Saturday and Sunday, 5th and 6th April
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| The University of Sydney Unspeakables |
And so we come to the real purpose of my visit to the States. Going to New York for five days just casually while I'm on exchange in Europe isn't the most logical thing, I mean I could have gone to Norway or Estonia or something and it would have made more sense. But no, Quidditch called me to North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I flew down (by plane, don't get excited) from Newark, New Jersey (another Wifi-less airport) to Myrtle Beach International Airport (which is actually quite nice, by the way, and does in fact have Wifi) on a plane with a note on my itinerary as having 'turboprop equipment'. Which basically means it has two propellers.
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| Thanks, it's great to be here. |
Propeller! |
Woot, woot! |
Quite a cute plane really, and rather full. The lady next to me mentioned that she must be the only person on the plane not going to play golf-- there is quite the course in Myrtle Beach, I'm informed. Examining the middle aged men around me, it wasn't hard to agree with her they were golfers. Watching them claim their baggage confirmed this later.
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Photo by Michael E. Mason
(Well sort of. That's him in the photo.) |
So I arrived, and walked down the hall, following the signs, and ran into my Sydney team mates. We hugged. It was pretty great. They all looked nice and 'fresh' from their flights from Sydney to LA to Charlotte to Myrtle Beach, featuring a 12 hour stopover in LA where they got up to various shenanigans I heard about (something about a crazy taxi ride, finding the Hollywood sign and eating a
lot of Werthers Originals). It was so great to see them! :) After some issues with hotel rooms, we set up in the gorgeous Prince, had lunch, shopped, crashed out, and set about fake murdering each other in several games of Mafia. Simply swell! We also had the fire alarm go off-- expert/paranoid that I am now about fires (there was one at my dorm, remember) we evacuated (being some of the few guests to do so). Was a false alarm, thankfully.
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| Beach Quidditch |
On Friday morning we saw the fields for the first time, and took part in a few demo games while the media took promo pictures. We also did some training and started making American friends. It felt good to be back on a broom! It was weird to be playing with a proper broom again too-- much heavier than we are used to and I hate having bristles. They scratch. We normally play with taped up pipe with a piece of pool noodle stuck on the end. Our training Friday afternoon involved a game the team made up in 30 seconds-- beach quidditch. Similar to the above but with modifications since we were on a beach and only had one ball and no brooms. We were joined by several other teams on the beach, and it was really fun!
So how do you actually play?
How did I know you'd ask? I've been playing for nearly two years. It comes up a lot.
Muggle Quiddtich (or quidditch as it is supposed to be called) is a lot of fun. Everyone playing needs to be 'mounted' on their broom at all times-- as mentioned, this doesn't need to be an actual broom. Anything about a metre long will do. When we played with Grant Denyer on Sunrise he was prancing around on one with a unicorn head (his "Sydney Uni-corn".) So usually you hold your broom with one hand, but you can hold it between your legs for a bit if you want to make a catch for example. If you 'dismount', you are taken to have fallen to your injury/death, and must run back to your defensive hoops and touch them before you are back in play.
Chasers, three per team, pass the quaffle (a deflated volleyball) to each other, and try and score through one of the three hoops. A goal is worth 10 points. There is also a
keeper per team to defend their hoops, but can also be a valuable attack asset, behaving like a chaser.
Beaters, two per team, have the task of throwing one of three bludger/dodgeballs at their opponents. If you are hit with one, you have been 'beat', and must dismount and return to your hoops before rejoining play. The
snitch is the one everyone always asks about. The snitch is a ball in a sock attached with velcro to the pants of the snitch runner-- a neutral person whose job it is to evade capture. The
seeker on each team has to seek out the snitch, and, well, catch the snitch. Everyone else stays on the pitch, but the snitch may run wherever is agreed beforehand, for example all over campus, and the seekers basically have to wander around in search of them. The snitch gets told to come back to the pitch eventually so that the game doesn't go on forever, and the seekers aren't released to go after them for the first 10 minutes to let the game go on for a while. Catching the snitch ends the game and is worth 30 points (not the 150 from the books, because that is ridiculous). Oh, and it is full contact (with rules, of course). You need two people of gender different from two other people making up the six on the pitch at all times (usually, two female and four male).
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| Team Selfie |
The Snitches |
Team bus |
Saturday morning, bright and early we arrived at the sports complex, and found a spot in the Athletes Village. Yes seriously, though it was really just a place to dump our stuff/hang out. We were applauded walking through after someone shouted "HEY! IT'S SYDNEY!" So much awesome. After a brief dance off with Canadian teams, we walked around Field One in the Opening Ceremony, accompanied by a middle school band, and waving to the crowds who had come out to see us. That was fun. We, as Australia, were the second group in the procession, following the Snitches, and leading the five Canadian teams, and the remaining 73 American teams. So World Cup VII wasn't much of a
world cup (it is a thing in parts of Europe, but they didn't go because reasons, and actually four spots were given to Australian teams but we were the only ones who could go) but hey we were a team from (more or less) Australia in South Carolina playing a sport on broomsticks. :D :D We took our spots in the grandstand and listened to a few speeches. Then we belted out the National Anthem and happily listened to the Canadians and Americans do the same (well we hope it was the Canadian anthem. We couldn't hear properly, and it could have been our second verse. We're not sure, but it would have been awkward to ignore Canada.) We took up a cheer of COMMONWEALTH! COMMONWEALTH! at the end. Yay for solidarity based on colonial conquest! :)
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| Opening Ceremony Procession |
Not all Australian, but much rejoicing!
