still used today. It is bewitched to evade capture for as long as possible. The game of Quidditch does not end until the Snitch has been captured. The longest recorded game was in Bodmin Moor in 1884, where the Snitch evaded capture for 6 months. The two teams finally gave up, disgusted with their "Seekers" poor performace.

The Keeper
The Keepers' job is very simple to explain. They are required to stop the "Quaffle" going through one of the three hoops that are placed at either end of the Quidditch Field. While it is usual for the Keeper to stay in the scoring area, they may leave it, but this is only to intimidate or head off a Chaser carrying the Quaffle. The Keeper is not allowed to score.

The Chaser
It is the Chasers job to try and shoot the Quaffle through one of the three hoops that is being guarded by the Keeper. Only one Chaser (the one carrying the Quaffle) can be enter the scoring area at one time. This is to prevent the possibility of two Chasers raming into the Keeper, leaving the goal unguarded.

The Beaters
The Beaters have what could be considered the most fun job in the game. It is their job to protect their fellow team members from the Bludger. They do this with the aid of wooden bats. This position isn't all fun and games tho, while you it's ok for you to aim the Bludger at opposing team members, this position requires alot of strength and excellent balance.

The Seeker
Only the lightest and fastest fliers are selected to be Seekers. This position requires agility, balance, and an excellent eye. Because the capture of the Snitch will usually win the game, it is traditionally the Seeker that get's the worst injuries through Bludger attacks.

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Quidditch Teams of Britain and Ireland

Appleby Arrows
This northern English team was founded in 1612. Its robes are pale blue, emblazoned with a silver arrow. Arrows fans will agree that their team’s most glorious hour was their 1932 defeat of the team who were then the European champions, the Vratsa Vultures, in a match that lasted sixteen days in conditions of dense fog and rain. The club supporters’ old practice of shooting arrows into the air from their wands every time their Chasers scored was banned by the Department of Magical Games and Sports in 1894, when one of these weapons pierced the referee Nugent Potts through the nose. There is traditionally fierce rivalry between the Arrows and the Wimbourne Wasps (see below).

Ballycastle Bats
Northern Ireland’s most celebrated Quidditch team has won the Quidditch League a total of twenty-seven times to date, making it the second most successful in the League’s history. The Bats wear black robes with a scarlet bat across the chest. Their famous mascot Barny the Fruitbat is also well-know as the bad featured in Butterbeer advertisements (Barny says: I’m just batty about Butterbeer!).

Caerphilly Catapults
The Welsh Catapults, formed in 1402, wear vertically striped robes of light green and scarlet. Their distinguished club history includes eighteen League wins and a famous triumph in the European Cup final of 1956, when they defeated the Norwegian Karasjok Kites. The tragic demise of their most famous player, “Dangerous” Dai Llewellyn, who was eaten by a Chimaera while on holiday in Mykonos, Greece, resulted in a day of national mourning for all Welsh witches and wizards. The Dangerous Dai Commemorative Medal is now awarded at the end of each season to the League player who has taken the most exciting and foolhardy risks during a game.

Chudley Cannons
The Chudley Cannons’ glory days may be considered by many to be over, but their devoted fans live in hope of a renaissance. The Cannons have won the League twenty-one times, but the last time they did so was in 1892 and their performance over the last century has been lackluster. The Chudley Cannons wear robes of bright orange emblazoned with a speeding cannon ball and a double “C” in black. The club motto was changed in 1972 from “We shall conquer” to “Let’s all just keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.”

Falmouth Falcons
The Falcons wear dark-grey and white robes with a falcon-head emblem across the chest. The Falcons are known for had play, a reputation consolidated by their world-famous Beaters, Kevin and Karl Broadmoor, who played for the club from 1958 to 1969 and whose antics resulted in no fewer than fourteen suspensions from the Department of Magical Games and Sports. Club motto: “Let us win, but if we cannot win, let us break a few heads.”

