Australia's Most Significant QUAFL Grand Final and the Story Lines Behind It
/Ajantha Abey examines the story lines behind the QUAFL 2019 Grand Final, unpacks years of quidditch backstory, explores the growing battle between university and community clubs around the world, and shines a light on the legacy of past leaders, to see why the game made for one of the most incredible circumstances in international quidditch, and why the Muggles’ victory is one of the biggest moments in quidditch history.
Many thanks to Nicola Gertler, Nathan Morton, and Sam Kilpatrick for their assistance in piecing this together.
The QUAFL 2019 Grand Final Footage goes Live on YouTube at 7:30 PM tonight - watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9oyGtLgekY
The QUAFL 2019 Grand Final was an all-Melbourne show down between longtime juggernaut community team and three-time-national-champions, the Melbourne Manticores, and a university team that has been on a long but steady rise for the last several years, never having made it past the semi finals before - the Monash Muggles.
In this article, I’ve tried to examinethe storylines that led up to this match for each team over the course of 2019 and the last several years,the legacy of the Monash founding members who found themselves facing off against their successor generation, and the broader battle between university and community teams in Australia, and how that fits into the global quidditch scene. The unique set of circumstances of the QUAFL 2019 Grand Final sets the stage for one of the most incredible games in Australian quidditch history, and makes the Monash victory a remarkable diversion from international trends.
The Muggles win QUAFL 2019 | Photo: Maddi Moulton Photography
To understand the full context of this game, however, we need to go back to the Monash Muggles - eventual 2019 champions, but for now, we need to go back to 2012, when the university team was first founded by Manuel Thompson (now retired). With the emergence of the Victorian Quidditch Association in 2013, the team came to prominence, with now household (& Dropbear) names like Nathan Morton, Nicola Gertler, and Dean Rodhouse all joining alongside plenty of other talent. The team always performed solidly at nationals, making semifinals in 2014, rebuilding in 2015 and making the quarter finals, and then going in strong to 2016 as one of the teams tipped to win. In each year, however, they failed to get past the major teams of those years - UNSW and WSQC from NSW, and the Basilisks, Wrackspurts (who came to prominence more from 2015), and Manticores from Victoria.
The Manticores, by contrast, started out as a grass-roots community team, but have always been one of the top performing teams in the country. After losing their first pool play game at QUAFL 2014 to the Unspeakables [a detail I bring up without any personal bias or interest whatsoever], they went on one of the longest winning streak’s (the longest winning streak?) the country has seen, spanning the rest of that national championship to win the title over UNSW, and then run all the way through the 2015 Vic Cup and QUAFL 2015 to another Grand Final run away win over UNSW. [The streak was broken, interestingly by the Muggles, just before QUAFL in a friendly spring charity tournament held by the VQA outside of the Vic Cup]. 2016 saw the Manticores similarly dominant through the season, only foiled at QUAFL by a strong use of slowballing by Perth Phoenixes (lead by 2014 Dropbear captain James Hyder) in Pool Play of QUAFL, and an up-and-coming Wrackspurts in the semi-finals, whose style remains a mystery to quidditch, but were certainly bolstered by the transfer of Dropbears beater Deni Tasman from Manticores, (who thus won QUAFL three years in a row).
A young(er) Ed Vienet takes on ANU with the Muggles at QUAFL 2016 | Photo: Ajantha Abey Quidditch Photography
Interestingly, 2016 saw both the Manticores and Muggles, as well as University of Sydney Unspeakables all tipped to win. After building up for two years, the Muggles came into the tournament extremely strong, and despite being seeded in the third pod, they ended up top of their pool, defeating both ANU and UNSW (4th and 2nd in NSW respectively that year). Manticores had dominated the Vic Cup again, but in the end, but major upsets from the Wrackspurts (winning in overtime against the Manticores) and WSQC (catching from 20 down after spending most of the game down 30 against the Muggles) led to an all-blue final. It some ways, it was an climax (or anticlimax?) to the stories of the Muggles and indeed, Usyd Unspeakables, who had been on a similar trajectory to the Muggles in NSW - slowly building and climbing up the ranks, winning the NSW State Championships for the first time in 2016. Both saw the tournament as highly winnable - indeed, the team’s best shot at winning nationals before older players moved on and graduated. Both were tipped as possible winners, the Muggles driven by Morton and Gertler, the Unspeakables by Luke Derrick and Natalie Astalosh, but in the end, neither were successful, the Unspeakables losing in a SWIM quarter finals to the Manticores.
