Even among sports, quadball is unique.

The fact that it spawned from pop culture is enough to make it stand out, but the make-up of quadball also significantly differentiates it from practically every other sport out there.

No other sport has such a high proportion of trans and non-binary players in particular. Estimates have around 20% of players as being trans and non-binary, helped by gender diversity being written into the rule book.

At any point in a match, a team may have no more than four players who identify as the same gender on the pitch – a novelty for what is a full contact sport.

That also means that rather than being segregated into different categories or competitions, trans and non-binary players are welcomed into quadball just like anyone else would be.

People who may not otherwise find a place in sport, then, can be drawn to quadball as a space where they can reap the rewards of team physical activity.

One such player is Jon Gray, who has found himself in the Scotland national squad somewhat by accident.

“Growing up in Canada, I did play a lot of sports because the culture there is much more supportive in terms of inclusion,” they said.

“All sports are there either mixed gender, and if they’re not mixed gender it’s the law – at least in Ontario – that they have to provide equal funding and resources for female and male teams.

“That means everyone grows up doing a lot of sports. I was in a really small, rural school, so there was no option not to be on the school team because they wouldn’t have one otherwise. I went from being on the school team for volleyball, hockey, football, all the sports including contact sports, to then going to the Isle of Man and not doing any contact sport.

“One thing I found moving to the UK was that I was doing a lot less sports because everyone had done it since they were five, so you were really good at it or you just didn’t play at all.

“So I have always done sports, but I wasn’t always able to do them as much as I wanted to. Coming to university, that’s what quadball let me do – get back into being directly involved in a team sport consistently that I just hadn’t really gotten the opportunity to do being in high school.

“It really was a throwback to getting to try out a lot of different things previously, and obviously quadball combines a lot of elements of those other sports as well.

“One thing that’s been really lovely about it is I always felt like I was slightly on the fringes of sport at school. I always had the sense of being in the LGBT+ community, and so I always felt like I was a little bit on the fringes socially in school – and I definitely felt like that in sports teams.

“In quadball, much to my own surprise, I have been able to say I have grown my own potential. That’s the great thing about quadball – it gives people who wouldn’t have had a chance the chance to train and get better in a really non-judgemental environment.

“In quadball nobody has been playing for their whole lives, most of them started at 18. The people are so patient to give you that chance to develop, and the stakes aren’t so high anyway, so it gives people a free space to explore that part of themselves.

“I never thought I would be part of a competitive sports team, but here I am. I know a lot of other people as well who want to be part of a sport and want to do something physical, but they are marginalised from it.

“I have a friend who is a trans guy, and he’s really into football but he doesn’t know of any team in Glasgow that is there for him. He doesn’t feel comfortable playing for conventional men’s or women’s football teams, because there’s the fear of being judged and discriminated against.

“For me, I’ve found something that manages to bypass all of that, because I would be in a very similar situation. I’m at a point in my life where, now that I’m 20 and not particularly amazing at any other sports, if it wasn’t for quadball I don’t think I’d ever do team sports again unless it was very casual.

“The amazing thing about quadball is that it’s organised enough and competitive enough with leagues all around the world, that you can come to it and – like me – somehow end up playing in international tournaments.

“You don’t have to have been an amazing sportsperson your whole life to do that, so for people who want a taste of playing in a structured environment but with that inclusion and community feel, quadball offers something really specific.”

Finding feet in a new sport

Thousands of people around the world play quadball, but it is still a relatively underground activity to take up.

For many people, university is the gateway. That was the case for Gray, who had never come across quadball before going into higher education at the University of Glasgow.

Now, though, they are preparing to compete at a home nations tournament – the WISE Cup – featuring Wales, Ireland, England and Gray’s adopted home of Scotland.

“I had no idea about quadball,” Gray recalled.

“At the time it was still called Quidditch, so I saw it on the first day and I was like ‘I’d love to do that’. I don’t know, it just seemed fun, and also the taster session was in the grounds of the university, which is obviously a very Hogwarts-ian experience.