Holyhead Harpies
The Holyhead Harpies is a very old Welsh club (founded 1203), unique among Quidditch teams around the world because it has only ever hired witches. Harpy robes are dark green with a golden talon upon the chest. The Harpies’ defeat of the Heidelberg Harriers in 1953 is widely agreed to have been one of the finest Quidditch games ever seen. Fought over a seven-day period, the game was brought to an end by a spectacular capture by the Harpy Seeker Glynnis Griffiths. The Harriers’ Captain Rudolf Brand famously dismounted from his broom at the end of the match and proposed marriage to his opposite number, Gwendolyn Morgan, who concussed him with her Cleansweep Five.

Kenmare Kestrels
This Irish side was founded in 1291 and is popular worldwide for the spirited displays of their leprechaun mascots and accomplished harp playing of their supporters. The Kestrels wear emerald-green robes with two yellow “K”s back to back on the chest. Darren O’Hare, Kestrel Keeper 1947-60, captained the Irish National Team three times and is credited with the invention of the Chaser Hawkshead Attacking Formation.

Montrose Magpies
The Magpies are the most successful team in the history of the British and Irish League, which they have won thirty-two times. Twice European Champions, the Magpies have fans across the globe. Their many outstanding players include the Seeker Eunice Murray (died 1942), who once petitioned for a “faster Snitch because this is just too easy,” and Hamish MacFarlan (Captain 1957-68), who followed his successful Quidditch career with an equally illustrious period as head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports. The Magpies wear black with one magpie on the chest and another on the back.

Pride of Portree
This team comes from the Isle of Skye, where it was founded in 1292. The “Prides,” as they are known to their fans, wear deep-purple robes with a gold star on the chest. Their most famous Chaser, Catriona McCormack, captained the team to two League wins in the 1960s and played for Scotland thirty-six times. Her daughter Meaghan Currently plays Keeper for the team. (Her son Kirley is lead guitarist with the popular wizarding band The Weird Sisters.)

Puddlemere United
Founded in 1163, Puddlemere United is the oldest team in the League. Puddlemere has twenty-two League wins and two European Cup triumphs to its credit. Its team anthem “Beat Back Those Bludgers, Boys, and Chuck That Quaffle Here” was recently recorded by the singing sorceress Celestina Warbeck to raise funds for St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries. Puddlemere players wear navy-blue robes bearing the club emblem of two crossed golden bulrushes.

Tutshill Tornados
The Tornados wear sky-blue robes with a double “T” in dark blue on the chest and back. Founded in 1520, the Tornados enjoyed their greatest period of success in the early twentieth century when, captained by Seeker Roderick Plumpton, they won the League Cup five times in a row, a British and Irish record. Roderick Plumpton played Seeker for England twenty-two times and holds the British record for fastest capture of a Snitch during a game (three and a half seconds, against Caerphilly Catapults, 1921).

Wigtown Wanderers
This Borders club was founded in 1422 by the seven offspring of a wizarding butcher named Walter Parkin. The four brothers and three sisters were by all accounts a formidable team who rarely lost a match, partly, it is said, because of the intimidation felt by opposing teams at the sight of Walter standing on the sidelines with a wand in one had and a meat cleaver in the other. A Parkin descendant has often been found on the Wigtown team over the centuries and in tribute to their orgins, the players wear blood-red robes with a silver meat cleaver upon the chest.

Wimbourne Wasps
The Wimbourne Wasps wear horizontally striped robes of yellow and black with a wasp upon their chests. Founded in 1312, the Wasps have been eighteen times League winners and twice semifinalists in the European Cup. They are alleged to have taken their name from a nasty incident which occurred during a match against the Appleby Arrows in the mid-seventeenth century, when a Beater flying past a tree on the edge of the pitch noticed a wasps’ nest among the branches and batted it toward the Arrows’ Seeker, who was so badly stung that he had to retire from the game. Wimbourne won and thereafter adopted the wasp as their lucky emblem. Wasp fans (also known as “Stingers”) traditionally buzz loudly to distract opposing Chasers when they are taking penalties.