Then came the highly anticipated 2017, which was unmistakably a watershed year for Australian quidditch. With many of the players on big university programs like Monash, Usyd, and UNSW beginning to graduate or already having left uni, Australia saw the emergence of Graduate Community “Super” Teams - the Whomping Willows Quidditch Club in Melbourne, largely made up of players from the Basilisks and Muggles, and the Sydney City Serpents in Sydney, largely made from USyd and UNSW players. While Melbourne has historically had many community teams, including the Manticores and Basilisks, these were all grass-roots teams whose players were coming to the team brand new. The Willows and Serpents represented something new, where almost the whole, if not the entire team was made up of experienced players - often some of the best players in the state, including a sizeable chunk of Dropbears a piece.
The Willows (green) and Serpents (purple) enter the Australian quidditch scene, drawing in a huge amount of raw Dropbear power | Photo: Ajantha Abey Quidditch Photography
The emergence of Graduate teams was an inevitability - and part of a larger global trend in quidditch already seen in the USA, where college and community have split into two different divisions at the National and Regional level due to the sheer imbalance between teams. In the UK as well, teams such as Velociraptors QC (largely made up of Oxford University Quidditch Club (the 2016 British Champions) players) and Werewolves of London (largely bolstered by an influx of ex-Southampton (2015 British Champions) players) either formed or came to prominence in the 2016-17 season. In the UK, the Raptors and Wolves were dominant over almost the entire rest of the competition, save for Warwick university, whose core experienced players eventually became the core of yet another graduate community team in London (London Quidditch Club), and the three clubs now battle for dominance (with some competition from the London Unspeakables, not strictly a graduate team, but now featuring many such graduates and other experienced players), while the rest of the country watches. Indeed, in the Northern Uk region, the Raptors’ closest competition is their second team, the Megalodons.
I wrote about this trend back at the start of 2017 - questioning whether we would be seeing the start of a similar trend in Australia. Watching countries one to several years ahead of us in terms of quidditch development like the USA and the UK, the writing seemed to be on the wall. Indeed, who could hope to compete with the likes of the Willows and Serpents, when the players who made up those teams not only comprised most of the best players in the state, but also meant that their old teams no longer had their experienced core propping them up? The likes of the Muggles and Usyd leadership certainly saw it coming, and were preparing for it, expecting that QUAFL 2016 was the last chance for their original university teams to have a shot at the National title, before the graduate community teams took over and became too strong.
In some ways, things in 2017 went as predicted. In NSW, while the Serpents sometimes struggled to find synergy among their mix of star power, their sheer level of size, skill, and experience made them overwhelmingly dominant in the NSW Quidditch League, only playing one game in SWIM which they lost to the ANU Owls. Meanwhile in Victoria, the Willows, featuring ex-Muggle Nathan Morton among a number of Basilisks stars (the likes of Taya Rawson, Gen Gibson, James Osmond, etc.) were similarly dominant, with only the Manticores for competition, who retained just as much star power for themselves between Dropbears Callum Mayling, Cassia Menkorst, and Emily Merry, while also starting to pick up some graduates like Dean and Nicola from the Muggles (The Wrackspurts I imagine may have been causing trouble too, but I don’t remember enough of the 2017 Vic Cup season).
Monash Muggles at QUAFL 2017, rebuilding in the wake of the new graduate community teams | Photo: Ajantha Abey Quidditch Photography
A very soggy QUAFL saw the Serpents and Willows face off in an intense SWIM semi-final where the Willows came out victorious and went on to win the tournament against the Wrackspurts - who had defeated the Manticores in the other semi-final. This isn’t the whole story however. While dominant and consistent, a strong recruitment program at Usyd meant that the club, now with three teams and a number of impressive pickups, gradually came back to prominence over the course of the year, with increasingly more convincing defeats over ANU at state finals and QUAFL, and an impressive SWIM performance against the Serpents in the quarter finals, demonstrating a level of regained parity that would have been unthinkable in the UK or US. Similarly, the Muggles also experienced a strong recruitment season, coming into Nationals with two teams and a wealth of talent, and, like Usyd, still making it as far as the quarter finals.
2018 saw the emergence of the Melbourne Ravens - another graduate team formed from the folding of the Wrackspurts and some of Melbourne University Unicorn’s most experienced players. The Ravens, Manticores (bolstered by picking up Neil Kemister from Wrackspurts), Willows, and Muggles all found themselves battling for top position in the Vic Cup. With minor losses to graduating/transferring players, and a lot of depth to work with from their two teams, the Muggles stayed strong and competitive against the very best their state had to offer - most of which could be considered graduate teams, with the Manticores picking up more and more graduate players over the years (even some NSW and QLD graduate players) to add to their now well-experienced core.
