Aladren Quidditch try outs on Quidditch Pitch

Francesca Wolseithcrafte

June 20, 2015 1:00 AM

Aladren Quidditch try outs by Francesca Wolseithcrafte

Francesca had pictured this moment again and again. And they weren’t just idle daydreams, they were preparation of what she would say and do (along with the frightening ways in which that might go wrong). She felt a little nervous, it felt a little weird, as she stood in front of the team - her team - but it also felt right and she felt ready.

“Ok, unless we get walk ons, we have the exact number of people, fitting the positions exactly. As I see no reason to swap any of you around or argue with that, that makes decisions pretty easy, so I’m going to run today more like a training session.

“We’ll start all together with some agility, then split into groups to pracitse specific skills,” this was how practises were going to look - a group activity on something that was relevant to all of them, like agility, hand-eye co-ordination, speed - then training in small groups on their own positions. She levitated a set of poles into the air to form a reasonably paced slalom. Once all seven players had passed through, the poles were charmed to get closer each round, until the players had reached their limit.

“Everybody up,” she ordered, mounting her own broom.

Once even the most nimble player had been defeated, she returned the team to the ground, to break them up.

“Leonidas and John, you’ll be working with soft balls to start with, focussing on accuracy. You can use the spare set of hoops for targets - see how far away you can get and still hit a ball through the one you want to.” She had discussed Beater training with Leonidas before the try outs - the different areas to be worked on included strength, stamina and accuracy. Whilst she was setting them off this practise, she had made it clear to Leonidas that she would expect him to devise the training exercises for himself and John in future. He had a better idea of what they needed, and it would be good practise for when he took over as captain. They would also be sharing Clark. He spent more time with the Beaters and it was a natural way to split the team but she felt that, as captain, she shouldn’t simply be delegating everything about the most important player to her subordinate. Especially a subordinate that had CATS this year.

“Clark, I want you comfortable on your broom,” Theodore had informed her of Clark’s summer purchase, “I’ll set up some additional agility for you. When you’re feeling confident, we can practise dives. Doesn’t have to be today.

“Chasers, we’ll be practising simple passing today in all directions along with shooting, and will move on to our team manoeuvres once those are smooth.” She didn’t outright state it was because they had a new first year, though it was her reason for starting out slightly slower. Still, Louis Valois was from a respectable family (she’d had to do a little research to check, not being terribly up on her Europeans) so she had hopes for the basics going quickly. “Theodore will be blocking. Let’s go.”

OOC - welcome to Quidditch try outs/training. If there are any walk ons, they are welcome to join whichever area they are most interested in playing, and may assume that Francesca has acknowledged them, taken their details and instructed them to do this. Your ability to write Quidditch is not based on how well you claim to do, but how creative and realistically you write, so keep that in mind when posting.

Subthreads:

Ready for another year. by John Umland with Leonidas Bennett

Trying to Thread the Stone Needle by Clark Dill

13 Francesca Wolseithcrafte Aladren Quidditch try outs 250 Francesca Wolseithcrafte 1 5

John Umland

June 23, 2015 1:45 PM

Ready for another year. by John Umland

It was, John thought, at least a little weird and probably statistically unlikely that the Aladren Quidditch team’s roster had followed the exact same pattern every year for at least three years. Each year he had been here, they had lost a seventh year and seen him replaced by a first year. John himself had taken the slot left vacant by Thaddeus Pierce, Jack Spencer had replaced James Carey, and now a new kid with a thoroughly interesting name (John’s awareness of fashion began and ended with a vague disapproval of make-up and the existence of items of clothing that were actually painful to wear, but French history was entwined with some of the things his mother found interesting and which he therefore knew a little about) had just joined up to replace Anthony Carey. They never fell short, but they never had any extras, either. There were always exactly seven players, and so far always six guys and one girl. It was uncanny.

