One for the Team on Pecari Commons

Sophie Jamison

September 01, 2012 6:40 PM

Quidditch Sign-up! by Sophie Jamison

This was it. After a lifetime spent on a broomstick, five years on the Pecari team, and one term spent as Assistant Captain, Sophie was ready to take the lead. She was per se a natural leader off of the Pitch, but she knew from her first pick-up Quidditch match with her cousins that she was meant to be a Captain. There was a perfect sensation that accompanied defending her goals and leading her team to victory, and she planned to chase the thrill.

Of course, the blonde could hardly do it alone. She needed a team to be the wind beneath her wings. As a Keeper, she needed an excellent Chasing core to maintain her boredom and limit the action to the other end of the Pitch. Beaters were a necessity to both attack and defend, to knock down the opponents while keeping their own team safe. As for the Seeker, well… Without a talented one, there was really no hope of winning.

Last year’s team had been good, but without Mel, there was going to be a lot of slack to pick up. Anyone who dared scribble their name on her sign up had to be prepared to work, perhaps even harder than they had under the previous Captain. Sophie needed players who weren’t afraid to struggle. The practices would be as frequent as she could acquire the Pitch, and those who skipped would be dealt with accordingly.

The Second in Command, Amira Thorton, seemed nice enough for a good cop/bad cop aspect of the team, but the sixth year wasn’t necessarily going to be “bad”. Sophie wanted a skilled, disciplined team; skill came from hard work, and discipline came from strict command. She was physically minute, but she was sure at least any first years that showed up would be intimidated. What she lacked in size, she more than made up for in dedication to the sport.

With a grin, she plastered up the sign-up sheet. It wasn’t fancy, and her hand-writing was characteristically messy. Still, it got the point across.

PECARI QUIDDITCH SIGN-UP:
Anyone interested in joining Pecari’s Quidditch team had best sign their name here. Tryouts will be held next Saturday at eight AM sharp. Indicate your year and desired position as follows.

Name: Sophie Jamison
Year: Sixth
Position: Keeper and Captain.

The blue-eyed teen added a scrap piece of parchment next to the signup. The parchment featured a huge arrow and the word “QUIDDITCH”. Sophie had been sure to charm the ink of the page to flash neon gold and brown. Anyone who even glanced past the board would probably find their eyes drawn in by the glowing colors.

Subthreads:

One for the Team by Ann Pierce

Train Me Up! by Rupert Princeton

Is this the right decision? by Waverly Canterbury

Signing up again. by Mellie Goodwin

Reclaiming MY spot by Jade Owen

First year as Assistant Captain! by Amira Thornton

12 Sophie Jamison Quidditch Sign-up! 34 Sophie Jamison 1 5

Ann Pierce

September 02, 2012 10:20 AM

One for the Team by Ann Pierce

Annabelle and Annette Pierce understood one thing above all others: in the New Hampshire Pierces, a girl signing up for Quidditch was the first step down a road that led to disownment, and to their mother, it was the whole jouney. Though they did not want to get disowned, the forbidden nature of the sport gave it a sparkling enticement to the girls that it almost certainly would not have had if they had been allowed to ride brooms with Derry and Thad.

Instead, the denial of that opportunity had created a festering curiousity that led to an adrenaline fuelled secret learning, which in turn had hatched what the Anns considered a foolproof plan.

One of them would sign up for Quidditch while the other stood nearby and rained on the parade. Since one of them was behaving propperly, and nobody could tell them apart, Mother could not disown either if them, since she didn't know who was being bad.

So with this anonymity in mind, one twin stood aside, frowning and saying, "No, you mustn't. Mother will be very angry," while the other added the following information to the list:

Name: Ann Pierce
Year: First
Position: Not Beater

1 Ann Pierce One for the Team 246 Ann Pierce 0 5

Rupert Princeton

September 02, 2012 11:14 AM

Train Me Up! by Rupert Princeton

There was loads expected of Rupert coming into his first year at Sonora. His parents expected him to follow in his brother's footsteps. They wanted him to be a leader, a star Quidditch player, an intelligent student in America. Rupert, of course, took their words with a grain of salt since his parents hadn't paid much attention to him until he started school.

Quidditch, however, was one passion Rupert could not deny himself. He would give up his good marks, his interest in different clubs, and even his birthright, though it mattered not, for Quidditch. He had broken multiple bones playing the dangerous sport, but it did nothing but keep him addicted to the adrenaline rush.

It was with no hesitation that, as soon as he saw the sign-up sheet, he immediately took out his quill and signed his name. Perhaps with some training, he and his teammates would beat his older brother's team. To his knowledge, Crotalus had yet to win the House Cup and Pecari had won two years ago. There was a chance. With that, Rupert grinned at the board, scanning it for anyone he might know, and then walked out for some breakfast.