2018 was where we saw a foreshadowing of what was to come for the Muggles in 2019, but occurring in the NSW league. By this point, the Usyd Unspeakables, despite further transfers of experienced members to the Serpents, had established themselves as a strong university presence in the top rungs of the NSW league, and using the full advantage of their three teams worth of depth and coming off the back of their 2017 rebuilding year, they dug in against their former teammates on the Serpents. The two teams went game for game the whole year, otherwise uncontested at the top of the ladder, Serpents winning in preseason, Usyd in the first round of the league, Serpents in pool play at Midwinter, Usyd in the Midwinter (and Mudbash) finals, Serpents in the next round of league play, and Usyd at the NQL Finals. Both teams came into QUAFL favourites for NSW against the two Melbourne super teams - Willows and Manticores rounding out the top 4.
USyd Unspeakables edge out a win over the Muggles at QUAFL 2018 to knock them out of the quarter finals, and proceed to the semis against the Willows | Photo: Maddi Moulton Photography
The 2018 quarter finals came down to exactly those four - with Usyd narrowly defeating the Muggles in SWIM twice - once in pool play, and once in the quarter finals. With three SWIM losses to Usyd in major tournaments across the year (Mudbash final play ins, QUAFL pool play, and QUAFL quarter finals), the year could have gone very differently for the Muggles were it not for the SWIM efforts of Usyd (/seeker Alex Cunningham), but nevertheless, 2018 was the year for Usyd as the university team in the limelight. A low scoring SWIM semi-final between the Serpents and Manticores almost saw a Serpents-Usyd QUAFL final, which would have made an interesting prelude to 2019 and an exciting decider for the teams' 3-3 record so far in the year, but a snitch catch to Manticores saw the Vic Cup champions in the grand finals a third time, for a third championship win against that year’s NSW state champions. While this was the first time the Manticores had been held in range in a QUAFL final, it nevertheless gave them a clean sheet in the championship finals.
Following in the steps of the USyd’s rise to the finals in 2018, the Monash Muggles found themselves on a similar trajectory in 2019. With many players on the Willows retiring, and even key names on the Manticores going into partial retirement, the Ravens and Muggles were able to come more into the forefront, now as experienced, well gelled teams. While the Muggles still struggled against a strong Manticores, the latter found themselves losing to the Ravens, who couldn’t hold up against the Muggles - a complicated love triangle if ever there was one. The Muggles, nevertheless, ended up emphatically winning not only Mudbash (against a team primarily composed of Serpents and other NSW players), but also the Vic Cup finals (against the Ravens, who had beaten the Manticores to get there).
A small and depleted Muggles squad is nevertheless victorious for the first time since 2014 at Melbourne Mudbash 2019
Coming off the back of two big seasonal wins, the Muggles were once again favourites for QUAFL - with one major caveat. 2019 saw a rough year for Victorian quidditch, with many clubs struggling for new players and many older players playing less frequently or retiring all together. The Victorian State Teams saw a huge influx of young blood (Mostly from the Muggles and Mudbloods) to fill the gaps of many of the legacy Victorian players from the 2014/16/18 Dropbears teams, and come QUAFL, many teams found themselves without enough players. The Muggles, with the large depth of their club, came under their own steam with a relatively small squad, but the Manticores and Willows found themselves merging into a super team of super teams.
The Willowcores/Mantows/Mangos/Whatever you want to call them featured a huge line up of Australia’s best - from the likes of classic trio Manticores trio of Callum Mayling, Cassia Menkorst, and Emily Merry, and the pairing of Nick Allen and Emmanuel Berkowicz (from the UNSW team of old), Dropbears beaters Nathan Morton, Dean Rodhouse, Anthony Hogan, and Nicola Gertler, ex-Team UK/Oxford/Velociraptors keeper Andrew Hull, and more. While almost all of the above have played on the Dropbears before, at the time of the QUAFL final, none of the Muggles had ever played for the team (Ed Vienet making the 2018 reserves) (though Ed and Maddie Fitzgerald have since made the 2020 Dropbears, and I personally suspect many more would be deserving had they tried out). The merger also meant, however, that most of the people who, in 2016, and left the Muggles for either the Willows or Manticores, now found themselves playing together again.
Ex-founding-Muggles Nicola Gertler and Nathan Morton find themselves reunited on the merged Manticores-Willows team at QUAFL 2019 (playing in Willows jerseys against the Serpents) | Photo: Maddi Moulton Photography
While favourites to win, flying under the Manticores name nevertheless meant that this combined team thus came into the tournament as a second seed - behind the Ravens, Muggles, Unspeakables, and Serpents, drawing the lattermost. The Muggles experienced some trouble from their second seed, the Valkyries, early in the day, but nevertheless came away with a strong victory and continued into day 2 undefeated in their pool. The climactic Serpents-Manticores game at the end of the day, another game with a lot of history and rivalries in it, saw a Serpents clinging to SWIM against a dominant Manticores, but eventually proving victorious against the merged powers - proving perhaps that the super team wasn’t as undefeatable as everyone had imagined.
