Hi, just a quick note to mention that the article on Oliver Wood states that:
1) Oliver became captain in his 5th Year
2) Charlie had been seeker during Oliver's 4th Year
The first is most likely incorrect, unless the previous captain allowed Oliver to give the team pep talks, which seems unlikely in light of the pre-game talks when Angelina and Harry were captains. I think it can be assumed that Oliver became captain in his 4th year, which would have been Charlie's 7th year.
If Oliver was the captain, then it might also follow that Charlie was not on the team in his final year, which wouldn't be too outrageous a proposition considering that he was a prefect, preparing for his NEWTS, and theoretically doing extra work to be accepted into the dragon handling programme. It also isn't too much of a stretch to postulate that he didn't want to spend a lot of extra time in practices with his rambunctious 12yo brothers who had just joined the team and were armed with heavy bats.
We know that Charlie was a seeker and captain, but there's no evidence to support that he was either for very long. If he joined the team in his 2nd year, won the cup in his 2nd or 3rd year, then he could have been captain in his 4th year. If Oliver joined the team in his 2nd year as well, that would have been Charlie's 5th year. It's easy to imagine Oliver hero worshipping the captain of his team in his first year as a keeper, and it's also easy to imagine that a year of trying to be quidditch captain at the same time as preparing for OWLS and being a new prefect left Charlie a bit burned out by the end, finally deciding to drop the team for 6th and 7th years to focus on his studies.
This would explain how, by the time Harry became seeker, the "glory days" seemed a long ways off-- they had had two years without Charlie as a seeker, and the year before that (provided Charlie was a captain in his 5th Year), the team hadn't been at their best due to Charlie doing too much. It also goes a ways to explain why it had been so long since Gryffindor won the cup (having a new captain who was a 4th year, even following winning the cup, would bring a period of adjustment for everyone on the team). Finally, it would explain how Oliver also came to be captain as only a 4th year, though it does beg the question who the captain was between Charlie and Oliver, during Oliver's 3rd year/ Charlie's 6th year.
Anyway, I know this is all mostly conjecture and that this forum isn't for those types of discussions, but I just wanted to point out that the article on Oliver Wood is probably incorrect to say that he became captain in his Fifth Year, and that the articles on both Oliver and Charlie don't seem to take into account that there's no evidence that Charlie played all the way through to his graduation, or that he was the captain the whole time-- in fact, it all makes more sense if he didn't/wasn't.
Eos9 09:08, June 18, 2012 (UTC)