Photo by Isabella Gong |
View from the grand stand |
The 80 teams (one dropped out really late so only 79 competed) were organised into 16 pools. We were pool 7, dubbed a "pool of life" because even though everyone wrote us off, no one was sure how it would turn out for everyone else. The five teams per pool play each other on Saturday, and the top three in each pool progressed to a knock out tournament on Sunday. Our first match was against McGill from Canada. We got smashed. It wasn't pretty. Score was 150-30*, the asterisk meaning we caught the snitch (yes, we didn't get any other points. We know.) We weren't terribly upset because we always have a slow start but McGill was a game we needed to win, so it didn't look great... Our second match was against RPI, a technical uni from the North East. This game pissed me off. We had moments where we were doing good, but we couldn't string anything together and it was just so frustrating. We could have won and we should have won. Score was 70*-20, so if we had got the snitch when they did, we would have won-- this is termed being 'within snitch range'. But it was great to get some goals on the board, at least!
During our lunch break, we ran around trying to collect a full set of our starting line up's trading cards. We had each submitted a photo and a small blurb, and then they sold them in packets like other trading cards-- so you got randoms and then had to seek out and trade for yourself. Luckily, everyone seemed happy to trade along, and we eventually found a few sets of our starting seven. Mine was the last to be found, I was starting to worry we wouldn't find me! I had a card because I was starting chaser, and my blurb read, "Her proudest achievement so far has been beating a weatherman live on national television." (You can see it here:
Take that, Grant Denyer) I also gave myself a tattoo. I'm so cool.
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| Gone to the dark side... |
Us and the IQA CEO
Photo by Arielle Flak |
Us and the Silicon Valley Skrewts
Photo by Monica Wheeler |
University of Minnesota was probably the best game I've ever played. I was swapped into beater because we needed a more physical chaser game. It was so much fun, we had Americans we'd known three hours cheering us on, we had plays falling into place, a guard of honour off the pitch, it was honestly just so great. We lost, 90-50*, but I don't think anyone cared. We had played our hearts out, came off and collapsed and everyone was so happy, smiling, exhausted and so proud. Our fourth and final game was by artificial light, against the Silicon Valley Skrewts-- a community team, not affiliated with a college. This was a difficult match, we lost 150*-30 in the end. I don't remember much except that their snitch catch was so soft-- the snitch was being an idiot and taunting after our seeker got beat and sent back to hoops, so he didn't notice that the other seeker just ran up behind him and got the catch, a second before I beat him. That was irritating. But overall not terrible. We returned to our hotel that night victorious in defeat.
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| Okay, so we fly a little. |
After having other people ask us for photos
all weekend, we asked the winners,
University of Texas for one :) |
Since we clearly didn't progress through (the Skrewts, Minnesota and McGill did from our pool) we slept in and arrived after some of the matches had been played. We spent the rest of the day watching, chatting, hanging out, celebrating ourselves and each other and taking HEAPS of photos with teams who would ask us. We wanted to play an exhibition match or two but the organisers didn't let us for fear of breaking the hoops (which, considering our history was rather a smart decision). The grand final was University of Texas v Texas State University, you can check out the rest of the bracket
here. Grudge match and it was delightful to watch. UT won, 130*-70. They had a closing ceremony, where we won the award for 'Furthest Travelled', and we picked up the prestigious 'Xander Manshel Award' (which I want to rename the Manshel Shield), the prime sportsmanship/awesomeness award. Everyone loved us. It was incredible. We ran out and did a final AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE - OI OI SHHHHH. We're the Unspeakables, hence the shhhhhh. We're so cool. We partied in our hotel room for the night, until those heading back to Australia left at 3.30am. I was flying back to New York and home from there via Amsterdam, while another team mate was going back to his exchange in Washington DC and another was staying with him for a week. It was sad to say goodbye after such a short time, but I really had the best weekend. Simply so amazing.
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| Oi! Oi! SHHHH! |
Paul, me and our trophy |
The team and our trophy
Photo by Michael E. Mason |
If you can't tell, I had a really, really great time. Also, I'm now officially an International Athlete. Life goal accomplished.
I tried some of the local cuisine in New York, and got excited about having bacon on my burger... I forgot that Americans can't do bacon, they overcook it and it was really quite upsetting, actually. My blueberry pancakes on the other hand, were simply delightful. As for shagging, well, apparently it is a Myrtle Beach tradition. We saw an ad in the hotel lobby for shagging lessons, and we waited til it came back on screen to check what we had seen, and awkwardly asked the concierge what it was. His reply: "haha, yeah I'm not from around these parts either, I know why you're laughing. It's a type of dance or something." We also saw a shagging shoe shop, and "Myrtle Beach, home of the shag" on top of a water tower.