Rupert Princeton
First year
Beater or Chaser

40 Rupert Princeton Train Me Up! 248 Rupert Princeton 0 5

Waverly Canterbury

September 02, 2012 10:48 PM

Is this the right decision? by Waverly Canterbury

Waverly had exhausted almost every non-fiction Quidditch book in the library researching positions to try out for. She had thought about trying out for a long time, but now that she was finally in her third year, she really wanted to be on the team. It would be hard to add Quidditch into all of her other extracurriculers, but she would do it! She could be just like any witch who had grown up with magic. And if Waverly decided she'd much rather be on the sidelines, then at least she could say she had been a part of the Pecari team.

She hadn't exactly grown up as an athletic girl, but she would consider herself in well-enough shape. She liked to walk and hike and bike a lot. Riding brooms wasn't too hard either, though joining the team meant she'd have to buy her own broom. The school ones weren't so good, at least it said so in all of the books she had read about brooms in the past few weeks.

After researching the positions, and looking up and down the Quidditch signup sheet, she decided that there was no way she could ever be a Chaser. What she really wanted to be was a Keeper, but that was out of the question. It seemed inevitable that the only position that was really open was the Chaser position. Waverly was definitely not strong enough to hit a bludger around and she wasn't skilled with a bat anyway. Seeking was way too much pressure and finding a golden ball in the middle of a game sounded like finding a needle in a haystack. She didn't know how Jade did it.

It was inevitable. Waverly sighed heavily, but finally signed her name, wanting to be on the team more. She was afraid of broken bones, but hopefully that wouldn't happen! Waverly walked away after signing her name feeling slightly nervous.

Name: Waverly Canterbury
Year: Third-year
Position: Chaser (or reserve Keeper)

19 Waverly Canterbury Is this the right decision? 218 Waverly Canterbury 0 5

Mellie Goodwin

September 03, 2012 3:10 PM

Signing up again. by Mellie Goodwin

She knew it was a big loss for the Quidditch team, but privately, Mellie was sort of glad that Mel Eagle had graduated. Not only was there likely to be much less confusion on the Pitch when a Mel and a Mellie weren’t on it at the same time, but the big Beater had always intimidated her, something that Sophie didn’t do as much.

The former captain had, though, made up for what she failed to do for Mellie’s nerve around large angry-seeming people with what she’d done for her physical strength and coordination in last year’s brutal training sessions, so now she thought she was much better suited to playing Quidditch than she had been before. That, she thought, made it really ironic that this was the year she had considered just dropping the team from her schedule. She still didn’t have the nerve to wear any of them besides, sometimes, the lip gloss, but in the bottom of her trunk, she had a make-up kit and a skirt and a pair of high-heeled sandals, and that dangled the possibility before her eyes that she could maybe actually be…girly, the way she liked to think about being, instead of one of the guys, the way she had always been. Girly people didn’t usually play Quidditch.

She had finally decided to stay, though, because the team was the main time she spent time with other Pecaris, because she felt like she ought to be a supportive roommate to Amira as she became Assistant Captain, and because as appealing as that all sounded, it still scared her half to death to go from thinking about it to thinking about going through with it. This meant she could at least, if she decided against staying totally the way she was, stay halfway between the two, instead of being firmly stuck on one side or the other. The way the sign up was structured bothered her a little, for some reason, but she wrote it all out anyway –

Name: Mellie Goodwin
Year: Fourth
Position: Chaser –

Before she went to her first class one day, then put her pen away and headed out of Pecari, still wondering if she had done the right thing and hoping that she could stop thinking about it sometime soon, like before she found it distracting while she was trying to do things that led to not failing classes.

16 Mellie Goodwin Signing up again. 206 Mellie Goodwin 0 5

Jade Owen

September 03, 2012 3:19 PM

Reclaiming MY spot by Jade Owen

There were certain undeniable truths in life - some good, some bad - and occasionally these presented themselves as realisations before the sequence of events had occured as proof. When it came to Quiddithc this year, Jade could admit several of these undeniable truths. The most obvious, of course, was that she would make Seeker for Pecari. Admittedly, she hadn't brought as much glory to her House in her first year as she had in her second, having failed to catch the Snitch. In her defense, the rest of her team had sucked pretty bad, too. Maybe they were just having an off year. This year would be better, Jade knew it, even if it were for undeniable truth Number Two: Amira was assistant captain, and was therefore guaranteed to be a pain. It was highly unfair, as Amira was petty, had no leadership skills, and was a drama queen on top of all that. there was no way she should have made such a title, excpet for the unfortunate fact that she was next oldest on the team after Amira, and at Sonora the title of captain tended to pass in this manner.

