Rivalries rule sports, even in Quidditch

In the history of sports, there have always been rivaling teams. It’s clearly present at the professional level, with rivalries such as the one between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees in MLB, or the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys in the NFL.

It is also very much present at the collegiate level, with rivalries between universities such as Auburn University and Alabama University, University of Virginia and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and, more locally, Florida State University and University of Florida. The same goes for FIU, with Florida Atlantic University being our main rival in most of our sports. But there is one sport in particular that has an unexpected rival: Muggle Quidditch.

According to Casey Lamrouex, the team captain of FIU’s Quidditch Club and a senior majoring in architecture, the team has a rivalry with Florida State University.

“I think our biggest actual rival would probably be FSU because we beat them last year,” Lamrouex said. “It’s a friendly rivalry. We always like playing against each other; we always had good games against each other.”

The Quidditch team at FSU and our team have only played against each other a total of three times. Of those three times, FIU’s Quidditch Club has only won once.

“We’ve only won one, but they have always been close games. Not like at regionals this year where we heard some stories of teams losing 220 to zero,” Lamrouex said.

Besides having beat FSU’s team recently and the closeness of the scores in all three of their games, Lamrouex considers FSU our rival in Quidditch due to the fact that they are rebuilding themselves as a team just as our team is doing.

“They’re rebuilding kind of along the same lines we are. They used to be one of the really good teams but they lost a lot of people. So, they’re just trying to get back into it. It’s the same with us. A year ago, we actually didn’t have this team for a while. We weren’t sure if we wanted to keep doing it or not. Most of our players had left. I think we had a core group of maybe four people including me. So, we’re kind of along the same story,” Lamrouex said.

In addition to rivalries between teams, there always seems to be one team that almost every other team in a league, as well as fans, can agree is commonly disliked. Such is the case with the New England Patriots in football, the Miami Heat in basketball, and the New York Yankees in baseball.

The same can be said for Florida teams in the International Quidditch Association, including FIU’s Quidditch Club.

That one team in the Quidditch league is called Florida’s Finest Q.C., a team put together by Sean Pagoada who just so happens to be a student in his junior year at FIU.

Although most of the Quidditch teams are associated with colleges and represent their respective schools, it is allowed in the rules for teams to be created without any ties to any organization.

“He had been a player at USF in Miami but he decided he wanted his own team and at the time he wasn’t going to a university, so he started his own team called Florida’s Finest. He kind of has a rivalry with everybody because he just kind of put a message out on Facebook saying ‘Hey guys, if you don’t really want to play for your school anymore, I’m getting an all-star team together,’” Lamrouex said.

In addition to Pagoada himself, some other FIU students on the Florida’s Finest Q.C. team include freshman and landscape architecture major Dominic Mack.

“He didn’t really steal but he kind of took some players from some other schools, which they weren’t exactly happy about. Everyone kind of has a rival with him because they took it as a challenge. Some people take it a little more seriously than others, but it’s always fun,” Lamrouex said.

 

-junette.reyes@fiusm.com

 

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