It also had an obvious downside: if Clark ever got too hurt to play, they were all doomed and it was probably either his or Leonidas' fault. That wouldn’t be fun for anyone. On the bright side, though, they all had great position security and the near-consistent line-up and low number of new faces to process after the first year had made it a lot easier to get comfortable with all but the oldest few members of the team. The pattern would start to break after this year, but for now, things were good. At try-outs, he casually greeted his fellow intermediates, congratulated Clark on the new broom, politely greeted Francesca and Jack, and only moderately awkwardly waved as he said hello to the new guy without using his name since he didn’t know how Guy-he-assumed-was-Louis would pronounce it. His sister wasn’t the type to make a fuss about it, but he knew it did annoy her sometimes when people assumed she was Gillian or Julianne and it seemed safest to assume Louis would feel the same way about whatever his preferred pronunciation was.

At time, Francesca got straight to the point, which John liked and thought was a good omen for the year of doing what she said. A major point of dissension between him and his father involved John's irritation with the My Team's The Bestest Ever style of sports rhetoric. Affection for the representatives of one's own city or province just because they were one's own was one thing, that was part of basic Love of Home and he was as happy as the next guy when his did well at something, but the way a lot of people got about this-or-that Quodpot or Quidditch or hockey or football team struck him as the kind of thing that might have inspired Orwell. Getting caught up in the heat of the moment once or twice while new to being a fan or under truly exceptional circumstances was one thing, but why did so many people consistently get all pumped up when some guy started ranting and raving about this being the Best Team Ever instead of usually staring in utter awe at the sight of such a colossal moron? The kind of statements he was thinking of didn't reflect faith in one’s troops, they either demonstrated suicidal overconfidence or were flat-out lies, and the constant repetition every time there was a game or, sometimes, practice made 'lies' seem more likely. He liked to think Aladren had better taste in leaders than that, though, and was happily un-disappointed at the moment.

He was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to say the same of his performance in the agility challenge. John was a lot better on a broom than he had been as a first year, but he hadn’t been the best even before hitting fourteen and another growth spurt. He still didn’t quite know how to handle the fact that his destiny was apparently going to involve being taller than he’d expected to be; it might work out eventually, but at the moment, he just spent far too much time wondering why, after all the years he had spent loving them, biochemistry and physics occasionally decided they hated him and should do everything in their power to cause him pain.

Today, though, wasn’t a bad day, and while he did eventually have a brush with one of the poles trying to go one more pass than he was really up for, he didn’t think it was going to leave any bruises or impede his ability to practice his position. He nodded when he and Leonidas were instructed to focus on accuracy. After the team broke up for separate skills practices, John hefted his bat and looked at the Assistant Captain.

“So, what’s the plan?” he asked. “Want to start even and see who can hit it further?”

16 John Umland Ready for another year. 285 John Umland 0 5

Clark Dill

June 27, 2015 1:15 PM

Trying to Thread the Stone Needle by Clark Dill

Clark had been growing. He'd grown all of last year, and even more so over the summer. At nearly fifteen now, he towered over his undersized dad (not hard; Dad was only five foot nothing), had a few inches over the average fully grown woman, and stood just about even with the average adult man. And since neither Jamie or Jake, and certainly not Uzume who was both younger and female, had been born with genes that rivaled Clark's for height, he was most likely going to be the tallest Seeker out there this year barring surprise roster changes. Heck, even if Pecari and Teppenpaw and Crotalus found seventh years to play instead of other players his year or younger, Clark probably wouldn't be notably shorter. Certainly, he would have been very obviously taller than Annabelle this year if she hadn't graduated (he'd been taller before this latest growth spurt, too, but he'd needed to stand reasonably close to her to tell for sure).

Excessive height was not exactly the ideal physical specification for Seeker, but at least he was still skinny since all of his growing was upward so far and not much outward yet - beanpole, he thought, was the common phrase used to describe people having his relative proportions of weight and height. Even if nothing else was good about it, he figured he at least had longer arms and therefore longer reach on his competitors.

Between the new summer inches and the new broom, neither of which he'd had the last time he'd flown, he was glad Francesca put him on agility exercises to get used to both of them, especially when he bumped the slalom poles more often than not during the group activity. Given his height, and the likelihood he was going to keep growing at an astounding rate, he'd gotten a broom much longer than the one he'd been using, and it was going to take some time to get used to its new dimensions.

