Coach Reilly
October 27, 2018 10:09 AM
Quidditch Match! by Coach Reilly
Coach Patricia Reilly stood in among the fourteen students that made up Sonora’s school-wide Quidditch team, plus reserves. Fourteen was a very convenient number. It meant they could have full matches during practice sometimes. Other times they worked on coordinating specific plays or drilled certain skills that had needed improvement during a recent league match, but today was a good day for just playing a good solid game of Quidditch. Chilly, of course - it was January- but clear and not too windy.She checked over the paper she held in her hands, more as a symbolic gesture than because she didn’t already know what it said. “Midterm grades are in,” she remarked gravely to the gathered students. “As you all know, anyone not keeping up in their studies cannot continue to play.” She paused a moment for suspense, giving hard looks toward the students teetering just a bit too close to the passing line for her comfort. “You’re all fine.” She smiled again.
“We’ll be playing a practice match today.” She waited for the couple of cheers that erupted from this announcement, the smile still hovering on her lips. “Joe, you’ll be captain of the second team.” Ben Pierce had been chosen as the primary captain for the school team as a whole, so it was a given that he would be captaining the first team. She changed up her secondary captain, to give each of the students who marked it on the sign up sheet a chance to try it out, but Joe got it most often as he was a good match for Ben, both of them being seventh years and beaters.
“We’ve got a game against the Howard School of Magic this weekend so all first string players are in their team positions today.” That wasn’t always the case. She mixed those up, too, letting the kids have a turn at positions they had wanted but not gotten, and to give her an idea of how she might rearrange the team next year, when her two strongest beaters were gone.
“With Ben, we have Jozua as a beater,” she frowned at them as both boys groaned, “Lily, Ness, and Malikhi as Chasers, and Eden and Tatiana as Seeker and Keeper, respectively.”
“For Joe, we have Parker as your second beater, Simon, Winston, and Evelyn as Chasers, Amelia, you’re the Seeker, and Nathaniel, you have Keeper today.” Jozua often played Keeper during practice, as it seemed to be the only position he actually liked, but Nathaniel was technically the reserve Keeper, Jozua having declined competitive play, and the younger Teppenpaw did need some practice in case Tatiana ever couldn’t make a game.
“Any questions? Good, you can have a few minutes to work out your strategy, then we’ll begin.”
The two teams huddled around their captains. She handed out yellow practice robes to Joe’s team (their captain was a Teppenpaw) and red ones to Ben’s (red was a good contrast color to yellow).
Once the two teams were equipped with their practice robes, and seemed to be done making plans, she summoned to two captains together to shake hands. Once they returned to their teams, she released the snitch and bludgers (they were using game regulation balls, not practice ones), threw the Quaffle high into the air, and blew her whistle to start the game.
OOC: Welcome to Quidditch playing! I know we have a few new people. Quidditch rules can be found here, but the gist is that there is no posting order, just build off of whoever has already posted. No god-modding; you can say you had a good solid well-aimed throw, but you can’t say your teammate caught it, in case they want to fumble or an opposing player wants to intercept. Use the html font tag shown below to show your name in your team color.
You can assume there have been official league games already. We won some, we lost some.
For reference, the official team is as follows:
First String
Ben Pierce (Captain, Beater)
Joe Umland (Beater)
Simon Mordue (Chaser)
Winston Pierce (Chaser)
Lily Spencer (Chaser)
Eden Manger (Seeker)
Tatiana Vorontsova (Keeper)
Reserves
Nathaniel (Keeper)
Amelia (Seeker)
Malikhi, Evelyn, Ness (Chasers)
Parker (Beater)
And these are today’s practice teams with the font tags to use.
