Originally published October 7, 2009, in The Towerlight. Photos by Blake Savadow.

A new hot sport on the Towson campus has student athletes wielding sticks, chasing players and throwing balls. It’s not football. It’s not soccer. It’s not field hockey.

The sticks are brooms, the balls are Quaffles and the game is Quidditch.

Freshman theater majors Eva Hiatt and Erin Boots came up with the idea of bringing the Hogwarts pastime from the pages of the “Harry Potter” novels to Burdick Field during their freshman orientation.

“It started out as a joke,” Boots said.

The idea started brewing, then the pair saw students in the Center for the Arts playing a game called Marauder’s Mayhem, which Boots said has its players wandering the halls with wands.

“We’re turning this school into Hogwarts. This school is Hogwarts. We have people running around the CFA with wands, so we might as well play Quidditch,” Boots said.

From there, the pair got to work.

“We spent a day shopping at the dollar store, Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, Toys’R'Us, a sports equipment store. At one point I think we went into a grocery store looking for random things like duct tape and golf balls.”

Many hours of work and $141 in supplies later, they had most of the makeshift gear they needed, including hula hoops and poles.

In the “Harry Potter” books and films, Quidditch is a high-flying game played with flying broomsticks. The game Hiatt and Boots are trying to organize is more down-to-earth.

“There are certain things you have to modify because it’s a Muggle sport, because it is Muggle Quidditch, not real Quidditch. You can’t do magic,” Boots said.

The Muggle version of Quidditch is a mix of football, soccer, dodge ball and hide-and-seek.

The Snitch, a small winged ball in the books and films, is a golf ball in a sock attached to the pants of a “Snitch runner.” The runner can run anywhere, even off the field. The rules apply very loosely to the runner.

“If the Snitch wanted to, he could pretty much punch out the Seekers to prevent them from catching [him],” Hiatt said.

Towson would not be the first school with a Quidditch league. In 2005, a group of students at Middlebury College in Vermont adapted the game for Muggles. The students later formed the Intercollegiate Quidditch Association, which formed standard rules and now comprises more than 100 schools. The association even sponsors world cups. Boots said she doesn’t see Towson’s Quidditch league getting there quite yet, and added that they changed the regulation game a bit for safety and other reasons.

“We adapted some of the rules and twisted them around and made them our own because [of us], as I said, being theatre kids and having imaginations of our own,” she said.

Their idea is gaining steam. More than 80 people joined a Facebook group Boots and Hiatt started, and an informational meeting they held Wednesday afternoon in the CFA attracted more than 40 students.

Junior art education major Emily Dennis found out about the meeting on Facebook.

“I’ve been wanting to do something active sport-wise, but all the other sports on campus are really intense and competitive, and I just wanted to do something fun, and I like ‘Harry Potter,’” Dennis said.

Marina Ybarra, a freshman theatre major, energetically described herself as a “cheerleader” for the effort to get Towson Quidditch off the ground.

“I’m a really positive person, and I want people to get more involved with Quidditch in a positive way,” Ybarra said. “[My friends and I] like ‘Harry Potter,’ we like Quidditch, so why not be just excited about something here at the school?”

Hiatt and Boots said they want to form at least two teams of seven to 14 people. Hiatt said their motivation is “how much fun we’re going to have, how much fun we know we’re going to have.

“It’s not necessarily the books of the “Harry Potter” stories,” she said. “We know because of J.K. Rowling’s imagination mixed with our imaginations mixed with everyone else’s imaginations.”

Hiatt and Boots said they are considering the idea of the group affiliating with the Student Government Association and the Intercollegiate Quidditch Association. Taking the lead on such a project is daunting, but Hiatt said they’re up to it.

“We are pretty dedicated, organized people. Maybe not organized, but dedicated and persistent, more or less,” she said.

Boots said she thinks of Quidditch as a release and an escape for stressed students.

“What more can be enjoyable than running around with a broom between your legs throwing things at people?” she said