He nodded in agreement to Francesca's assessment that the acclimation process could take longer than just this one practice. "Got it," he agreed verbally to show he understood his assignment. As everyone else broke away to do their own practices, Clark turned back to the slalom poles with determination.

Without the social need to try to keep up with the rest of the team, he took them slowly at first, repeating it again and again until he could maneuver through them cleanly. Then he began to work on increasing his speed without losing his maneuverability.

He was going at a pace a little quicker than his normal cruising speed when the practice broke up, but nowhere near the breakneck pace he wanted to reach before moving on to a tighter course or the next exercise. He'd keep practicing it in the MARS room, he decided, thinking it would be best to put in the extra time now, so he wasn't still learning his broom if Aladren got picked for the first match of the season.

NOTE: Title is an obscure Star Wars reference, referring to a feat of very agile flying in Tatoonine's Beggar's Canyon.

1 Clark Dill Trying to Thread the Stone Needle 277 Clark Dill 0 5

Leonidas Bennett

July 05, 2015 11:31 PM

Good for you by Leonidas Bennett

As Francesca started talking, Leonidas found it hard not to spend some of his time wondering what he would say and do next year when she was gone and he was in her shoes, something he was sure every assistant captain did sooner or later. He was pretty sure he would be the first captain in a while who served for multiple years and had someone his own age on the team, so if he flubbed it, he would have to live with it for two years. Even if he did better the second year, he was sure everyone else would remember the first in vivid detail, and it all started with the first speech.

Luckily, though, the speeches weren’t very complex. Welcome, statement – easy this year because they fit the positions perfectly – and orders. Confident delivery was probably the hardest part, and he thought he could handle that.

For now, though, his job wasn’t much different than it had been last year. He had to keep John in line and spend about half time – like divorced parents, he thought, amused – with Clark, too, helping Clark work on evasive maneuvers while he and John worked on aiming at people. There was, after all, a difference between aiming at goal hoops and aiming even at people that he didn’t like or was completely indifferent to, difficult though it was to be completely indifferent to other players in the heat of the game even if he didn’t know their names right.

Today, though, it was just goal hoops. John seemed enthusiastic. Leo wasn’t sure how to take him proposing an activity, though. You’d expect, he thought, for the new badge holder to do the talking. Of course, John had never been shy that he’d noticed, and it also reminded him a little, weirdly, of his eldest sister. Eliza was a woman in a male-dominated profession, and while she’d had to work hard to stand out from the start, she had gotten almost pushy since she more or less respectably married another banker and some of her colleagues had tried to start treating her more like Bill’s secretary than like someone on their level. Bold colors in her clothes, firm tones, speaking first – none of that was really natural, he thought, for a Crotalus, but it had been learning to do those things or retiring before her thirtieth birthday. Because he’d seen it with Eliza, he thought he recognized some of the same feeling in Francesca, though it seemed more natural with her, probably because she’d been doing it for more of her life or because he just had never known her any other way. Maybe half-bloods were like businesswomen, they always just tried too hard to make up for the favored traits they lacked.

Or maybe it was just that John wasn’t society. From what Leo had read, non-society people tended to talk a lot about ‘equality,’ which made him think their families and organizations must be chaotic. That would explain why, despite the formal paper concessions they had wrung out of the government over the years, everyone knew which social group was still running things. That was good; if everyone was on the same level in their organizations, nothing ever got done – the idea that anything could under those conditions was as absurd as the idea that the government could ever be more than a paper tiger; the families would never allow it to take away their power over their own properties and people – and if nothing ever got done, the Johns and Clarks of the world posed no real threat to the status quo and his people could continue to mostly peacefully cooexist with all the non-society people at Sonora and with the real John and Clark enough to play Quidditch.

“Sure,” he said. “We’ll practice first, though, warm up and get back in the swing of it.” He had had plenty of time to practice over the summer, but wasn’t sure if John had had the same luxury and knew he hadn’t had it with that broom. It would be unkind to fly rings around him when he had no tough love point to prove by doing so, at least not yet. He had given an order, and if it was accepted, then he didn't have an authority problem to deal with.

0 Leonidas Bennett Good for you 269 Leonidas Bennett 0 5