Red Team (<font color=red>Your Character Name, Your Position</font>)
Ben Pierce (Captain, Beater)
Jozua Sparks (Beater)
Lily Spencer (Chaser)
Ness McLeod (Chaser)
Malikhi Hill (Chaser)
Eden Manger (Seeker)
Tatiana Vorontsova (Keeper)
Yellow Team (<font color=yellow>Your Character Name, Your Position</font>)
Joe Umland (Captain, Beater)
Parker Fitzgerald (Beater)
Simon Mordue (Chaser)
Winston Pierce (Chaser)
Evelyn Stones (Chaser)
Amelia Layne (Seeker)
Nathaniel Mordue (Keeper)
Subthreads: Let's get this party started! by <font color=red>Lily Spencer, Chaser</font> with <font color=red>Captain Ben Pierce, Beater</font>, <font color=yellow>Winston Pierce, Chaser</font>, (<font color=yellow>Evelyn Stones, Chaser</font>), Coach Reilly, <font color="yellow">Joe Umland, Cap-Beater</font>, <font color="yellow">Simon Mordue, Chaser</font>, <font color="red">Tatiana Vorontsova,Keeper</font>, <font color=red>Ness McLeod, Chaser </font>
Guarding Eden by <font color=red>Jozua Sparks, Beater</font> with <font color="yellow">Amelia Layne, Seeker</font>, Coach Reilly
Don't mind me, I'm just keeping score.... by <font color="yellow">Nate Mordue, Keeper</font>
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Coach Reilly
Quidditch Match!
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<font color=red>Jozua Sparks, Beater</font>
October 31, 2018 1:14 PM
Guarding Eden by <font color=red>Jozua Sparks, Beater</font>
Jozua groaned as the Coach put him in as a beater again. He hated being beater. He hated being a Chaser, too, but he hated being a Beater more. But he kept getting stuck there because that was the spot team seemed most lacking in, and that was only going to get worse next year once Ben and Joe graduated. He was actually tempted, if only a little, to actually volunteer to play competitively next year, if only to guarantee his spot as Keeper during practice games. He was, he thought, maybe possibly a better Keeper than Tatiana, and even more possibly better than Nathaniel. He had longer arms at any rate.And surely it was better for everyone if he was parked in front of the goals instead of flinging dangerous metal balls about with no real idea how to aim them properly. His beating strategy was basically ‘hit it and hope for the best’.
Maybe he just wasn’t very good at hoping. He could usually manage the hitting part at least. It was where the bludger went after it encountered his bat that was often the problem.
Though his hopes to get assigned to Eden paid off. There was just way too much going on around the six chasers for him to have a prayer of doing any good there. At least with the seeker, there was only one person to protect. He could usually handle that much. Deflection didn’t require any aim other than not hitting the person it was already heading towards, which was easy enough most of the time.
He gave a salute to Eden and a grin he hoped looked confident. When the whistle blew, he kicked up into the air, taking Ben’s instructions to heart. Just guarding. Nothing else. Amelia was not his concern, only Eden. He followed Eden and didn’t so much as try to collect a bludger for his own use.
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<font color=red>Jozua Sparks, Beater</font>
Guarding Eden
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<font color="yellow">Amelia Layne, Seeker</font>
November 09, 2018 4:12 PM
Hunting the Snitch. by <font color="yellow">Amelia Layne, Seeker</font>
As much as she knew it had been a good idea, it still felt kind of weird to Amelia not to aim for the top. Therefore, practice games were actually kind of a relief, because she was automatically back in a prominent role, but still without the stress of constantly traveling and battling other Seekers and battling Eden within the school and all that. She could study like a maniac for her CATS and still feel like she wasn’t a complete one-trick pony, something that all her relatives seemed to think would be a death sentence to doing well in life after high school, however much Lionel had barely even qualified for the one trick. Lionel, after all, was still being guided by Granddad and Grandmother and Uncle Geoff, and supported to an extent; without them, Amelia didn’t seriously question that it would take her brother very long to end up no better off than their mama, and the last Amelia had heard of her, she’d been painting plates for some kind of loosey-goosey touristy thing in North Dakota. It was such a waste; Mama really was a talented painter, but who besides them and random people with fifty bucks would ever know it, since Mama didn’t have a degree in studio art or connections to galleries to back it up?Admittedly, Amelia knew she was not at the top of the game in academics, either. Without Uncle Geoff, she suspected she would struggle to get much of anywhere, either. Which underscored the point but also reminded her that but for the grace of God went she – or somewhere close to there, anyway, since Amelia couldn’t paint. She was much more comfortable with the idea of working in the lab that made the paint.
