Is a Fantasy Season on Life Support Worth Saving?

By Jake Gomrick

Between my freshmen and sophomore year of college, I stepped away from (then-called) Quidditch and the friends I had made on the team at my tiny Liberal Arts school, Loyola New Orleans, to take a summer job in another city. When I came back from summer break and joined pick-up games in New Orleans, I saw several of my teammates had improved notably over the summer.

They were hitting distant beats with regularity, in great offensive position for passes, and held strong defensive spacing.This was 2013, 2 years before MLQ had its inaugural season, and there were no organized team practices going on in town, just occasional pick-up games. When I asked them what they did to improve over the summer, I got one answer back over and over:

“I went to fantasy tournaments.

In case the concept isn’t entirely familiar, a fantasy tournament is where all the players that sign up are put into a players-pool and team captains draft players to make unique teams, not unlike how fantasy football works. Except, in this case, the players actually show up and play in person on these temporary, random teams.

At the time, there were no organized leagues in the summer to which the most talented, most obsessed players could devote their energy. Instead, they went to fantasy tournaments. Most regions had a major fantasy tournament that would draw huge numbers of community members, intermingling players from across the country, and across all levels of experience.

When my inexperienced teammates traveled to Southwest fantasy, or West Fantasy, or Northeast Fantasy, or any of the tournaments that drew large crowds back then, they wound up playing on teams with the experienced athletes that we normally only met when playing against their teams at official tournaments. Players with whom we once had distant, adversarial relationships became mentors at a fantasy tournament.

Joe Robles, a former player from Southern California, noted how invaluable his first fantasy tournament was. It came at the end of his first season with Anteater Quidditch. “We were a bad team with no real direction throughout my first year as a player,” Robles said. “I was given [co-]captain-ship after my first season, so [at] my first fantasy tournament I went in hoping to find things to take back to my USQ team.” Robles couldn’t say enough about how important this first tournament was for him and for AQ as a whole.

“Alex Browne was our fantasy captain, and he modeled simple tactical ideas, simple mechanics fixes for different ways to catch a ball with 2 hands, and different ways to score goals all from the same offensive positions… I took so much of what I learned into my first coaching year. Our team qualified for nationals for the first time in our history that year.”

It wasn’t just a chance to improve, but to meet people, make friends, and build community. I spoke to 40 current and former Quadball players about their experience with Fantasy Tournaments, and almost all of them gave some version of Robles’ story.

Multiple people talked about friends they made at fantasy tournaments that they still keep in touch with to this day, some for almost a decade. Others built community through them. Brian Nackasha, a player that has been in the sport since 2012, spoke about how their network in the community exploded after they attended tournaments. “My [Facebook] friends list grew from 50 to 300… I actually knew these people, and they knew me by name.”

Then the sport grew, competitive leagues began to occupy the summer months, and the culture of fantasy tournaments changed.

In 2013, Southwest Fantasy, then called “THE Fantasy Tournament”, drafted 12 different teams, each team with between 14 and 17 players on it, totaling over 150 players in attendance. In recent years, it’s rare to find any fantasy tournaments with even half as many attendees. The events that garner the most attention now, with few exceptions, typically have around 70+ interested people on average, and it’s unlikely the final sign-ups will include everyone interested in the Facebook event.

Tad Walters, current player on the Chicago Prowl, organized a fantasy tournament in New Orleans in 2015, the very first year of MLQ. It was a smaller event than one of the major, regional tournaments, but it still drew large numbers. Tad recalls having at least 6 teams of roughly 14-16 players each participating, putting the numbers at close to 100 players. The old facebook event, still publicly visible, lists 137 attendees.

When asked why he doesn’t organize any more tournaments, Tad gave one reason: Major League Quadball. “The main reason [I stopped organizing fantasy tournaments] was MLQ,” Tad said, “Season is too busy, people are already traveling for MLQ.”

I reached out to Christian Barnes, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Director at MLQ as well as Board Member, Regional Coordinator, and Gameplay Manager at USQ, to ask about the organizers of major fantasy tournaments from years prior. They responded saying, “Many of us who organized major fantasy stuff went into MLQ.”

