7/11/2026

New York Titans (Major League Quadball) @ "Lyndhurst Golden Bears Sports Field" (Lyndhurst, NJ)

When fiction meets the real world

2026: New Venue #26

You may not have heard of the sport of "Quadball" before, but most readers will probably recognize it by its former, more common name. I won't say it here for...reasons, but the sport originated from one of the most popular young adult novel series of all time (whose author...is one of the reasons the sport is called "Quadball" nowadays¹); if you somehow haven't figured out what it is yet, the main character's name rhymes with "Larry Cotter", and if THAT hasn't given it away yet, then...I don't know what to say.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that given just how popular the franchise was, people adapted the sport from the books into something for the "real world" sometime around 2005. Since we as a society have neither flying broom technology nor semi-sentient sporting equipment (as in "not horses for polo nor animals for those who consider hunting a sport"), adjustments have been made to make the sport "playable". Based on this experience, I would say that in its CURRENT form, quadball feels like an amalgamation of (at least) four different sports:

1. Handball. If you’ve never heard of handball, it’s essentially “association football/soccer but using hands instead of feet”, and that concept kinda exists here: the "main game" of quadball is players throw the "main" ball around and try to throw it through a set of three hoops to score (10 points per goal). However, to avoid ball hogging, there is a limit to how long a player can hold the ball (or at least I assume there’s one); in addition, while handball has its goals at the ends of the area of play, quadball has its goals set up more like the next sport:

2. Lacrosse. The hoops are placed on the field so that there is ample room behind them for players to play the ball and still be in bounds, and much like lacrosse (and to certain extents hockey), players are able to pass the ball to a player behind the hoops. However, something super unique to quadball is that goals count no matter which way the ball travels through the hoop (i.e. "forwards" towards the ends of the field or "backwards" towards the center) - I cannot think of any other sport that has a quirk like this (as hockey and lacrosse nets are "one way only"). There is one HIGHLY unfortunate effect of this: the hoops are CONSTANTLY getting disrupted (i.e. knocked down) during play, which I feel has major drawbacks...

3. Dodgeball. In a nod to a mechanic from the books, two or three dodgeballs are present during play (I do not know what the actual number is supposed to be), and if a player is hit with one "on the fly" (i.e. the ball has not bounced off the field), they have to run back and tag their center hoop before returning to play. As you might expect, this also forces them to drop any ball they may be holding, but unless I'm mistaken, only certain players are allowed to "use" the dodgeballs.

4. Wrestling. After 20 minutes of play, a “flag runner” enters the field with a flag attached to their back. Both teams then send a specific player after this flag runner to get the flag, as it's worth 35 points. However, this flag runner does not give up their flag so easily; I can't speak for other matches, but at this one, the guy pulled wrestling moves on the players to get them off of him.

In addition, once 20 minutes have been played (and the flag runner is released), a score target is set to the leading team's score plus 60; the first team to reach this target wins (irregardless of who gets the flag and when they get it). Also, they kept the brooms (to an extent - as the "brooms" here are just handles without bristles); I'm personally not sure how I feel about that (because it seems GOOFY), but there is a rule where if a player loses contact with their broom, then they have to reset (just like if they get hit with a dodgeball).

I realize that all of this information may be quite a bit to take in, but I hope that gives at least a basic overview of how quadball works. In any case, Major League Quadball (which is the only quadball league I could find in the world) was founded in 2015, and my understanding is that it is a purely "amateur" league (as the sport as a whole is still very much in its infancy)², with its teams featuring both male and female players (one thing that makes quadball unique is that it is usually coed - which rarely happens at the top levels of sports that don't involve a paddle/racquet)

The New York Titans were one of the founding members of MLQ, and believe it or not, the team represents the THIRD different "New York Titans" franchise overall in a THIRD different sport; there was a short lived NLL team back in the mid-to-late 2000s that moved to Florida before folding, and before that, a "The Titans of New York" were a founding member of the American Football League (and still exist as, yep, THAT team)³. They've historically been one of their division's better teams (as I could find only one season in which they finished lower than second), and Wikipedia indicates that they won a league title in 2024. Their opponents for this game were the Boston Forge, who have won three MLQ titles including the first two back-to-back (I guess due to the Salem connection).

An MLQ "match" is similar to MLW Wiffle Ball in that three games are played one after the other (again, the endgame for a quadball game starts 20 minutes in and there's a score limit rather than a time limit). As a small side note: in terms of merchandise (since I usually talk about that stuff), there was no merchandise available at the game: this IS a fully amateur event after all (i.e. it's all volunteers running things). However, I did see that MLQ jerseys were available online on the manufacturer's website, and some of the ones I saw (namely the two teams who I saw) were actually quite interesting.

I won't go over each of the three games in detail here (unlike the MLW post), but the Titans won all three games - the second one with the flag capture ending the game (like the books), and the third one despite Boston getting the flag (i.e. they weren't able from preventing the Titans from reaching the score limit). Also, I had to leave right after the third game started (for reasons I'll get into soon), but I tried listening to the broadcast of the game on my drive home (as it was streamed on YouTube), and I do have to admit that the commentators were...clearly untrained.

I feel like watching quadball was a very interesting experience. However, the sport DEFINITELY needs some refinements if it's to take off into something more than what it is now, as it feels WAY TOO CHAOTIC for a casual audience to follow. While the changes that I think would make it more appealing would also turn it into MUCH DIFFERENT thing than the sport its trying to emulate⁴, that may not be such a bad thing to help distance it (even further) from the author-who-must-not-be-named-much-like-the-villain-of-their-books...
(Again, if you have no idea what this is by now, I don't know how to help you understand.)

You may have noticed that I've yet to mention the stadium this game took place at. That's because...it's VERY MUCH a generic high school stadium (similar to St. Joes)⁵; the most notable things are that it's right next to the high school it serves and it features a large field house at one end. It's partially due to this that I thought about NOT counting this as a 26 in 26 venue; however, given that several other high schools and lower level colleges are on my list (plus this is a WHOLE NEW SPORT to this blog which actually had a much better crowd than some of the USL2 games I've been to), I figured I'd be consistent and count it, which means...

I’ve done it.

26 new venues for 2026.

Sure, I did inflate it a LOT with stuff like, well...this, but I wasn’t exactly expecting to be done with this challenge THIS early. Heck, there’s even venues I had planned to visit as part of this challenge that I haven’t been to yet!

So what’s next?

We keep going!

I’m not going to assign a new “number” for this year (or attempt anything like this in the future), but I do have SEVERAL new places I plan on going to this year (one of which involves me doing something I have NEVER done before). Outside of that, I have some thoughts for things to do next year...though brewing trouble in the baseball world may affect some of those plans.