She didn’t know either of the captains well, but was not entirely pleased with her assignment. Joe Umland was a perfectly capable Beater, of course (her own acquaintance with his older brother made her suspect he might not have had much choice in the matter), but he had also been the Teppenpaw captain. On one hand, he was John Umland’s brother, but on the other, he was…a Teppenpaw. Teppenpaws were soft, and until very recently, Eden had been Joe’s charge. He might run into conflicts of interest there, ones which would not benefit Amelia. She was therefore glad to see Ben and Joe both seem to assign the least dangerous of the Beaters to the Seekers; Joe promised to back her up at need, but she wasn’t really that worried about his buddy Jozua putting her in too many positions she couldn’t get herself out of.
Still, though, Parker Fitzgerald was new and foreign enough that Amelia still had half an eye out for Bludgers as she kicked off and went into the air and started looking for the Snitch. Since she also had to keep Eden and Jozua in the corner of her eye, this exercise made her wish for a fleeting moment that she was a spider or a fly or something. A multitude of eyes would have made all this watching a lot easier for her.
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<font color="yellow">Amelia Layne, Seeker</font>
Hunting the Snitch.
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<font color="yellow">Amelia Layne, Seeker</font>
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<font color="yellow">Amelia Layne, Seeker</font>
November 24, 2018 2:44 PM
Victory is mine! by <font color="yellow">Amelia Layne, Seeker</font>
Alas, even had Amelia been capable of an Animagus transformation – something she doubted she would ever really be capable of; she was not a walking disaster in Transfiguration, which was something, but nor was she exceptionally talented; more than once, she had worried about whether or not she would be able to make at least an E, the score on a test which her grandfather regarded as an A, on the Transfiguration CATS exam, between solid mediocrity with that form of magic and the stress of the test situation exacerbating things – and had somehow happened to have an Animagus form which was useful for Seeking, she was pretty sure it would have been against the rules to use it on the Pitch. Plus, if she was able to turn herself into a spider at will, she might have an advantage when it came to seeing in multiple directions at once, but a much larger problem with actually steering her broom, much less catching the Snitch, which moved fast enough and was large enough that Amelia suspected it was capable of squishing a spider. Winning was important, no doubt, but she was pretty sure that even Granddad would agree it wasn’t worth dying such a messy, complicated, bizarre, and undignified death over. Especially since she was not exactly noted for winning a lot in this domain in the first place.Injury, however, was something she thought Granddad would tolerate, though he would prefer it if she won and avoided injury at the same time – it meant she had performed better, at least on paper. In reality, Quidditch was too chaotic, with too many variables, for Amelia to think such things were really that neatly quantifiable, but paper results were paper results and the things people looked at. As a result, she kept her head moving even more than the rest of her, looking for both Bludgers and the Snitch, and was just contemplating whether it was really possible to accidentally unscrew her own head from her neck this way when she spotted a flash of gold to her right.
Her stomach jumped up toward her chest cavity and her heart jumped up toward her throat, but she began to dive so quickly that she reckoned the rest of her caught up with their new positions pretty quickly. She didn’t look behind her now, nor even to the side – not for Beaters, or Eden, or Bludgers, or anything. The wind dried out her eyes, but she refused to blink until her hand actually closed around the fluttering lump of metal, giving it not even a fraction of a second to dart out of eyeshot.
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<font color="yellow">Amelia Layne, Seeker</font>
Victory is mine!
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