This afternoon I read an email from someone asking about a note we’d put on Katie Bell’s page. Apparently there is some confusion about how old Katie was when she joined the Gryffindor Quidditch team, specifically if she had been on the reserve team in her first year. My first reaction was to check the Hogwarts Team page to see exactly who was on the team which years, but as I read that page over I realized that it was not up to date and didn’t include all the information I was hoping to find.
So I spent the last four hours researching and rewriting the entire Gryffindor section of that page. Now you’ll find a complete list of Gryffindor players including what year they were in when they started and the years they played. No, Katie was not a first year reserve player as some have incorrectly guessed (that was Alicia who was on the reserve team the year before Harry joined, and she was a second year at that time). Katie was a second year and playing in her first ever match at the same time Harry was in early November of 1991. Of course, he was so scared that he never noticed how nervous she was, poor thing…and then she took a Bludger to the back of the head shortly after the start of the match!
It is interesting to note a few glaring inconsistencies in the books. They are noted on that page. It’s possible to invent complicated explanations for some of the references, but I think it’s much more likely that Rowling simply didn’t have all the timeline details worked out when she wrote those parts. I hope that the next revision of the books will include some modification of these problem passages.
