Nicknames: Yass; has also had a range of nicknames throughout his quidditch career. “The Bullfighter”, for one.
Birthdate: 21st July, 1854
Current Age: 36 Years
Position: Coach for the Moroccan National Team
Reputation: 6
Yassine’s career has been full of controversial play and quarrels, both on and off the pitch. His motto is ‘if it comes to blows, it comes to blows’. Privately, he tends not to care much with whom he associates, whether they’re working class or more disreputable sorts who would make his family shudder. Publicly, he doesn’t care if he causes a bit of a stir - after all, he always likes to give the press something to talk about.Wand: Moroccan cypress, 12 3/4”, phoenix feather, brittle.
Blood Status: Pureblood
Social Class: Upper
Family:
Mahmoud Bensouda | Father
Nadia El-Fassi | Mother
Omar, Brahim, Ilyas, Younes | Brothers
The Bensouda family is one of the elite dynastic families in control in Fez, with eminent pureblood lineage and European ties even going back to the Arab ancestors expelled from Spain during the Inquisition. Yassine is the most disappointing and nevertheless the most famous of his brothers: the rest of them followed in their father’s footsteps in business and state administration and settled down respectably. Losers.
Appearance: 5’7” and brawny, Yassine has curly dark hair - always tousled just so - and twinkling dark eyes. His eyebrows often arch expressively, and his smile is usually a smirk. His clothes are usually of the highest quality but in some semblance of devil-may-care disarray. He is right-handed for wandwork and writing, but fairly ambidextrous in sporting terms. Though he no longer plays quidditch himself, he still retains the same athleticism; from coaching, horse-riding, and some boxing and duelling on the downlow. Always happiest at the centre of a confrontation, it has never been unusual to see him sporting injuries from on or off the pitch. But hey, you should see the other guy.
Educational Background:
Attends an elite boys’ school in Fez in his younger years, then - as every generation of his family before him - is shipped off to Beauxbatons, because the family likes to capitalise on their European ancestry and has unceasing aims of ingratiating themselves with the French who are currently worming themselves into Moroccan politics. Yassine, unfortunately for his father, quickly proves not to be academic or useful at school at all.
Quidditch Background:
Having barely touched a broom until starting at Beauxbatons, Yassine finds a natural talent for it and his competitive spirit all at once. He tries out for the team and spends the first few years switching between positions, trying to find his favoured one. (It never was seeker, that’s for sure.) Eventually, he settles in as a chaser and when he leaves school - you could hear his professors’ collective sigh of relief across the Mediterranean - he heads home to muck about being rich, insolent, and basically impossible to corral into anything useful. He becomes the star player of his home quidditch team almost just for fun, but the local league is nothing particularly impressive, and he is quickly bored. He throws some money into North African quidditch to invest in it, hoping to try and raise the stakes, and then relocates back to France as a second-string chaser for a half-decent team.
A couple of years after making it to first-string, he gets recruited by a Spanish team and goes to play professionally there, enjoying the challenge of it, and the freedom of not being so closely under his family’s thumb. When a world cup comes around, Yassine returns to Morocco with newly added swagger to throw his hat in the ring. He’s second-string (psht), but when one of the chasers has to drop out before a match, Yassine is on, and he certainly makes an impression. In the opposing keeper’s skin.
And so he makes a name for himself: he will kick and bite and ram players off their brooms if he has to. He’ll tease and taunt the other players like he’s a bullfighter in the ring. Whatever makes a win. Not everyone loves vicious dirty tactics, so controversy follows him all through his career - but what are a few fouls and penalties if the other team loses a player? what’s the point of playing quidditch if you’re going to be a shrinking violet about it? - but fans and quidditch reporters seem to enjoy it well enough, if the coaches do not.
And he is good with the quaffle, either way. He captains his Spanish team for some time, spends more time on the Moroccan national team in the international leagues, and then - when an injury takes him out for good, if his advancing age has not - he takes up coaching for the team in Marrakesh, now rather famous.
And now here he is: coach of the national team. Not everyone’s keen, but Yassine is supremely confident about this.
Other Notable Events: —
Personality: ENTP | Brash and competitive, Yassine has a confidence that verges on arrogance. At the same time, he doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously - will happily engage in horseplay, mischief, japes and games - and has a careless kind of charisma. Often a polarising figure, he can make fast friends or rub people the wrong way quite swiftly; he taunts and prods and banters to see how people react, to push them a little farther just for curiosity’s sake. He does the same with the team he trains, always liking to push to people’s limits - to get the best of their abilities or just to see what will tip them over the edge (depending on how much or little he likes them). Has a logical, tactical mind beneath the careless attitude; lives and breathes quidditch and has no plans of leaving the profession entirely. Love him or hate him, he doesn’t care.
Other:
— Fluent in Arabic, French and Spanish. Some Portuguese and English.
— Culturally Muslim, but was always the rebel in his family anyway, so nothing’s really sacred.
Age: 25