This was a very common opinion among the many members of the community I spoke with. If they didn’t stop attending or organizing fantasy tournaments because of their involvement with MLQ, they still view the league as one of the primary contributors in the decline in the tournaments’ popularity.

Of course, there is never just one reason for things to change. Barnes noted in a discussion thread on a Quadball Facebook page, “…Fantasy tournaments were a lot to coordinate with little to no thanks, lots of complaining, and many people dropping out… Why would we put all that work in on top of what we do for MLQ, where there’s a higher standard, better thanks, and a better product?”

And the more I spoke with organizers, the more I heard that same point. Fantasy tournaments are not put together by a central organization with widespread resources. They are organized by individuals who want to put the work in. And there is a lot of work to put in; finding General Managers to draft teams as well as volunteers and officials, advertising for player signups, securing fields to use for the event, managing the liability of dozens of people playing a high-impact, contact sport.

Additionally, much of that costs money, so an organizer needs to manage player’s fees for the event, and whenever money changes hands trust becomes an issue. It’s hard for organizers to deal with reluctant players that may not want to hand over their cash, but it can be hard for players to trust an individual, with minimal accountability, to handle their money well.

Burl Womack, a player from the Carolinas, recalls drama surrounding a Fantasy Tournament, Retro Cup, that was around in 2016 and 2017. The third installment of the tournament in 2018 was canceled due to weather issues, but according to Womack, “The people running the event never actually refunded everyone… A lot of people from outside the Carolinas had been going to Retro Cup, so this more or less killed the trust teams had in us to run a big fantasy.”

These are issues that were always likely to destabilize the ecosystem of fantasy tournaments. Still, it’s hard to overlook the effect that the proliferation of competitive leagues in the summertime had on them, especially because it’s not just here in the United States.

Players from the UK have noted a similar shift when their summer league, the Quidditch Premier League (QPL), ran from 2017-2019. Gio Forino, a player from the UK, told me, “In the UK there used to be more, but they died off after the introduction of the QPL, and haven’t recovered yet since COVID.”

Another former tournament organizer that wished to remain anonymous noted the significant drop off in attendance since the start of Major League Quidditch. “I would say we used to get 8-10 teams [per tournament], and that dropped to, like, 4-6.” They continued, “They’ve definitely dropped off, in number of people and quality players attending.”

That is an important distinction. It’s not just about the fact that less players are coming to tournaments, but about which players are skipping tournaments. If MLQ rosters the most talented players in the sport, and MLQ players have a difficult to impossible time participating in fantasy tournaments, that paints a clear picture of the players that currently attend fantasy. There are talented players that show up, but the majority of the best players don’t participate anymore.

There are many understandable reasons for this. For one, MLQ players already have loaded schedules over the summer, with practices and travel, not to mention the physical toll that takes on their bodies. Most MLQ players also play on competitive USQ teams from Fall to Spring as well, so that schedule becomes year-round. Some coaches and players fear unnecessary injury that could occur from fantasy tournament participation, sometimes banning players on the roster from participating. However, there is another potential factor I noticed in speaking with dozens of players.

When asked about the value of fantasy tournaments, almost every respondent mentioned things that were valuable for new and recreational players: making new friends, working fundamentals, learning from experienced players, getting game experience, learning new positions. With few exceptions, none of the answers I heard were inherently appealing to players that engage with the sport at highly competitive levels.

And that is part of what makes this discussion so complicated. MLQ has occupied much of the space that fantasy tournaments once did. It makes it harder to organize fantasy tournaments, but the organization itself is not the reason that fantasy tournaments declined.

The drive for more competitive leagues goes beyond just MLQ. Regional Summer leagues have proliferated throughout the country as well, such as Western Championship Quadball, Texas Secede League, and Breakaway Quadball in Boston. There is a desire for these types of leagues throughout the player community, independent of any individual league or organization.

