By Shelly Williams/editor-in-chief
There’s a new “sport” sweeping the nation. It involves grown men and women running around in their athletic wear and capes.
College teams run up and down a field atop broomsticks, chasing a funny gold-painted man eluding capture — the famous Snitch.
Surrounding the hype of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One, a sudden spike in the role-playing game, Quidditch, has been seen in the media. Forty-six college teams across the nation, including Yale and Harvard, gathered in New York Nov. 16 to compete in the Quidditch World Cup.
What began as a fun scrimmage at Vermont’s Middlebury College in 2005 has grown to include more than 400 Quidditch teams across the country, according to an article by the San Jose Mercury News.
The NCAA has even been reported as looking to make the game a sanctioned sport, mixing dodgeball, soccer and tag, the article said.
The game, nerdy and ridiculous as it sounds, helps get the nerdy and ridiculous off the couch. If this is what it takes to stay active and exercise in the most obese country in the world, then we should be all for it. The game gives students a break from the stressors of college life and a chance to be a part of a literary sensation that our generation grew up with.
This sport may be taking the term fan-boy/fan-girl to a new level, but it takes courage and confidence to dress like a broom-wielding wizard in public. With five campuses at TCC, Quidditch could be another way to bring students together during intramural season.
Maybe it’s the idea of running around in a cape, but Quidditch reminds me of the old Verb commercials that used to run on television every five minutes when we were younger. Started by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Verb campaign pushed a slogan that we may have forgotten: “It’s what you do.”
Despite wearing silly outfits and whether this game catches Harry Potter fanatics here or not, it seems to be an ideal way to get college students out from behind desks and away from computer screens.
The game is proof in itself that it’s more important to find something you can enjoy doing to remain active and healthy than what you look like while exercising.