“I didn’t really expect to treat it as a proper sport. At the time I just thought it would be fun, more of a novelty thing rather than a sports team, but then I realised that it very much is a sport in its own right.

“The first event I went to was a freshers event. It was kind of a fun morning, because I just had basically just booked loads of taster events.

“I think, like everyone, I was petrified about not making new friends because in that first few weeks it feels crucial. I’m always the person that signing up for the weird and different things.

“It was all just freshers, the coach Ben, and then one other experienced person running it. In terms of first impressions, I think I thought it was a lot of fun – I mean, I clearly did because I kept going.

“We were just sort of running around and doing more like exercises rather than enough an actual game scenario, because there are so many rules it’s kind of impossible to do that in one session.

“I don’t think I thought too much about it at the time, it was just a fun hour and then I was moving on to my next event, but afterwards Ben said training was on Saturdays and I made a mental note to go. I just kind of kept going, and now I’ve just become the president of the Glasgow Quadball Club, which is pretty cool even though we’re quite diminished in terms of numbers at the minute.

“I would say it gradually progressed for me. I’m playing on the competitive squad with Team Scotland in the WISE tournament, but I did not expect to do that or to be in that squad. It just seems like I’ve just kept going, and then things just happened.

“I don’t feel like I’ve ever been particularly driven with it, but when Glasgow was really starting to struggle in terms of numbers Team Scotland was running these monthly, bigger training session.

“I started going to those in Stirling and Edinburgh, and I would say that is when I starting feeling more like I’m part of a sports team.

“In the first year of university we did one tournament, which was fun, but I just felt like I was along for the ride. I was really surprised at how serious the Team Scotland sessions were to be honest, because there are really experienced older players talking tactics, and they’ve got all this jargon that I still don’t know to this day.

“I’m kind of still in the process of shifting my mindset. I felt like it was more of a social thing, but now I’m being dragged into an actual competitive sport – that’s a good thing, I’d just never intended it for it to be that way.

“I would always approach it just as a fun way to get a bit of exercise on a Saturday, but now it’s kind of morphed into something more and I think Team Scotland was the real catalyst for that.”

The elephant in the room

There are several potential reasons for the struggle for numbers that Gray alludes to.

The Covid pandemic wreaked havoc with many sports, and for one emerging like quadball it can be difficult to regain the momentum that they had been building up a few years ago.

Quadball’s origins is another potential factor. Starting out as Quidditch, the sport’s first boom came as a result of die hard Harry Potter fans who jumped at the opportunity to give it a go in real life at university, but as time goes on a new generation of students are coming in who are not as big fans of the franchise.

Of course, when Harry Potter is involved, there is also the impact of creator JK Rowling’s anti-trans views to take into account, particularly given the large proportion of trans and non-binary players involved.

Gray puts a lack of interest down to a combination of all those factors, but on the latter especially they say plenty of efforts have been made to distance quadball from its source material.

“Obviously a big entry route for the bulk of people historically been through Harry Potter, and I think that’s changing now that they’re sort of moving away from the franchise,” they reasoned.

“If you’d been a Harry Potter fan in the 2000s, then maybe by the mid-2010s all those original fans back when Harry Potter was just enormous were all going to university, and that led to a huge increase in the number of players. There were a few years where the sport just sort of exploded, but the people coming to university now were probably on the tail end of that.

“Another thing is obviously everything with JK Rowling has been hugely damaging. A big draw for quadball for loads of people is that it’s trans friendly and completely gender inclusive, and also just inclusive to people who for a variety of reasons would have been marginalised from other sports.

“Unfortunately, JK Rowling’s attitude towards trans people makes a lot of people in those communities want nothing to do with anything that she’s associated with, and the sport by association unfortunately still is associated with the wider Harry Potter franchise and JK Rowling, which is maybe turning people away from trying it.

“A lot of queer people who don’t know anything about the sport don’t know that it’s incredibly inclusive.