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The Spread of Quidditch Worldwide

Europe
Quidditch was well established in Ireland by the fourteenth century, as proved by Zacharias Mumps’s account of a match in 1385: “A team of “Warlocks from Cork flew over for a game in Lancashire and did offend the locals by beating their heroes soundly. The Irishmen knew tricks with the Quaffle that had not been seen in Lancashire before and had to flee the village for fear of their lives when the crowd drew out their wands and gave chase.”

Diverse sources show that the game had spread into other parts of Europe by the early fifteenth century. We know that Norway was and early convert to the came (could Goodwin Kneen’s cousin Olaf have introduced the game there?) because of the verse written by the poet Ingolfr the Iambic in the early 1400s:

The year 1473 saw the first ever Quidditch World Cup, though the nations represented were all European. The nonappearance of teams from more distant nations may be put down to the collapse of owls bearing letters of invitation, the reluctance of those invited to take such a long and perilous journey, or perhaps the simple preference for staying at home.

The final between Transylvania and Flanders has gone down in history as the most violent of all time and many of the fouls then recorded had never been seen before—for instance, the transfiguration of a Chaser into a polecat, the attempted decapitation of a Keeper with a broadsword, and the release, from under the robes of the Transylvanian captain, of a hundred blood-sucking vampire bats.

The World Cup has since been held every four years, though it was not until the seventeenth century that non European teams turned up to compete. In 1652 the European Cup was established and it has been played every three years since.

Of the many superb European teams, perhaps the Bulgarian Vratsa Vultures is most renowned. Seven times European Cup winners, the Vratsa Vultures are undoubtedly one of the most thrilling teams in the world to watch, pioneers of the long goal (shooting from well outside the scoring area), and are always willing to give new players a chance to make a name for themselves.

In France the frequent League winners the Quiberon Quafflepunchers are famed for their flamboyant play as much as or their shocking-pink robes. In Germany we find the Heidelberg Harriers, the team that the Irish Captain Darren O’Hare once famously said was “fiercer than a dragon and twice as clever.” Luxembourg, always a strong Quidditch nation, has given us the Bigonville Bombers, celebrated for their offensive strategies and always among the top goal-scorers. The Portuguese team Braga Broomfleet have recently broken through into the top levels of the sport with their groundbreaking Beater-marking system; and the Polish Grodzisk Goblins gave us arguable the world’s most innovative Seeker, Josef Wronski.

Australia and New Zealand
Quidditch was introduced to New Zealand some time in the seventeenth century, allegedly by a team of European herbologists who had gone on an expedition there to research magical plants and fungi. We are told that after a long day’s toil collecting samples, these witches and wizards let off steam by playing Quidditch under the bemused gaze of the local magical community. The New Zealand Ministry of Magic has certainly spent much time and money preventing Muggles getting hold of Maori art of that period which clearly depicts white wizards playing Quidditch (these carvings and paintings are now on display at the Ministry of Magic in Wellington).

The spread of Quidditch to Australia is believed to have occurred some time in the eighteenth century. Australia may be said to be an ideal Quidditch-playing territory given the great expanses of uninhabited outback where Quidditch pitches may be established.

Antipodean teams have always thrilled European crowds with their speed and showmanship. Among the best are the Moutohora Macaws (New Zealand), with their famous red, yellow, and blue robes, and their phoenix mascot Sparky. The Thundelarra Thunderers and the Woollongong Warriors have dominated the Australian League for the best part of a century. Their enmity is legendary among the Australian magical community, so much so that a popular response to a unlikely claim or boast is “yeah, and I thing I’ll volunteer to ref the next Thunderer-Warrior game.

Africa
The broomstick was probably introduced to the African continent by European wizards and witches traveling there in search of information on alchemy and astronomy, subjects in which African wizards have always been particularly skilled. Though not yet as widely played as in Europe, Quidditch is becoming increasingly popular throughout the African continent.

