SLU again playing in Quidditch World Cup

CANTON — Move over, soccer; there's another World Cup in town.

The Quidditch World Cup is being played this weekend in New York City and a team of beaters, chasers, keepers and a snitch from St. Lawrence University are going.

Quidditch — the popular wizarding sport from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels — is no longer an imaginary game. Colleges around the globe have started playing it, adapting it to be played without flying or wands.

"It is a full contact sport and you have to run with a broom between your legs," said senior Leah S. Farrar, a member of St. Lawrence's team. "We're fairly confident we'll get through to day two, but we'll see. We could be surprised."

The games began Saturday, with each team in a bracket against three other schools. The top 24 teams from those matches were to go on to the second day of the competition, which were to be sudden death rounds. There are about 60 teams from around the U.S. and Canada slated to play.

This will be the fourth year the Quidditch World Cup will be played and the second year St. Lawrence will attend. Last year, SLU's team was very green and was surprised to find out how rough and tumble the game can really be.

"It was the first time we'd done anything other than scrimmage," said Miss Farrar, a beater on the team. "It went poorly. It was really fun. The team formed a month into the semester."

The game is played much like the Quidditch described in Rowling's novels. There are seven players: three chasers, who throw a large ball called the "quaffle" to each other to score goals, two beaters, who try to prevent the chasers from scoring by throwing balls called "bludgers" at them, and a keeper, who acts as goalie. And then there is the Golden Snitch, which is not the winged gold ball of the novels, but a person dressed in yellow with a tennis ball that must be seized to end the game. A seeker has to catch the snitch to win his team 150 points.

The quaffle is a slightly deflated volleyball, the bludgers are dodgeballs and the goal posts are three hula hoops raised up on sticks.

St. Lawrence's team has 50 members; the 15 players going to the Cup were chosen after a series of games on campus. Miss Farrar captained the winning team to ensure her spot to New York City.

Win or lose, when the St. Lawrence team returns to the north country, it will host a "Yule Ball" — a dance that comes from "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," the fourth book in the series — for children beginning at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Eben Holden Center to benefit Literacy of Northern New York.

"We're going to dress up like Harry Potter characters and kids can come out and hang out with a bunch of older, adult nerds," Miss Farrar said.