Athletes sprinted with brooms between their legs across the Howard County turf Monday morning to prove even the most bitter questions about gender in sports could be settled over quidditch.
Well, not exactly quidditch.
These days, the niche game that bubbled out of the whimsical universe of Harry Potter and found popularity on college campuses is rebranded as quadball — a full-contact, mixed-gender sport involving four balls and three goalposts. There are no wands, nor Hogwarts houses.
The game’s literary roots and mix of skill sets have crossover appeal with nerds and jocks of all body types and genders. Its popularity comes at a time when transgender athletes are struggling to find their place in the sporting world and women’s teams are compensated less than their male counterparts.
Such issues haunted the Olympics in Paris this summer. Algerian athlete Imane Khelif was misidentified as a man on social media, including by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who complained that the Olympics had permitted her to compete. Khelif is not transgender and was assigned female at birth.
U.S. Quadball and Major League Quadball have tested out gender initiatives in Howard County, which has three times hosted national tournaments.
The sport generally leaves players to define their genders, but some leagues specify that no more than three or four players of the same gender can be on the pitch at one time. The quotas have changed the way teams play the game — and attracted a more diverse population of athletes to the sport.
Rose Mourninghan, a chaser from Rochester, New York, gravitated to quadball two years ago in part because its rules and policies seemed to encourage good sportsmanship.
Players who compete against Mourninghan don’t need to know anything about her when they congratulate her on a good play, the 24-year-old transgender woman said. To them, she is No. 13 on the red team.
“I deserve my spot on this field,” she said Monday from the sidelines of Pitch 1 at Troy Park in Elkridge. Mourninghan came to Maryland to play in Major League Quadball’s gender-inclusivity showcase, called Take Back the Pitch.
Quadball has transformed significantly since it leapt off the pages of the Harry Potter books. Teams have formed on every continent except Antarctica, with a World Cup tournament every two years. The U.S. Quadball rule book in 2023 topped 80 pages.
Back when the sport was still called quidditch, Amanda Dallas remembers some collegiate teams running around in capes on wooden brooms with bristles.
“I thought it was so stupid,” said Dallas, now a co-founder and commissioner for Major League Quadball.
Still, the former softball player liked the full-contact facet of the game and, over time, found teams that were playing to win. Old-fashioned brooms were replaced with a length of PVC pipe. (Players insist they’re not as difficult to run with as people tend to imagine.)
Warner Brothers owned the trademarks for snitches, quaffles and bludgers, so each ball was renamed. Seekers now pursue a flag attached to the waistband of an impartial runner who uses any means to avoid capture. Beaters hurl dodgeballs to thwart their opponents. Chasers dunk a slightly deflated volleyball, called the quadball, through the three round goalposts of staggered heights.
What the game lacks in magic, it makes up for in variety. It borrows elements from basketball, dodgeball and tag. Players can run behind the goalposts, similar to hockey, and tackle, as in rugby.
“Chaos is part of its charm,” the summer league’s website states.
Dallas likes the tackling best.
“It was cool that I, as a woman, could be on a field with these men and I could do better than them,” she said.
Still, the sport was not immune to gender challenges, she said. When the COVID-19 pandemic caused games to be canceled, Dallas and other organizers decided to tackle problems that had been troubling them.
They were noticing most teams seemed to skew male while women and nonbinary players were more likely to find themselves in the gender minority. Some teams weren’t passing the balls to their female and nonbinary players. Worse yet, women were passing the ball so men could take the big shot, Dallas said.
The game’s leadership briefly considered creating a new league for just women or nonbinary people, but a survey of players found those groups preferred a mixed-gender team, Dallas said. The more popular idea was to put together an event to give players of underrepresented genders dedicated training and playing time.
So organizers in 2021 closed out the national league’s summer tournament in Howard County with a showcase called Take Back the Pitch. Women, transgender and nonbinary players took to the field for what would become one of the last games under the name quidditch. Cisgendered men sat the games out and cheered from the bleachers.
By the end of the year, U.S. Quidditch and Major League Quidditch were making moves to rename the sport and distance it from Rowling out of concern for her statements about transgender people.
In the years since the pandemic, quadball governance in the U.S. has continued to tinker with the gender rules. Leagues this season largely required a maximum of three players of a single gender on the pitch during the seeker floor and four players during seeker on pitch.
One of the rule’s more subtle effects is that it requires teams to discuss representation throughout games and practices, Dallas said.
She knows not everyone in quadball is going to like or agree with the rules, but the conversations are what matter, she said. Two players on her club team recently disclosed to her that they didn’t understand nonbinary gender identities.
But they were curious enough to talk to Dallas about it.
“What if they never saw this sport or never played this sport,” she wondered. “Would they bother to ask?”