The diminishing of fantasy tournaments correlates with the rise of competitive summer leagues, but it is the widespread demand for them, not the leagues themselves, that has caused a shift. Talented players want to play in competitive leagues, not fantasy tournaments. They’ve been gone, and the culture has changed, though not always for the worse.

Fantasy tournaments were praised by community members in interviews for being spaces that were more focused on fun than competition. However, when talented players attend fantasy tournaments they sometimes bring their competitive spirit with them, along with the toxic parts of that mentality.

Kris Forsstrom, a player who just won a USQ National Championship with the Warriors, opened up about the negative experience she had with a Team USA player captaining her fantasy team:

“I asked to play keeper. Especially being a female keeper, I’m used to not seeing the green headband as much as I’d like, and I figured fantasy would be a great place to work on these skills. However, four games passed and even after asking again to be put in with the green, I was ignored until the fourth game, when I was told, ‘Well, we’re going to the championship anyway, this game doesn’t matter. I guess that’s fine.’ I then had a male player following my every step, repeating ‘I got you right here’ as if they were waiting for me to mess up or panic. This was not done to the other, male keepers. I ended up performing decently well, and I was told, ‘Wow, you did really well at that.’ To which I responded, ‘Yeah, I’m a keeper.’”

Fantasy Tournaments were not, and are not, immune from the same kind of exclusionary, competitive culture that keeps many players, even talented ones, on the outside looking in. This mentality affects all kinds of players, but it disproportionately affects women, non-binary, gender fluid, and other gender non-conforming players the most, whether it’s in a fantasy tournament or a competitive league.

In a study titled “We All Play Pretty Much the Same, Except. . .”: Gender-Integrated Quidditch and the Persistence of Essentialist Ideology, published by Sociologists Rachel Allison and Adam Love for the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, data was collected from 23 first year, undergraduate Quadball players over the course of four months. They noted how rising competitiveness in the sport affected reception of the game differently along gender lines.

They found that, despite many of the students associating an increase in competitiveness with “fun” and “excitement,” some of the participants in the study, primarily women, critiqued that increase in competitiveness. A key aspect of that phenomenon could be seen in the initiation of physical contact, usually by men against other men, which is attributed to a fear on the men’s part that similar contact with women would injure them. This falls in line with other sociological research showing that competitiveness and “a willingness to inflict bodily damage and the acceptance of pain and injury” are typically held as “central components to orthodox masculinity.”

Despite the sport being gender-inclusive, positions of leadership and influence on individual teams are still often dominated by cis-gendered men who, in turn, take up the majority of players on the pitch in most competitive tournaments, building teams around their priorities. This structure winds up leaving players that don’t conform to those standards on the margins.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why a new type of fantasy tournaments that have formed since the rise of competitive summer leagues are the ones exclusively for women, non-binary, gender-fluid, and other gender non-conforming players. Glorious Bitches Galore, Take Back the Pitch, and Themme Fatale were frequently cited as positive and important experiences by the people I interviewed, particularly players who joined after MLQ had its inaugural season in 2015.

Milena Sousa started playing in 2021, and in that time she attended Take Back the Pitch in 2022 and Themme Fatale in 2023. When asked about what she took from those experiences, she said, “The value of the fantasy tournaments I attended were unmeasurable… In terms of my community, it gave me a chance to connect to other minority players in Quadball… It was very reassuring to see that there are other players like me that share the same experience of, specifically, being a woman in Quadball and the ups and downs that come along with that.”

Sousa made note of the importance of players’ freedom to get out of their comfort zones at these events. “This tournament was a great opportunity for [new players] to explore other positions or roles on the field that are different from the ones their teams stick them in. For example… bringing up the ball on offense or playing keeper. That is something you don’t typically see on most Quadball teams and it was very refreshing…”

More than an opportunity to play new roles or gain experience, Take Back the Pitch drew talented, experienced players. In her second year as a player, Sousa got to play with a Team USA player from the opposite side of the country as her, taking invaluable lessons from playing with her and watching her play and lead up close.
Fantasy tournaments aren’t dead by any means, even if they aren’t thriving. These tournaments still provide valuable resources to new players in this country. There have even been a couple tournaments within the last year that offer hope for wider growth of fantasy culture.

