Your Story: Tye Rush
We were so inspired by everyone sharing their stories of how quidditch made a positive impact on their lives on Facebook that we would like to publish your story. Simply send an email to editorial@internationalquidditch.org telling us how quidditch has made a difference for you, and we may publish it on the IQA website.
Photo by Michael E. Mason/IQA Staff.
It's rare to find something in life that you just want to completely immerse yourself in and become a part of. In high school, I had always done different sports: I played football, tennis, and ran cross country. I liked the time that I had spent playing sports at a competitive level, but had never really had a defining experience that made me fall in love with any sport until I found quidditch.
My story starts less than a year ago. It was the summer before I entered college, and I spent most of my time thinking about the transition and working a part-time job. I know I am going to get a lot of hate mail for saying this, but I had never read any Harry Potter book or even seen any of the movies until a friend convinced me to do so a week before I moved into my dorm at school. I ended up watching all of the movies back-to-back and was so intrigued with it that I started reading some of the books. As luck would have it, somebody posted a link on University of California Riverside's incoming freshman Facebook page about quidditch existing at the collegiate level and that there was also a group of UCR students putting together a team. After watching the Brooms Up! documentary, I decided to try quidditch.
As an incoming freshman at a big university, I wanted to fit in and adjust. After telling a couple of friends and my roommate about my interest in quidditch, I was ridiculed and laughed at, and I decided that quidditch wasn't such a good idea after all. It took a weekend of having no homework or any social plans to show up to practice for my first time. Though I liked the sport, I couldn't get over the way that people looked at or talked about me in my dorm hall when I told them that I wanted to play, and I almost stopped coming but decided to see how I liked playing on other teams first.
I should really thank the Claremont Dirigible Plums for hosting the Claremont Colleges Classic. This was my first experience playing any team outside of practice and I fell in love with quidditch. This tournament may not have been as epic as I remember it, but it was to me. Our first game was against the Orange County Obliviators, an unofficial team with mercs that I later found out to be Steve DiCarlo and Tony Rodriguez. It ended up being a very close game (140-130 in quaffle points) that, after a snitch catch, my team won 170*-130. OC matched every goal we made with one of their own. I don't know about anyone else on my team, but it took me all that I had to help our team score, and these people were answering back every time. I will never forget the feelings I experienced when we won that game. I had been pushed to my limits in a foreign sport and we had come out on top. I felt instant relief and joy at the end of the game, and what was strange was that the other team hugged it out with us at the end (which was something I later found to be unique to the Western Region, but still). Prior to playing quidditch, I had been trained by coaches to see opposing teams as the enemy, so it really caught me off-guard to hug these strangers from the opposing side after we played. My team, Remus' Riverside Runners, ended up winning the next game against the hosting team, which put us in the finals in the first game against the team that would become our rival, the Santa Barbara Blacktips. They were fierce and showed us what strategy and physicality in the sport looked like. We lost that game 60-210*, but I went home that day with a new outlook. My experience at that tournament was unique from any other sport that I had played in that I got a glimpse of how competitive the sport is, how cohesive the Western region is, and how I had a chance to succeed and grow in the sport with my team.
After my first tournament, I wanted to play a lot more. I made it a priority to go to every practice and get better for a tournament that we were hosting a couple weeks later. I was so anxious to play again that I researched teams, videos, strategies, and players, and unknowingly began immersing myself in the quidditch community. I found that the more I looked up past events and tournaments, the more excited I became about playing. With my spare time, I helped organize our upcoming tournament by creating schedules and contacting teams. I have to admit that this tournament, The Riverside Rundown, as it became known, didn't top my experience at the Claremont tournament, but it did help my love for the sport to grow. We made the UCR school newspaper and had a local news photographer come out to take pictures because of this. This may be no big deal for anybody else, but because I had never been in a newspaper before for any sport, I was excited beyond words. What added to this feeling - to this day I don't know if it was a typo, a miscommunication between the school reporter and our captain, or what - was that the newspaper's article had mentioned me and had called me one of the team captains! At the time I was not a captain, but was promoted at the very next practice and I became even more active in networking with other teams in the IQA and became informed of upcoming events.
Before quidditch, I had never traveled outside of California for anything. It was due to a lack of reason as well as the cost of it. My first trip outside of California was for Snow Cup III and I will never forget it. I signed up to merc literally an hour before the draft and was lucky enough to find someone to carpool with. I ended up hitching a ride to Utah with Santiago Gonzalez, Vanessa Goh, and Nicte Sobrino, some of the biggest names in Western region quidditch. The Utah Crimson Flyers showed me a new level of generosity by giving me free housing for the tournament and showing me a great time. To top it off, I got to play on a team of really experienced players (go Orange Team!) and snitched for my very first time. My team made it to the semi-finals and I was elated to be part of such a skilled team and I learned so much in that tournament thanks to all of the players involved.
The next page in my story was written at Western Cup IV in Roseville, CA, my first two-day tournament. Riverside was placed into what became dubbed “the pool of death.” In pool play, we faced USC, ASU, and Santa Barbara (our rivals), and these were the most intense games that I had ever played in. These games introduced me to the competitive aspect of quidditch and showed me just how physical the sport can be. Though we didn't win any games in pool play, we beat Berkeley's B-team to make it to the bracket and play our rivals, Santa Barbara. I had never seen my team play so cohesively before that game. We truly played as one and despite our loss in that game, I was never more proud of my team. A couple months later, we finally beat Santa Barbara at Beachside Brawl and took home the Southern California Quidditch Conference Division II championship at the SCQC finals to close out our season.
Quidditch has been a crazy and very unpredictable roller-coaster ride for me so far and has taught me so much. I learned to not care about what people think of me. I learned how to play competitively while always hugging it out with the teams I played against. I met people from all walks of life that I wouldn't be associated with if it wasn't for quidditch. I was finally given the opportunity to travel and have made lifelong friends all over. I was given the opportunity to help lead a team of my best friends in games and have grown so much as a person and a player. Thank you so much to all of the people and teams that have helped me along the way. I owe so much to the quidditch community and am excited to see where the sport takes me next.
Photo courtesy of Terry Pierson/ Staff Photographer of The Press-Enterprise.
