Quidditch in the real world?

Oh yes! Just don't be too surprised to hear that folks, its been around for a good seven years. You heard that right... S.E.V.E.N years of Muggles playing a Quidditch tournament.

Started by a group of students as an fun-filled small time inter-collegiate event nearly seven years ago, the first game was played at Middlebury College,Vermont. Apparently the students were too "awkward" to play the traditional sport of lacrosse so this fancy game was begun.

The small time event soon garnered much popularity as J.K Rowling's famous broom-flying-airbender sport in the Harry Potter series,  was emulated by the students. This tournament has more than 80 participating colleges and more than a 1,000 registered teams across the world in today's date.

Popularly called as the Irony Bowl, the tournament is no less than a mecca for the Potter fans. Added to the action packed sports, the sidelines are a fun-house too.

Reportedly the tournament is a "Cross between the Super Bowl and the medieval festival" thereby hosting loads of family-based activities, band concerts , masquerade-cum-costume gatherings, commentary by stand-up artists and the fun-filled "kidditch pitch"  for kids to play this quirky sport. Hence it is rightly tagged as the Quidditch World Cup.

This year the competing teams, including members from Canada, Mexico , France and a top US universities like John Hopkins, UCLA and NYU, are all set to face the grand rout at Kissimmee, Florida as reported by the Christian Science Monitor.  The event is managed by the International Quidditch Association that has prepared a official rule book for the game.The interesting thing is how this Muggle-version of Quidditch has managed to stay true to the bookish version. But certainly don't expect the flying gimmicks exactly.

Ben Frederick reporting on the tournament informs us that the "In the "Harry Potter" books and movies, Quidditch was a mix of baseball, handball, soccer, rugby and basketball (and tag) played on enchanted broomsticks. Muggles, instead, have to make the best of dealing with four different balls while keeping an earth-bound broomstick between their legs at all times while in play... Quaffles become "slightly deflated volleyballs" and the golden snitch becomes a 15th player (each team has seven on its side) dressed in yellow with a ball inside of a golden sock sticking out of the back of his pants".

This sure seems interesting, at least to the Pottermania breed like me, who have spent scores of pages reading about the game. The musings finally seem to be materializing in some part of the world and I can't wait to catch all the live action.

The event has already kick-started this weekend. You can catch all the action through the live video blogs here.