Uganda in particular is emerging as a keen Quidditch-playing nation. Their most notable club, the Patonga Proudsticks, held the Montrose Magpies to a draw in 1986 to the astonishment of the Quidditch playing world. Six Proudstick players recently represented Uganda in the Quidditch World Cup, the highest number of fliers from a single team ever united on a national side. Other African teams of note include the Tchamba Charmers (Togo), masters of the reverse pass; the Gimbi Giant-Slayers (Ethiopia), twice winners of the All-Africa Cup; and the Sumbawanga Sunrays (Tanzania), a highly popular team whose formation looping has delighted crowds across the world.

North America
Quidditch reached the North American continent in the early seventeenth century, although it was slow to take hold there owing to the great intensity of anti-wizarding feeling unfortunately exported from Europe at the same time. The great caution exercised by wizard settlers, many of whom had hoped to find less prejudice in the New World, tended to restrict the growth of the game in its early days.

In later times, however, Canada has given us three of the most accomplished Quidditch teams in the world: the Moose Jaw Meteorites, the Haileybury Hammers, and the Stonewall Stormers. The Meteorites were threatened with disbandment in the 1970s owing to their persistent practice of performing post-match victory flights over neighbouring towns and villages while trailing fiery sparks from their broom tails. The team now confines this tradition to the pitch at the end of each match and Meteorite games consequently remain a great wizarding tourist attraction.

The United States has not produced as many world-class Quidditch teams as other nations because the game has had to compete with the American broom game Quodpot. A variant of Quidditch, Quodpot was invented by the eighteenth-century wizard Abraham Peasegood, who had brought a Quaffle with him from the old country and intended to recruit a Quidditch team. The story goes that Peasegood’s Quaffle had inadvertently come in contact with the tip of his wand in his trunk, so that when he finally took it out and began to throw it around in a casual manner, it exploded in his face. Peasegood, whose sense of humour appears to have been robust, promptly set out to recreate the effect on a series of leather balls and soon all thought of Quidditch was forgotten as he and his friends developed a game which centered on the explosive properties of the newly renamed “Quod.”

There are eleven players a side in the game of Quodpot. They throw the Quod, or modified Quaffle, from team member to member, attempting to get it into the “pot” at the end of the pitch before it explodes. Any player in possession of the Quod when it explodes must leave the pitch. Once the Quod is safely in the “pot” (a small cauldron containing a solution which will prevent the Quod exploding), the scorer’s team is awarded a point and a new Quod is brought on to the pitch. Quodpot had some success as a minority sport in Europe, though the vast majority of wizards remain faithful to Quidditch.

The rival charms of Quodpot notwithstanding, Quidditch is gaining popularity in the United States. Two teams have recently broken through at international level: the Sweetwater All-Stars from Texas, who gained a well-deserved win over the Quiberon Quafflepunchers in 1993 after a thrilling five-day match; and the Fitchburg Finches from Massachusetts, who have now won the US League seven times and whose Seeker, Maximus Brankovitch III, has captained America at the last two World Cups.

South America
Quidditch is played throughout South America, though the game must compete with the popular Quodpot here as in the North. Argentina and Brazil Both reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup in the last century. Undoubtedly the most skilled Quidditch nation in South America is Peru, which is tipped to become the first Latin World Cup winner within ten years. Peruvian warlocks are believed to have had their first exposure to Quidditch from European wizards sent by the International Confederation to monitor the numbers of Vipertooths (Peru’s native dragon). Quidditch has become a veritable obsession of the wizard community there since that time, and their most famous team, the Tarapoto Tree-Skimmers, recently toured Europe to great acclaim.

Asia
Quidditch has never achieved great popularity in the East, as the flying broomstick is a rarity in countries where the carpet is still the preferred mode of travel. The Ministries of Magic in countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and Mongolia, all of whom maintain a flourishing trade in flying carpets, regard Quidditch with some suspicion, though the sport does have some fans among witches and wizards on the street.

The exception to this general rule is Japan, where Quidditch has been gaining steadily in popularity over the last century. The most successful Japanese team, the Toyohashi Tengu, narrowly missed a win over Lithuania’s Gorodok Gargoyles in 1994. The Japanese practice of ceremonially setting fie to their brooms in case of defeat is, however, frowned upon by the International Confederation of Wizards’ Quidditch Committee as being a waste of good wood.

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