On May 27, IQA commissioner Alex Benepe and IQA intern Winter Schwaid-Lindner accompanied 10 members of the Toms River Hydras Quidditch team (Toms River, N.J.) to Holland Brook School in White House Station, N.J. There they found nearly 250 eager fourth graders ready to learn Quidditch.

“I was definitely pleasantly surprised with how many students we were working with,” Benepe said. “Instead of being just the one class, it was the entire grade.”

The day was made possible by the efforts of Donna Degrau, a teacher at the school who brought her students to watch an exhibition match in New York City this past year. Degrau reached out to the IQA and spoke with the school’s accommodating administration.

While the instructors were greatly outnumbered, Benepe quickly took control, explaining the rules to the crowd and leading them in a rousing rendition of the Spongebob Squarepants theme song (though members of the crowd would later admit they no longer listened to this tune).

With the rules explained, it was time to take to the pitch. The Hydras teamed up with some students to play a demo match. After a brief pre-game huddle, the teams were off and running. The Holland Brook students took to the game quickly, and their speed and skill impressed the Hydras. When a young seeker outsmarted the much older snitch with a Harry Potter-esque grab to end the game, the crowd was louder than ever.

For the rest of the afternoon, the Hydras settled back into a coaching role, while the fourth graders took over the game. Each team had a chaser coach and a beater coach, and the students grasped the concepts well. “The students seemed to have a really strong grasp of the rules,” Benepe said. “Sometimes when you are working with kids, the rules kind of overwhelm some of them. I thought that [the Hydras] did an excellent job of coaching the kids and organizing the teams, which is definitely not an easy task.”

The games were well contested, and the crowd was active throughout; whether it was asking Benepe for autographs, chanting for their team, or cheering on the entertaining antics of the Hydra’s Mike Kane, who was serving as the snitch at the time.

This event was the latest in a series of events all tying into the IQA’s Kidditch movement. While they had to pull out of the Pepsi Refresh Contest, Benepe remains optimistic about the program moving forward.

“There’s definitely potential to continue to run events like these,” Benepe said. “As long as we have local teams to help we can do it infinitely, and I intend to pair up schools and teams as much as possible. The challenge ahead is raising money so that these schools can afford equipment or if they can afford equipment to have funding to continue a mentor-team relationship.”