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Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

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You guys can disrupt rooms.

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Imagine flying through the air on a magical broomstick, there's wind rushing through your hair, and you're trying to catch a tiny ball with wings called the Golden Snitch. Only you're not actually flying on a broomstick, and you're running around the field chasing someone wearing yellow. This is muggle Quidditch, a full contact sport based on the fictional sport from the Harry Potter series.

0:47  
Roseanne

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and brings up

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just two series that really grows up with you why it's caught our generation by storm so much as it started with characters that were young just like us, and we kind of grew up at the same pace as them over seven years. I have a sister who's four years older than me, who just has always loved the series so much. And so from the beginning, she's always been introducing me to the stories and so we would always go out and see the movies together as soon as they came out in theaters. And when we were younger, we get them read to us as bedtime stories.

1:26  
That's Nicholas Tassie

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for our generation that watch each movie and read each book guess they came out. And now when you go back and you watch an older movie, you kind of you know every single Why

1:39  
make Christmas wrong. Make Christmas Harry.

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And what about the pincers?

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Copy wizard.

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I'm just Harry

1:51  
Nicholas is on university of Toronto's Quidditch team.

1:54  
This is now my third season playing. And I've played about two or three tournaments a year and about five to 10 games a tournament and I'm starting to get into the more experienced end of players. Quidditch, Quidditch, it comes from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter kind of all of the stories that JK Rowling made that are so popular with our generation. It's taken from there and kind of adapted because in the books you can fly and there's a lot more magic involved things that we haven't figured out in real life yet. We're using a more human or Mughal version of Quidditch.

2:34  
Like there's people running around with broomsticks between their legs. It's just a mixture of European handball, dodgeball, and rugby.

2:40  
It's handball and rugby combined together.

2:43  
And that sounds absolutely crazy, but also absolutely amazing. Yeah, one beater at each budget.

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One chaser here.

2:56  
It just, it grabs your attention in a way that like nothing else can just seeing the word Quidditch on a poster or an advertisement. It's something that anyone who didn't love Harry Potter would just pass right by but I loved it so much that one side, as soon as I saw a poster advertising it, I thought, that's a Harry Potter related sport. I'm going to do this for the rest of my life.

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But it's not just something Nicholas loves. It's special to his whole family

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was a big part of our family growing up because we our parents into it, because they had to read the books. When we were at a young age. They had to read them to us, and then they had to bring us to see the movies. So it kind of became such a family bonding experience just growing up with the series. Nikki, that

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doesn't help that I'm

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my sister. She actually just started her first year in college. So she plays on the golf team and I play against her

3:56  
Christian wa is one of Nicholas's teammates.

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She texted me it's like, are you gonna go to this Ottawa tournament? I'm like, yeah, I'm like, are you just like, yeah, I'm gonna be playing chaser. And I texted her I'm like, yo, you better not come like near the fuel. I'm gonna destroy you. Right? She's like

4:13  
Margo quit Quidditch is a niche sport that is only growing. Canada even has its own national Quidditch organization. It was created just four years ago, Quidditch Canada had 22 teams across the country last year. This includes McGill University, University of Guelph, Simon Fraser University, McMaster, Queens, Waterloo, Ryerson u of t, and on and on, but that was last year. This year. One team will not be returning. Ryerson University Quidditch Christian and Nikolas may be on U of T's team now. But they were on Ryerson University's Quidditch team last year. Christian graduated from Meyerson Last year and Nicholas is in his final year now, the Ryerson University Quidditch team did not have enough members to continue playing this season. So Christian and Nicholas joined the centaurs to continue playing the game they

5:13  
love. Nicholas was still trying to run the Martian team here. So then, when I found out that because new t needed players to race, so I told them to reach out to Ryerson to see what was going on. Nick loves it. So he's like, yeah, I'm down.

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They welcomed us with open arms.

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Having the Ryerson students on our team has been incredible.

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JOHN, Mustang k is the coach of UMTS Quidditch team.

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They've been both some really important players, and some really committed players, but also really central to our culture that we've built this year.

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Anyone who tries the game seems to love it. And the interest in the sport is only growing across the country. But there's a lack of interest from the Ryerson community.

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The Ryerson Quidditch team started out as really big, and there's a lot of members but the turnover of like getting new players in recruiting, it started to really die down.

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It's very hard I find with teams and cities, like commuter schools like Ryerson to get a big team, because we practice on Sundays, and a lot of people are commuting some of them an hour, two hours a day during the school week. So they don't want to do an extra commute on the weekends just to play Quidditch, a UTD, built,

6:24  
I guess a better community. First off the kind of have like this little retreat where they make you go to the bar and kind of get drunk with everyone so that you know everyone real well, and you become friends. So the fact that you make friends on the team is the reason why you want to go.

6:45  
So I guess with Ryerson, we didn't really focus on that aspect. So there's interest for people to come out to college, but there's nothing kind of keeping you there. It's like when a wonderland raise like good Going once, but why do I need to go again.

7:04  
Other popular full contact sports don't seem to have this problem. But Quidditch does. This may have to do with the perception of the sport.

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The fact that it's inspired by Harry Potter, like I think it's kind of cool, right? But that's also the reason why a lot of people don't take it seriously because it's fictional sport at the end of the day.

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I know this happens in my case, and I'm sure it happens for a lot of Harry Potter fans are just more nerdy, happy go lucky people in their lives. So then when you tell someone that you're playing a sport that's tackling like rugby, and people are getting injured and broken bones, it's just hard to believe that that it's this sport that's based on a fun series that has created this sport, where there's so much intensity and so much physical play involved.

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Ultimately, in almost every single sport, the team that's faster, stronger and quicker will win. So a lot of the offseason training for Quidditch, just as every other sport is just doing those very things getting faster, stronger and quicker. Hey,

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hi.

8:19  
I think my favorite part about coaching Quidditch is seeing some of the more Shire players really come out of their shell. They come in really quiet, really passive and not really willing to hit. And after a couple of weeks, you see them speaking up more and practice yelling at their teammates on the other team while in game.

8:44  
The thing that has kept me in at most as much as I do love playing is just the community around it and kind of seeing the same faces and the friendships that you build through it with your team and with all sorts of team. I definitely considered quitting

9:03  
a real sport

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or the specifically the broomsticks silly shirt, but I think it's just a crutch and important mechanism in every single sport. Is it silly that people write on horses and polo shirt? Is it silly that you can't just pick up the ball in soccer? Yeah. Is it silly that you have to dribble every three steps in basketball? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, these are all crutches, we have the brooms to sort of make our sport unique but also slow our players down and make the game a little bit more difficult.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai