Beater try-out on Quidditch Pitch

Captain Liac Reinhardt

June 20, 2015 2:48 AM

Teppenpaw Tryouts by Captain Liac Reinhardt

It was a sunny day that afternoon out on the pitch. Luckily for Liac he had claimed a twilight time slot so it wouldn't be too hot for his team. Even so he made sure to provide lots of water charmed to stay cool even after several hours. Magic definitely had it's benefits compared to some of the huge ice boxes Muggle parents relied on at sports games.

The only people who signed up for the team were those who had played last year so Liac was hopeful that there would be last minute walk-ons. If there were he would be sure to extend an extra happy thank-Merlin-we-have-more-people-this-is-gonna-be-awesome smile. His regular teammates on the other hand, he made sure to give hearty pats on the back in hopes they would get pumped for tryouts. Once everyone was there, Liac had everyone give one interesting thing that they did over the summer.

"Now, as most of you know, last year we combined with Crotalus. And depending on the amount of people who try out for each team we may have to combine again. Okay," he said, movin gon to the main event of the day. "Before you all start playing, I want us all to take a quick lap around the pitch on foot. Then, we will all stretch as a team timing the stretches together. Next we will get brooms and do two laps around the pitch to get warmed up. Remember, this is not a race," he added. Although Teppenpaws were not the sort ot turn every little task into a competition he thought he ought to remind them anyway.

After the team had ran, stretched, and flown he gathered them together again to explain how the rest of try outs would work. "We will each be trying out for every position," as he didn't want to pigeon hole any of his teammates into a position they hadn't enjoyed the previous year. "We will be doing two on two chasers against a keeper, rotating keeper every twenty points. Next we will go through a beater obstacle course, trying to hit the blue dummies with bludgers and avoiding the yellow ones. Last we will all be attempting the Seeker challenge in which I will release a practise snitch and time to see how long it takes you to locate it as well as how long it takes you to capture it."

OOC: Walk-ons are completely welcome and would be asked to introduce themselves before sharing the interesting thing they did that summer. Please remember that Quidditch is like classes in that it is based on your creativity and realism rather than how well your characters perform. Although Liac is having you try out for each position, please indicate at the end of your post in OOC what position you think your character would have done best at.

Subthreads:

Trying Out by Ginger Pierce

Here we go! by Jake Manger

Beater try-out by Tobi Reinhardt

0 Captain Liac Reinhardt Teppenpaw Tryouts 288 Captain Liac Reinhardt 1 5

Ginger Pierce

June 22, 2015 1:54 PM

Trying Out by Ginger Pierce

Ginger arrived on the Pitch a few minutes before the try-outs were scheduled to begin, not wanting to be too early and certainly not wanting to be late. She chatted briefly with some of the other students there until Liac started up his plans for the try-outs. When it came to her turn to share something about her summer, she happily announced that she'd gotten to play a bit part as a messenger in a Shakespeare play over the summer, and she'd even had one line.

She groaned a little as they were told to start running on foot, but she was in decent shape - her lifestyle could easily be generalized as 'active' - so she wasn't too out of breath or sweating copious amounts when she finished up. She hadn't tried to run fastest - she was pretty sure she was still be the shortest person on the team so that would have been somewhat doomed to failure - but she had kept up with everyone else without overmuch trouble, merely hurrying along when she started to fall behind but otherwise keeping a steady pace most of the time.

Stretching with everyone else was easy, almost relaxing and gave her a chance to get back what breath she'd lost during the run. She was naturally flexible, so none of the exercises gave her any difficulty.

The flying part went better than the run, too, since the length of her legs didn't matter quite so much. Again, she didn't push herself to full out top speed, instead choosing to just keep even with the main group of the rest of the team. This was just a warm-up after all; there was no sense in exhausting herself before the try-outs had even properly begun. She ended the two flying laps feeling re-acquainted with her school broom after the long summer away, which she supposed had probably been the point of the whole thing.

Liac resumed talking after that, and the look of dawning horror on Ginger's face quickly surpassed the dismay of the mild groan she'd let out upon being told to run. She had not been expecting to try-out for anything but Keeper today, and was not looking forward to that changing. After seeing how the other people in the school played Quidditch, she had zero interest in playing any of the other positions, and would have been quite happy to switch out her Keeper job for a place on the bench if there had been enough people for it.

As the try-outs went on though, she found she wasn't much worse suited for some of them, at least in theory if not in gameplay, as she was for Keeper itself. She was too little to be a truly effective Keeper, which would surprise nobody after her lack of success last year, though her technique had vastly improved since this time last year. Her lack of size also made her a pretty awful Beater, since she didn't have any real amount of power behind her hits. She could hit the blue dummies accurately enough, she'd found, but not hard enough to do any real damage. Not that she wanted to cause damage. She didn't even eat meat most of the time, because she didn't want to be indirectly responsible for the deaths of animals.

For Chaser, she lacked the competitive edge that would put her in the best positions for catching and she didn't fly fast enough to make any breakaway runs down the pitch with the Quaffle, partly because she was on one of the school brooms and partly because she had just never needed to fly super fast for more than a moment or two before and it kind of scared her.

Oddly enough, it was Seeker that she seemed to do best at, at least comparatively speaking. She was sure Jake and Uzume were both better options than she was for that most critical of positions, and she really didn't want the stress of having the whole game ride on her shoulders, but her size was actually an advantage there, unlike in Keeper and Beater, and while flying fast was still a problem (and flying fast downwards was worse), it was at least limited to shorter spurts than the Chasers had to maintain for almost the entire game. But without the pressure of a game hanging on her, she did pretty decently with catching the practice snitch in a reasonable amount of time.

In short, she had discovered, pretty much as she had figured she would when Liac first announced the plan, that she was an entirely mediocre player across the board, not standing out as being good at anything, and what she sucked at the least was the one spot she really really really did not want to be saddled with, and it already had two people who actually wanted it more anyway.

As she was packing up at the end, she walked past Liac, to make it verbally clear - in case there was any doubt and it mattered at all - where her preferences lay. "Hey, look, I know I'm not a great player, so I don't mind being on the bench at all, if you think somebody else would be a better Keeper, but I don't really want to play anything else, okay?" she meant to make it an unambiguous offer to take reserve with no hard feelings, but the last word snuck in at the end, turning it into something of a pleading request instead.

OOC: Ginger is accurately accessing her skills. She may have the raw talent to eventually become decent, even good, elsewhere, but the only one she's got any interest in developing is Keeper because it intimidates her the least and she's not really well suited in personality to play anything seriously or competitively. She's just not star Quidditch player material and she understands and accepts that.

1 Ginger Pierce Trying Out 302 Ginger Pierce 0 5

Jake Manger

June 25, 2015 2:45 PM

Here we go! by Jake Manger

As Jake strolled down to the Pitch for tryouts, he couldn’t help but admire his new broom. It had arrived yesterday with a tag saying, Hope you like it. Love, Dad. which might not have been weird until he remembered that his dad had just bought him a broom the year prior. This one was the same brand and design as his old one, just the next year’s model. Jake never really understood what his dad was doing or why, but nonetheless, he noted mentally to send a thank-you card as soon as he had the chance.

And his newfound dilemma, it seemed, would not plague him on the Pitch today. Jake was having quite a string of difficulties around girls lately, beginning at the Opening Feast with his realization that they had Parts of Interest and continuing on through these past weeks, inspiring stupid mistakes like spilled potions and mis-aimed spells. His grades were going to suffer, and he knew it, but fortunately, the only girl he had to be around today was Ginger, and she was just a little kid. She was safe.

He was excited to take a lap around the Pitch on foot as he happened to really enjoy running; there was something freeing about the speed and the adrenaline, the way your heart and lungs stepped up their game to keep you going. Running made Jake feel human. Of course, this wasn’t a full-out run, so he didn’t have to put in all his effort. And while he could have easily led the group, he noticed Ginger near the back and slowed up a tad to meet up with her.

After the stretching and flying laps, which for Jake went rather uneventfully, he eagerly awaited his Captain’s instructions. Upon receiving them, he grew more excited than ever; this playing-all-the-positions thing sounded pretty fun and was, he felt, a smart move on Liac’s part. It gave everybody an opportunity to try all the positions to see practically which position they were both enjoyed and did best.

Jake could appear on the outside like a decent Chaser, but he knew immediately that he wasn’t competitive enough. In the Keeper position he did well enough, and had Ginger, whom he considered better than he was, not been around, he might have tried for it. At Beater he completely failed; honestly, he wasn’t sure why that position even existed because it seemed too brutal and made the game too dangerous, both of which decreased the fun. And his discomfort in even trying it was very apparent, as sending a Bludger at even just a dummy made him visibly cringe. He wasn’t sure if he did well because he couldn’t stand to look where it went.