When the Muggles found themselves on day 2, facing the same Serpents, having blasted through all their opponents so far, another intense SWIM match saw the Serpents (once again) going into the third place play off, while the Muggles faced off against the Manticores-Willows.
And so here we have it - an excessive number of paragraphs later, the stage is set. The Muggles have had a relatively consistent but relatively young team for the past several years. They have some of the top beating talent in Victoria, one of the best tacklers, one of the top keepers, and some of the best female chasers. None of them, however, have ever played for the Dropbears, most of them only started playing in the last couple of years, and this is the first time most of them have made it to this level of quidditch in Australia, and before 2019, Dan Leane was one of the only member of the team to have been a part of a major championship or tournament win (in State Shield for Vic Leadbeaters).
According to Muggles captain Sam Kilpatrick, the team had never really expected to make it that far, taking everything game by game against such high odds with teams like the Serpents and Manticores against them, and it didn't become real until they beat the Serpents - for a team who had been losing out in QUAFL after QUAFL to SWIM games, "we were just happy to be there".
Callum Mayling seeks a way to get a pass through to Cassia Menkorst, past the Muggles core of Ed Vienet, Sam Kilpatrick, Dan Leane, and Maddie Fitzgerald. | Photo: Taylor Angelo Quidditch Shots
Facing them down, most of the Manticores have at least 2-3 or even more years experience, most of them have been in at least one, if not 2-3 national championship grand finals before (and won them), most of them have played for the Dropbears before (a good chunk of them having won the World Cup in 2016), and most incredibly of all, a lot of them stem from the very team whom they’re now facing off against. The likes of Gertler, and Morton played alongside Vienet, Leane, Kilpatrick, Zach Giofkou, Maddy Coleman-Bock, Andrew Kuen, and Jess Cooper in the Muggles’ last major QUAFL run in 2016, and Hogan and Rodhouse both also stem from the Muggles heritage. Even the most experienced of the 2019 Muggles squad, Coleman-Bock, was herself coached by Gertler and Morton.
According to Kilpatrick, playing against such familiar opponents "sparked a little bit of extra competition and bravery, leading to spicier plays" citing, Jess Cooper taking on and holding out against Allen and Mayling, and Vienet's "many brave (stupid?) drives."
And thus, in winning, the Muggles pulled off what is probably one of the most significant championship wins in quidditch. They not only found themselves up 20 for a lot of the game, but following a rapid fire 50-0 points from the Manticores after the 18 minutes mark, the Muggles were still able to hold out against the Manticores in SOP - where the Manticores are most dangerous, and usually able to blow out games. Indeed, the Muggles were able to come back into range from 40 down to catch to win, quite feat in itself, let alone that it was against a bigger, more experienced team of former mentors, in an event that bucked international trends and would be largely unthinkable in the US or UK.
Looking back, between the Manticores in 2018, 2015, and 2014, the Willows in 2017, and the Wrackspurts in 2016, this also makes the Muggles the first university team to win nationals in many years (though the Victorian hold on the cup remains unbroken for that length of time).
Andrew Kuen pulls off a landmark snitch catch in Australian quidditch history | Photo: Chloe Lucia Photography
On a personal but relevant tangent, it’s interesting how closely the rise of the Muggles parallels the Usyd Unspeakables story, and how this whole timeline almost happened in 2018 from the NSW perspective. Both teams, Muggles and Unspekables, emerged around the same time in 2012/13, and both had major runs at QUAFL in 2016. The Muggles’ third place run in 2016 was interestingly preceded by USyd’s third place run in 2015 but the zeitgeist of the time suggested that this would be their last chances at a championship, before their graduates left and the community teams became too powerful. Two years later in 2018, the Unspeakables found themselves Mudbash, Midwinter, and NSW State champions, beating their former teammates on the graduate Serpents team, defying the graduate team prophecy, and making it all the way to the QUAFL finals - further than Usyd had ever been before. They were the lone university team amid the three graduate community teams in the semi-finals, fighting hard to make it past the interstate Willows, and kept the Manticores in range in the finals. One year later, the Muggles found themselves capable of the same run, winning Mudbash, Vic Cup, and the only university club amid three graduate super teams in the semis. Fighting hard against the interstate Serpents to make finals, they also came away, in range but victorious against their former graduate team mates, though from not just one, but both graduate super teams combined, and to win the national championship.
