The members of the Drexel Quidditch Club practice on Buckley Field during spring term.
Many students at Drexel University play club sports, but there’s only one that was founded in fiction.
Quidditch is the sport that Harry Potter and his classmates play in the popular book series. Today, there are more than 500 real-life Quidditch teams in 26 countries.
Drexel’s Quidditch Club was founded in 2010, but just this year the team was promoted from being a student organization to full-fledged club sport.
This fall, the Drexel Quidditch team registers with the United States Quidditch League, and will compete with colleges in the Mid-Atlantic region for a spot to go to regionals, or even qualify for nationals. Despite being new to this league, head coach Rajan Shah ’17 says that the Drexel team has already played against a number of well-recognized competitors.
“We’ve been fighting to be a club sport since our founding,” says President Izzy Sangaline ’20. “Since day one, we’ve been like, ‘Listen, we’re a full-contact, co-ed sport. We need to make sure that we have access to the space, the equipment, the trainers.’”
There’s a place for everyone on this team regardless of athletic experience or physical ability she says. The sport has three main positions: beaters, seekers and chaser/keepers (who both score and defend goals throughout the game).
To those who didn’t grow up reading Harry Potter books, the positions may sound esoteric. And that’s actually the case for some of the senior members of the Drexel team.
“I got into the Harry Potter series a couple of weeks before I started junior year and that was around the time of college applications,” says Eden Skye Einhorn, a freshmen fashion design student who plays beater and seeker on the team. “I forget how, but I found out Drexel had a Quidditch team and that was one of the two reasons that helped push me to go to Drexel along with the Pennoni Honors College’s honors program.”