It is early Sunday morning and most students have not yet recovered from their post−Saturday night haze to make it out of their beds, never mind their rooms.
But the Tufflepuffs, Tufts' Quidditch team, is already hard at work on the Res Quad. There is a chill in the air and a steady wind blows across the quad, but the weather has done little to deter more than a dozen players from showing up for practice.
The team goes for a jog before jumping right into an inter−squad scrimmage. Bodies fly everywhere as chasers attempt to weave through defenders, often instead finding themselves on the wrong end of a bludger to the side or a tackle that lifts them right off the ground.
Nearly five months have passed since the team's run to the Quidditch World Cup Final in just its first year of participation and the Tufflepuffs are working as hard as ever to continue to succeed in what is becoming a consistently more competitive national Quidditch scene. The squad meets twice a week, once on Tuesday afternoon for conditioning practice and again on Sundays for field practice.
According to the International Quidditch Association, the governing body of the sport's Muggle version from J.K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter series, there are now 65 official member teams and more than 500 more collegiate and high school teams in development. Quidditch's appeal is not confined to the United States; the Tufflepuffs had the opportunity to scrimmage a Finnish squad in February.
"It's been so exponential," sophomore David Meyers, one of the team's starting seekers, said. "Teams are sprouting up everywhere, and they are definitely getting more competitive."
But while the sport itself is in no danger of dying off, the Tufts' squad always has new challenges to face on the home front. While the budgetary concerns that plagued the team earlier in the year seem to have been alleviated, with the help of buffer funding from the Tufts Community Union Senate and a significant anonymous donation after the World Cup, the Tufflepuffs are now preparing for the first major leadership overturn in their young history.
"The sophomores going abroad is going to be a big blow," field co−captain and freshman Katie Lowe said. "We're going to miss them; they are some of our closest friends. A lot will depend on who comes in next year as freshmen and if we can generate interest."
From the team's inception until this semester, the squad has been in the capable hands of administrative president Carly Boxer, a sophomore. On the field, they have been able to look to the leadership of fellow sophomore Austin Bening, former field captain, whose physical play at the World Cup earned him both praise from the community and a red card in the final match.
With many of the core−founding group heading abroad, much of the leadership of the team is being passed on to the freshmen recruited this year. Freshman Fiona Weeks is now the squad's president and freshmen Duncan Leaf and Lowe have taken over the on−field captaincy duties.
"We're working through the transition slowly," Boxer said. "The Quidditch team is different from other organizations on campus because we never had really had an elaborate leadership structure — basically whoever wanted to lead the team did so. Luckily, we have old board members on the new board now to help them know what their responsibilities are and help when they need it."
Despite the large−scale changes, the veterans are confident that the team is in good hands for the coming year.
The freshmen will be inheriting a team that is a far cry from the underdogs that shocked the Quidditch world in November. The Tufflepuffs have since then had a target on their backs, as other teams look to knock off the No. 2 ranked team in the world.
"You can tell when we face other teams now that they are definitely more aware of us," Meyers said. "Some of them that we upset, like Emerson, are definitely out to see if they can get us again. People worry about facing us, which is new."
The squad recently had a pair of disappointing results against fellow Quidditch powers Boston University and Emerson, a definite setback after their World Cup run.
"We were missing a lot of our key players who played big roles at the World Cup," Lowe said. "A lot of our team was injured or just not playing well that day. There were a lot of new players there as well."
The squad will need to turn things around quickly with the New England Cup, which features many of the top teams from the Massachusetts area, less than a week away. The tournament will take place on April 18 at Emerson College's Rotch Field where the Tufflepuffs will look to improve on their third−place finish last season.
"We are looking to go and see what we can do," Meyers said. "We're looking to see where we are as a team right now because we haven't been able to play as much as we'd like over the winter. So we're going in with a very open outlook."
