The Keller High School Quidditch club in Texas is attempting to designate Quidditch as an official high school sport. Yes, the sport created by J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter novels.
The club, which boasts 80 members and four teams – named after the houses of Hogwarts – are hoping to have the sport sanctioned by the University Interscholastic League (UIL), making it the fourteenth official high school sport. This is also a recognition sports like gymnastics, water polo and lacrosse are attempting to receive.
“People don’t really grasp that it’s a legit sport,” co-founder of the club, Brooklyn George, said, “But, everybody thinks, especially at Keller High School, that it’s really cool.”
The game also is a great addition to the roster of sports because as co-founder of the club Kati Polaski said, Quidditch is “getting people who may not have played sports before to play sports and be physically active.”
For Keller High, the game of Quidditch is much the same for Muggles as it is in the Wizarding World. Just without the flying. But, players do still have to “ride” a broom, which means they only handle the ball with one hand. They use quaffles and bludgers and even a golden snitch. But this snitch is a bit different than flying golden-winged ball. “Our snitch is a person running around in all gold with a tennis ball in a sock tucked into a flag-football belt,” Kati explained.
The UIL has yet to make a decision on the designation of Quidditch as a school sport, but if it is accepted, Texas would become the first state that allowed Quidditch the recognition. The members of the club are creating a petition to show to the UIL, hoping to get people from at least 200 Texas schools to sign.
Quidditch for Muggles, however, is not necessarily a new concept. Since 2005 when two students from Middlebury College in Vermont first introduced the magical sport as Muggle-friendly, many other colleges and high schools have been playing. There is even a Quidditch World Cup, which last year was a competition between 60 teams and held in NYC, and an International Quidditch Assocation which cites colleges like Emerson, Johns Hopkins, Vassar, Tufts, Harvard, Arizona State and many others are official members.