Although, they will be going by plane and not broomstick or portkey, 18 muggles of the Ball State Quidditch team will fly down to Kissimmee, Fla., on Friday to the sixth annual Quidditch World Cup.
The team’s record of 22-2 and their achievements at the Midwest Regional Championship last November have earned them a spot in the Cup’s Divison 1 category, which consists of 60 of the 163 different teams from around the world.
“It’s the sixth World Cup and this is our first time going,” said Sara Makey, a junior special education major and president of the Ball State Quidditch team. Makey previously played as a chaser before becoming president of the team.
This year, participants in the World Cup had to qualify, as opposed to previous years where teams only had to sign up to participate.
“We’re excited and felt like we deserved to go, and [we] are very much looking forward to going there and playing against teams we’ve only heard about,” Makey said.
The team will get some exposure to other players and environments outside of the region, an opportunity that senior social work major Tyler Macy said the team is ecstatic about.
“I’m just really looking forward to playing against teams and the competition that we’ve never gotten to experience before because we’ve only played teams in the Midwest,” Macy said. “This is probably the most excited I’ve ever seen the Ball State Quidditch team.”
Macy is the co-captain and seeker of the quidditch team. He has played since he was a freshman in 2009, when the team initially started.
“I had an anthropology class with the girl who cofounded the club and she invited me to come to the call-out meeting,” Macy said. “I went and it turned out to be incredibly fun, so I just stuck with it.”
The road to the World Cup hasn’t been easy, however. The club lacks Harry Potter’s Gringotts Bank account and has had to dodge many financial bludgers in order to be able to finance the trip.
“It’s a really big financial commitment to raise the money to get there. We’re a young club, so we’ve been getting better at fundraising over the years,” Macy said.
The tournament will go on for two days starting Saturday. The D1 teams will be split into 12 pools based on rankings. The top two teams and a few others in third place from each pool automatically advance to the second day, which will be bracket play.
“Thirty-two teams advance and then they will play bracket-play with single elimination,” Makey said.
Ball State will be in a pool against Tennessee Tech University, Hofstra Universty and a team from Texas A&M University named the Silver Phoenixes.
The team won’t magically get itself prepared for the Cup, however. Makey said they have added a Saturday practice to their schedule and now meet four days per week.
Even with the tough competition ahead, Makey believes the experience will be well worth the trip.
“It’s very hard to get out of the region with traveling costs and everyone’s schedule,” Makey said. “So it will be really interesting to see different styles of play and to see different teams.”
