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In the world of intramural sports, there are badminton players, basketball players and dodgeball players. Then, there are Quidditch players.

Jon Pedigo, a senior at Homewood-Flossmoor, organized an intramural team last fall for Quidditch, a fictional sport that looks like a mix of lacrosse, basketball and flag football—on broomsticks. Although the game, made popular in “Harry Potter,” is played at some colleges, Pedigo hadn’t heard of it being played outside of the world of wizardry until recently.

“It was Friday night,” he said, “and I was doing a Quidditch commercial for my podcast, called ‘Potterchat.’ ”

He looked up a YouTube video and realized the game played with flying broomsticks had been modified by students.

“I figured why just do a commercial when I can play it?” Pedigo asked. He spread word on Facebook and heard back from 60 people in one weekend. He ended up with nine teams of about eight players each. A new club was born.

The teams held matches in parks in the fall, and the season ended with a championship in which a broom with a gold ribbon-wrapped handle served as the trophy.

But Pedigo isn’t the only Chicago-area teen who has turned an unusual interest into an out-of-the-ordinary club. Today, some students have more options than your garden-variety student council or drama group.

Lane Tech has a disco club, Jones has a DJ club and Steinmetz has a cardio fitness club. It seems there’s something for every taste, no matter how outlandish.

Some clubs are just for fun, such as Prosser’s Yu-Gi-Oh! club, which is in its third year. The trading-card game is based on the Yu-Gi-Oh! comic, which also spawned TV shows and video games. Players use a deck of cards to bring down their opponent’s “life points” through the use of monsters and spells.

At Prosser, what began as a group of friends playing Yu-Gi-Oh! after school became an almost daily meeting and has grown to involve students who previously had never met, said senior club member Ray Montanez.

Anyone is invited to play, and there’s a monthly tournament with a $5 buy-in where almost everyone wins a prize.

Before the Yu-Gi-Oh! club started, Montanez rarely played. “But now I get practice,” he said.

“Once people started coming, I had to get better,” Montanez said. “It’s not the most popular club out there. But it’s a really fun club with fun people. Everyone is friends.”

The club is intramural but organizers are looking for school sponsorship.

Meanwhile, Barrington has a Free Hugs club.

Senior Abby Pajakowski started the club last year after watching the “Free Hugs Campaign” video on YouTube, which features a man walking a shopping mall and the streets holding a “free hugs” sign. The video has a following and several copycats.

Pajakowski took it even further.

“It’s a random-act-of-kindness group,” she said. The club promotes kindness, compassion and making connections, and finds little ways to brighten students’ days. It has sponsored “high-five hallways” and has given away free sundaes.

“I think it can be embarrassing or awkward to be nice in high school,” Pajakowski said. “What we’re doing is promoting what people should really be doing every day.”

However, not every unusual club finds success. Oak Park and River Forest’s waffle club had a Facebook group with more than 200 members when it was conceived two years ago. The idea was to get a diverse group of students to hang out together and enjoy waffles. “There is honestly nothing cooler than bro-ing out, mackin’ on some waffles,” said then-founding member Peter Stein, now a sophomore at Dartmouth College.

But “the man shut us down,” Stein said with a laugh. The group had difficulty finding a faculty sponsor, Stein said, and disbanded after a few informal meetings.

Others tried unsuccessfully to start a waffle club, but Stein and his fellow founding members have pledged to start chapters at their respective colleges.

“There was something so pure and beautiful about the idea,” he said. “It was awesome to see people united behind an idea.”

When it came to Homewood-Flossmoor’s Quidditch club, it was easy for Pedigo to get recruits behind the idea, but it took a lot of creativity to get the league going. After all, the game is played in a world where broomsticks can’t really fly.

In Pedigo’s version, the Golden Snitch, a gold ball with wings that ends the match when caught, is a person who runs around the field in yellow shorts or tights, dodging players who are trying to capture his or her yellow flags.

“I read ‘Quidditch Through the Ages’ to try to be more authentic,” said Pedigo, who tried to model the game as closely to the “Potter” version as he could manage.

For Pedigo, bringing one of his passions from Harry Potter’s world into the real world has been an adventure.

“I got support, but I built the hoops and organized the games myself,” he said. “It’s been a lot of work, but lots of fun.”