The captain of Australia's quidditch team admits he is not a Harry Potter fan and started playing the sport to impress a girl.

"I started dating a girl and she said, 'Look, I play this sport, I reckon you might enjoy it'. And I thought, 'Well, I reckon I might like to impress you'," James Mortensen told Adam Shirley on 666 ABC Canberra.

"And I fell in love with it."

Quidditch attracts non-Potter fans

For the uninitiated, quidditch is based on the sport played on flying broomsticks at Hogwarts in JK Rowling's bestselling book series.

Mr Mortensen said Potter fans were the first to take up the sport Down Under but the number of non-fans was growing.

"I was part of the first of a wave of people who came to the game for its quality," he said.

"There's still a bit of an oil and water situation, where you've got the diehard fans compared to the athletes that have walked in and said, 'this is something that I really want to play'.

"For those original Harry Potter fans, the people who are drawn to this sport [but] had never played sport before it's sort of a trial by fire."

Mr Mortensen played representative basketball in his teens but before trying quidditch he said he had shied away from team sports as an adult.

"I love that it's the only sport that I've ever seen that rewards quick thinking as much, if not more than strength or speed," he said.

"So being the biggest, fastest or nastiest person on the pitch isn't going to save you."

Any skill can make a difference

The Australian team, the Dropbears, is a mixed squad with 14 men, seven women plus a female coach — Gen Gibson, from Victoria.

Mr Mortensen said the players came from a range of sporting backgrounds including Australian rules, basketball and badminton.

"The great beauty of the game is that any attribute is a good attribute," he said.

"Because of the way the game is so varied and complex, it might sound like a hard claim to back up, but I can practically guarantee that any player who has the will and the heart for it can step on a pitch and actually make a difference."

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In July, the Dropbears will compete at the 2016 International Quidditch Association World Cup in Frankfurt.

They won silver at the 2014 cup, but Mr Mortensen said they were going in this year as underdogs.

"We're not professionals, we are playing an extremely competitive sport on a global scale — the US alone has 10,000 players — and it's financially intensive, and time intensive, and we have to have such an amazing amount of passion to do it," he said.

"So of course we're looking for that end result, but whether it's gold, silver, bronze or wooden spoon, just to get there in itself is an achievement."