Sadly, Jade knew that no amount of complaining or feelling sour would get rid of Amira out of the AQC spot. Instead, she was resigned to watch Amira like a hawk (the actual birds, not the Aladrens, though they probably did tend to notice more than most), and if that girl put one toe wrong, Jade would be complaining staright to the Coach, maybe their Head of House, and to anyone else who would listen. She would not be the victim of a petty Pecari on a power trip.

Personal quibbles aside, Jade loved being on the Quidditch team for the past two years, and she revelled in the thrill of out-flying a Bludger. A small part of her didn't even care whether or not she won, so long as she got to play. Victory was always sweet, naturally - and nothing would be better to wipe that smirk of Arnold Carey's face for the second time - but it wasn't the sole focus of the game, in Jade's opinion.

So when Sophie put the sign up sheet on the House noticeboard, Jade wasted no time in adding her own name to the list: Jade Owen, third year, Seeker. It was only after she added her own details that she took a minute to glance at the other names already on the sign up sheet: two first years and her Muggleborn roommate, Waverly. Good Merlin, Pecari was going to need her this year; there was no way this collection of misfits was going to make it to the final game without their star Seeker.

0 Jade Owen Reclaiming MY spot 221 Jade Owen 0 5

Amira Thornton

September 12, 2012 3:21 PM

First year as Assistant Captain! by Amira Thornton

Amira had been told at the end of the year before, her third year, that she would become Pecari Quidditch Team’s new Assistant Captain underneath Sophie Jameson, the blonde 5th year Assistant Captain from the year before. Now, in her 4th year herself, Amira was ready to win, to show the whole school what Pecari could do.

Over the summer she’d grown in every sense of the word. She was now much taller and more muscles had developed due to practicing more than ever before. She was also developing into a more (how best to put this?) well, into more of a young woman. (For lack of a better way of putting it). She’d spent a good portion of the summer devising some plans to help Sophie out. Mira hoped Sophie liked them when she got to tell her about them!

In either case, now she was back at school, wearing more girly things than before, thanks to growing female parts and the desire of her mother for her to try to act more like a girl. Sure, she wasn’t entirely thrilled about it, but there were certain aspects of it that she liked. The first thing was that now she was starting to actually see the boys around her not only just as competitors, but also as cute. Sure, that was odd, but that was life, right? The second was the thought that perhaps the boys will start to notice her as more than just a competitor to them. She’d started to notice some of the boys in their Oregon neighborhood, one in particular stuck out more than the others. His name was Deacon and he’d been in her classes before she left for Sonora. Mira had spent some time with him too, her story was that she and her sisters went to a Boarding School in Europe once they turned 11 because there were so many kids at home, too many for even their mother and new Nanny/Housekeeper, Graciella, to take care of. She made it out to be a sort of sob story to him, but then made the mistake of telling him how she had become Assistant Captain for her Houses’ Team and he wanted to see her play.

She’d actually ended up telling him about Quidditch and the other things she’d been doing there the last three years. Mira almost told him about Magic too, but stopped herself just before she’d have given herself away. The now fourteen year old managed to make Quidditch seem like a European sport played only at Boarding Schools and he didn’t know any better about it.

With Summer over though, the Pecari was back in Arizona and ready to roll into a great Quidditch Season. Without Mel things would be different, but Amira was more than prepared to take up the slack. If it was up to her, Pecari would be working harder than ever before in order to win. They were a bunch of winners, even without their Captain of the year before. Sure, Mira and Mel had their differences, but the new fourth year had a lot of respect for the older girl. Just as she had for Sophie, for that matter. There was only two years difference in their ages, but that didn’t mean anything to her. Sophie was her Captain and though she was an assistant or just a player, she’d still respect her. Sophie had never as much said a nasty word to her before, and she was sure she wouldn’t even still.

Amira had decided that their team would win again, just like the year she’d had to miss due to her own stupidity. And discipline was key to the win. She knew that she was taller and more scary than Sophie. This fact made her wonder if she’d end up having to use her intimidation to get the team to work hard. She would do anything for the win, well, just about anything anyway. The Captain and Assistant Captain had huge dedication to the sport and to their house and that would be big to their win too. Her only slight issue was Jade Owen.

I’m Assistant Captain now, I have to be professional. she thought to herself as she walked into Pecari Common Room. Spotting the brown and gold sign on the Information Board she grinned and ran up to it. Reading all the words on the page, she nodded and memorized the time and day of Tryouts and then glanced down at the list of people who’d already signed up. Two first years, a second year, her roommate Mellie and HER… Jade had signed up again, and to boot, for Seeker. I’ll give her a fair shot, but she’s not gonna win out. She won’t.

On the sheet, she wrote, Amira Thornton, 4th year, Assistant Captain, Seeker and walked away from it, grinning from ear to ear to go find Clara.

0 Amira Thornton First year as Assistant Captain! 208 Amira Thornton 0 5