But in Seeker, he found comfort. Marcus was the one who told him he’d be a good one. Jake was pretty small for his age, which gave him an advantage in wind-resistance, and he had a steady hand and focused eyes. This new broom really gave him an unfounded bonus, though, rocketing him forward to grab the Snitch much more easily than he’d expected. But maybe part of it was just him improving, too; he had practiced quite a bit over the summer, all in good fun, and maybe it was paying off.

OOC: Jake’s narrative is fairly accurate. He’d be best for Seeker, a decent Keeper, a less-than-average Chaser, and an awful Beater.

12 Jake Manger Here we go! 280 Jake Manger 0 5

Tobi Reinhardt

July 05, 2015 6:51 PM

Beater try-out by Tobi Reinhardt

For Tobi, Quidditch had never been something that he had done for himself. He had signed up the year before so that Liac might have a better chance at forming a team, and growing up he had always preferred the lacrosse with brooms his mother’s family liked to play. This year, he had signed up despite knowing there would be enough players with extras if everyone from Teppalus came back since it was common knowledge that Arne would be trying out for the Quidditch team when he got to Sonora. This year, he was in a bit of a dilemma. Arne was trying out for Beater, he and Liac were returning Beaters, and the Teppenpaw and Crotalus teams were combining again. He couldn’t let Liac down—the partnership he had with his twin-cousin was fun and he genuinely liked working with Liac more than anything. Yet, he couldn’t help but feel selfish that he was taking a spot that Arne wanted more than he did. His younger brother was certainly more of a sports kind of person, and despite the complicated mess of emotions he had been recently, Tobi also knew that Arne actually liked playing on a team and interacting with other people—certainly he liked that kind of thing more than Tobi who would have preferred to wander around the Labyrinth Gardens by himself.

The morning of try-outs, he and Liac had waved Arne over to them to have a Reinhardt breakfast together, and his younger brother had actually been almost pleasant! It was a step in the right direction, Tobi felt, and as he watched the two people he felt closest to in the whole school interact, and fretted. Who would be more disappointed if he stayed Beater, who would be more disappointed if he quit the team. He honestly didn’t know, it felt as though he were being forced to choose between Liac and Arne and he just couldn’t—despite all the technicalities, he felt as though both were his brothers. Tobi smiled as Arne made a joke and took a bite of the sandwich he had made.

That afternoon, as Teppenpaw try-outs grew near, Tobi let Liac go ahead without him. “I just…have to do something,” he made the excuse as he slowly tied the laces on his shoes. After Liac left, Tobi walked to the bathroom to wash his face. After drying it, he stared at himself in the mirror. The same high cheekbones as always, the same tanned skin, and the same dark, dark hair, tied up neatly so that it didn’t get in his face as he walked around. He had to go to try-outs, he had put his name down and Liac was counting on him. And in that, Tobi made his decision—he couldn’t leave Liac alone with Alistair, he just couldn’t. Arne would be on Liac’s side all the way, Tobi knew, it was just what Reinhardts did, but somehow he felt as though leaving Liac to deal with that Crotalus captain without his silent support was just too cruel.

As he made his way to the Pitch, he ran into Arne doing goodness knows what. “Hey,” he said, catching his younger brother’s arm, Arne’s face slowly turning into the scowl that Tobi had become so accustomed to seeing grace his face. “I’m trying out for Beater again, but if you want the position, you can have it, I can switch or something.” Arne’s look was one of disgust as he twisted his arm away and left Tobi standing in the hallway, staring after him as Arne continued on the way he was going. Tobi sighed. At least he had tried, somehow he had known Arne wouldn’t accept the offering.

When he got to the Pitch, Tobi gave Liac a smile, trying to hide the shock and disappointment of his younger brother rejecting him so openly. He went through the motions, keeping pace with the others as they ran around the Pitch, an easy task since Tobi was used to running in the forests and on small mountain trails near his house in Washington. His laps went by as normal and he went to the Beater’s task first as it was the only position he really knew how to play. The other jobs weren’t really for him—Seeker was too spot light-y, and Keeper was not something he particularly wanted to do. Besides, Ginger seemed to be rather set with her position and Tobi didn’t want to take someone else’s job away from them. Never the less, after he finished his Beater trials, he lined up for the rest of them, leaving Seeker for last just in case they ran out of time and he would be able to skip that part of the try-outs.

10 Tobi Reinhardt Beater try-out 289 Tobi Reinhardt 0 5