In the words of Nathan Morton:
"2016 was the culmination of 2 years of rebuilding. We knew that Nicola and I were both leaving and that the Muggles had never had a better chance of winning before. We were also very confident of the succession plan going forward, but suspected community teams would be too strong in the future. So, to see the Muggles rebuild again find players and tactics to once again rise to the occasion at QUAFL was an emotional moment and we knew we'd been able to help create something special."
The Monash Muggles and Melbourne Manticores|Whomping Willows in the Closing Ceremony, feat. an absurd amount of star power | Photo: Maddi Moulton Photography
So what does this mean for the future? Can we continue to expect university teams competing at the top of Australian quidditch, or does the long arc of history bend towards the dominance of graduate community teams to the exclusion of university clubs?
While drawing the Manticores in the 2019 quarter finals secured Usyd Unspeakables’ spot in the 5-8th play-offs, the club has retained its three teams of depth now for four years, even into 2020, and has remained one of the top competitors in NSW, despite losing a second round of its first line and most experienced players to a new set of graduate community teams emerging in NSW (Nightmares and Valkyries). While the Unspeakables remain the lone university team in NSW able to contend against the Serpents, Nightmares, and Valkyries, they consistently won against the newer graduate teams in tight games for the duration of 2019, and remained the only NSW team to beat the Serpents all year, though the Serpents (featuring even more ex-Usyd players) were usually victorious againts the rebuilding Usyd (interestingly, the only two teams to beat the Serpents in 2019 were both university teams - the Unspeakables in NQL, and the Muggles at QUAFL). While losing their SWIM not-so-secret-weapon Alex Cunningham to Germany this year, the club continues to build and will likely stay competitive at the top of the NSW league.
Following their 2019 victory, the Muggles will lose star chaser and key tackling threat Ed Vienet to the Ravens, which will be a major loss for the team. Without information on further transfers and with the Vic Cup season not having had a chance to start before our current pandemic circumstances, it’s hard to make any further predictions for this year, though if they are retaining most of th rest of their players, the Muggles should remain a strong team, especially with the level of talent ready to move up from the Mudbloods when the time is right.
I strongly suspect that the multi-team tiered structure of both Monash and Usyd have been vital to both clubs’ success, weathering them through rounds of graduates leaving by having ready-made experienced players able to step up from their second (and third) teams, and shortening the time it takes to rebuild. Interestingly, in the UK, both Oxford and Southampton were two-team clubs, and while Oxford remains nowhere near as competitive as they used to be, Southampton, for at least for a few years after 2016, stayed near the top of UK quidditch after their first exodus. Meanwhile, it was another two team university club, Bristol, that the Velociraptors found themselves going toe to toe against in the 2017 British championships, having had to face Werewolves in the semifinals. The Bristol side has since, however, also mostly to losses to newer graduate teams as they pop up all over the UK.
Nathan Morton and Nicola Gertler alongside their victorious Muggles - legacy in action | Photo: Ajantha Abey Quidditch Photography
The legacy planning (estate planning?) of the Muggles and Usyd Leaderships back in 2016 thus also must be recognised here. Seeing the advent of graduate community teams in Australia coming in 2017, and their moving on coming at the end of the year, the likes of Gertler and Morton from Muggles, and Derrick and Astalosh from Usyd, all took pains to make sure that their clubs would be sustainable after they left. Both teams recruited well in 2016, Usyd forming their Unbreakables B team consistently in that year, and both teams made sure that while many players were moving on, there was still a core of experienced players with leadership experience who could carry on the club in the future. The gaps left by star players were filled with new rising stars who would eventually play on state teams and Dropbears, and the rest is history.
I think it’s important to look back at story lines like these - seeing the bigger picture of how quidditch has developed in Australia and around the world, and seeing where the trend is being broken, and then interrogating why. Club planning is important. The impacts of good recruitment are huge - not just in the present, but years and years into the future. And call me touting Australian exceptionalism, but I think it’s pretty cool that quidditch in this country alone retains at least a little bit of parity between the very best graduate community teams, and the university teams that made them, unlike anywhere else in the world - enough even that a university team can win against combinations of the top graduate teams from both regions in successive games. The legacies and impacts of decisions of team leaders made as much as 5-6 years ago are still being felt at the top levels of the sport today, and led to one of the most remarkable match-circumstances and outcomes in international quidditch.
Who knows how the COVID-19 crisis will affect the state of play when we come out the other side of the pandemic? It’s hard to say anything for certain, other than that we should all be watching the development of the next few years with a lot of excitement.
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