During team practices, the baseball teams conduct warm-ups on the baseball field along with their new companion: a coyote. “We got it about a week after practice,” sophomore and varsity baseball player Michael Evans said. “It was [junior] Ryan Medric’s idea.”
“We got a fake coyote to guard our field from geese, and he’s kind of like our team mascot,” Medric said.
Geese are generally regarded as pests on baseball fields, usually due to their large grass consumption and the droppings they leave behind that cause both aesthetic and safety issues for the field.
According to Evans, the team placed a cutout of a dog on the field last year, but it did not scare the geese as much as the coyote had.
“It works really well,” Evans said.
Freshman JV catcher Conor Boyle expressed similar sentiments, saying that he had “seen less geese on the field” since the team decided to leave the coyote out.
“It has a realistic tail that blows in the wind,” Medric said. “We put it at a different place everyday to make it seem more realistic.”
The coyote, christened Pablo, was bought with two-dollar contributions made by each baseball player. Coyote decoys run for $44.99 at Sports Authority and are quite popular among baseball teams.
According to the Sports Authority website, the life-sized coyote is “for coyote hunting at its best! It rotates on a single stake, which eases weary predators; a movable faux tail adds another dimension of realism.”
The team only takes Pablo off the field during games; at all other times, the decoy remains on the field to serve as a warning to all geese approaching the turf.