Blog : Ethnography - First Results: Quidditch

Group:
Daniel Aninag
Xandrix Baluyot
Will Hausman
Jonathan Wiese

Discussion:

Due to time constraints and other arrangements, I was only able to meet with the Quidditch team for the one hour practice this Wednesday evening. The Quidditch team meets on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 6:00 p.m. on the Simpson Drill Field and on Sundays at around 3:00 p.m. I arrived at the field at approximately 5:40 p.m. and I already found a large number of people on the field, next to the Quidditch shaped goalposts. Many of them were doing stretches and practice laps around the field. A couple of others were tossing a ball around back and forth.

I met a group member sitting on the grass, next to the sidewalk. I approached him and told him about this assignment. He then pointed me to the current Quidditch president, Drew. I went to talk to him and tell him about the ethnography assignment. He was nice and accepted me to watching them play Quidditch. He was open to any questions I had throughout the practice. At 6:00 p.m., around 30 people were there to play Quidditch. I was a bit surprised at the number of people there. I, originally, thought that only around 10 to 15 people would be interested in Quidditch.

The game itself plays interesting. It is a combination of handball, rugby, basketball, dodge ball, and tag. The game gets pretty physical and it impressive to see how focus the players were. They kept to the drills they were assigned. They act and train like people would do for real sports. Everyone was athletic, which seems to be contradictory to me since I thought that people who would be playing a game from Harry Potter are more of a bookish cast of people. It takes a lot of endurance to keep running around while holding a broomstick between your legs and throwing and catching balls with only one hand. During the practice, two people received some minor injuries. One girl was accidentally elbowed in the eye and another hurt her knee when she was dodging someone. I got to talk to them some time later. We talk a little bit about their history with the game and the Quidditch tournaments and rulings.

Throughout the practice, I noticed that there were many passersby who stopped and watched the group. This was probably out of curiosity of seeing people playing ball with brooms between their legs. The members do not seem to mind, and I saw one member try to recruit a person who asked what they were doing. The Quidditch players are all very friendly and they did not pay much attention to all the watchers. They remained focus and played the game.