“Covid was a big one too actually, that really decimated it. Loads of experienced players retired from the sport or haven’t come back post-pandemic, but because we’d had two or three years of no recruitment there were no mid-level players to take up those senior positions.

“What’s happened at Glasgow now is the coaching team are all just moving on with life and there’s no way that they can keep doing it, but there’s really no one that is properly experienced enough to take on coaching.

“Even though I’m now president – and to be honest, I think that’s mostly because I’ve just showed up consistently for the past two years – I can’t coach and there is really no one who has the right sort of skills and experience and also young enough that they actually want to do it for a few more years.

“So I think the combination of the pandemic, JK Rowling and the trans hate, and also just the age demographic of Harry Potter fans, I think those are three sort of big factors.

“Now that we’ve had the name change, we can more confidently say we are taking action to make this a separate thing from Harry Potter and JK Rowling, we’re moving away from that. Everyone is pretty united in where they stand on that, there’s not a lot of controversy there.

“We don’t get really confronted on it a lot in person. Maybe online there’s more discourse around it, but I don’t personally get involved in that. It’s not something that we’re constantly coming face to face with, but I think it’s just something that leaves a bad taste in all of our mouths.

“It’s just this thing that like, if only JK Rowling could have been a decent person, it would have made it a lot easier for the sport in terms of publicity, it just would have been a lot more simple. It’s not destroying the sport or anything, but it’s not nice for anyone. We try to ignore it, but it’s highly unfortunate.

“The one thing that the sport can confidently say is that despite numerous legal interactions with Warner Bros, there is no affiliation. No one could ever say that we’re propping up the Harry Potter franchise or anything because there’s absolutely no commercial affiliation, there’s no trademarking.

“We really are completely separate, especially now that the name has been changed. We are completely separate from Harry Potter in every sort of legal sense.”

Coming together

While some people may have been put off from trying quadball, those who are involved will be coming together for the WISE Cup in Edinburgh next weekend.

It is the first time in five years it will be held in Scotland, with Meggetland the venue for eight matches between all four international sides next Saturday.

That will inevitably bring a sense of community among the participants, and for first-time competitor Gray, it is a very exciting prospect.

“Surprisingly, the Isle of Man for such as small space has quite a vibrant underground queer and trans scene,” they added.

“I grew up going to this music themed youth club, and the idea was that it was a space for bands to practice and form and it provided studio space and instruments and all the rest of it.

“It was run by these queer punks who are really, really cool. When I say it was underground, I mean it was literally just in a basement. The reason I’m bringing that up is because being part of the quadball community kind of feels like being part of that.

“It’s not only the same kind of people in terms of having a lot of trans, non-binary and queer people, but also just the inclusivity and the willingness to support each other and the personal nature of it.

“We are obviously increasingly competitive, but it’s never hyper competitive and there’s never going to be actual beef between teams – or at least I shouldn’t hope so.

“Unless one team actually does do something really terrible, you’re all going to walk away friends and it kind of feels like a social club anyway. The community in quadball is very nice, and you don’t have to constantly prove yourself athletically, or prove your skills or anything like that.

“It’s a lot more lenient and a lot more accepting of people with different disabilities, or just different skills and attributes. We don’t take that part of it too seriously, which is really, really nice.

“I’m really looking forward to the WISE tournament. I don’t know what to expect.

“I had kind of forgotten it was happening to be honest, and then I saw an Instagram post saying here’s the roster, and I saw my name on the competitors’ one.

“I happened to come into it at a time when they were really struggling for players. I think it’s coming back now, but numbers were quite diminished, and I’m also playing for quite a small country in the grand scheme of things – if I was living in the USA or France or like any of these really massive teams, I wouldn’t be on their national teams.

“This will be my first tournament with Team Scotland which is quite exciting. I’m really looking forward to all the UK nations coming together, and I think it will be really great.

“I’m excited to see what the other teams bring to the tournament. I don’t really get a sense of what is happening down in England, or in Northern Ireland or Wales, so it will be really good.”