Fantasy Fest 2023 in LA held two tournaments over a weekend-Quadapalooza and Glorious Bitches Galore III-which featured a combined attendance of well over 100 players. New Jersey Fantasy put on its fifth annual tournament last summer, where attendance almost doubled from its annual average of around 50 to just under 100, and they are hoping to build on that this summer.

Both of these events show how fantasy tournaments can grow when dedicated community leaders put time and effort into them. Phill Cain, one of the organizers for New Jersey Fantasy, referred to it as a “If you build it they will come” mentality. She, along with his co-organizers, stuck with building a culture around an annual event for five years before the attendance took off.

Structural factors also played a part in the growth of New Jersey Fantasy. Up until 2022, players on the New York Titans, an MLQ team that has historically pulled talent from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, were not allowed to participate in fantasy tournaments while they were on the team. At last year’s New Jersey Fantasy, Titans players were allowed to play for the first time, and their presence affected the culture in a way that Cain credits with bolstering attendance, noting that the tournament “had an air of higher competitiveness than previous renditions” without sacrificing the fun.

Perhaps more tournaments can continue to benefit from dedicated local leadership not only putting the work in to organize them, but also making more room for people to organize and play in them. But then again, maybe this is as big as most fantasy tournaments will get now. Summer Leagues are here by overwhelming demand. As they should be. Competitive leagues can push the sport forward in important ways, but I don’t know what effects that will have long term.

One thing I do know is that a surprising amount of people were quick and eager to share all the positive impact fantasy tournaments had on their time in Quadball. So many talked about friends they made years ago because of fantasy that they still speak to regularly; a majority had a story of making a friend they wouldn’t have met otherwise. Players talked about learning how to play the sport at fantasy tournaments, meeting people they look up to, and cementing their love of the game. This value to the community won’t be entirely replicable in competitive summer leagues.

Spaces that encourage that level of player diversity and shared experience can be incredibly beneficial to the growth of a sport, especially one trying to stand apart from the intellectual property it came from. When I asked players about the spaces they could go in Quadball to play with people of different talent and experience levels, or players from different regions, there were very few options players found beyond fantasy tournaments.

Some respondents mentioned MLQ as something that offers a diverse community space, which it absolutely is. Many players talked about how MLQ allowed them to be recognized beyond their small USQ teams and helped them meet new people. But despite the expansion of practice squads, MLQ remains an option limited to a minority of players, whether it’s because they didn’t make the cut or can’t commit to the expense and travel. Some people mentioned other competitive tournaments, but mingling between teams at these can be difficult. Particularly so, if there isn’t anything built into the tournament weekend to encourage it.

It’s hard to say if fantasy tournaments will be the best way to encourage these types of diverse community spaces moving forward. They were at one time, and to some extent still are. New fantasy tournaments pop up every year, and old ones carry on. In addition to the successes of Fantasy Fest and New Jersey Fantasy, THE Fantasy Tournament comes back to Texas at the end of July for the first time in 6 years.

There is even an MLQ event this upcoming weekend, MLQ Worlds Weekend, that will allow for players to network, learn from each other, and play in a fantasy tournament together. With the association of MLQ’s branding and World Cup being played in the USA the weekend before, the fantasy sign-ups quickly filled up to around 120 before leadership decided to extend the sign-up window. The event is on-pace to be one of the largest fantasy events in the sport’s history.

But it isn’t going to be about any one event, any one policy, or any one person. Whether it is fantasy tournaments or something else, fostering inclusive spaces for the national community will be a consistent effort that requires the entire community. It will take local organizers to plan the events, it will take leaders of competitive leagues making guidelines and schedules that encourage players to attend, it will take talented, experienced players wanting to give back to new players, and it will take all of us supporting them.

Is a Fantasy Season on Life Support Worth Saving?

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