By Alex Solari, Staff Writer
Have you ever wanted to see gigantic moose with your own eyes? More importantly, have you ever wanted to perhaps ride one of these moose? Well, you’re in for a treat! The Maine Mountain Moose team is looking for new athletes to march with these creatures into the night and never look back.
The first march for the team was against the University of Maine.
This was to the school’s surprise, with the team’s coach saying, “We have never had a Maine Mountain Moose team before, but these kids from UMass Dartmouth insisted on our track team having a march up our mountains. I figured it would be a good endurance exercise for our athletes, until I realized that the only ones marching are the moose.”
You may be wondering, how exactly did the teams get these moose? Well, if you are at all familiar with Maine, you would know that there are signs on some of the roads that say, “Brake for Moose. It could save your life.”
The athletes waited around those signs, looking for a moose to walk into the middle of the road where the cars would stop for them.
At this point, the athletes attempted to drag the 1000-pound animals across the road, but as you can probably guess, this was impossible.
So, the athletes decided to lure the moose in with some snacks, and this method only led to the teams collecting one moose each.
The goal was to get three moose for each team, since there were 3 athletes per team. Since this wasn’t possible, all 3 athletes sat on their one moose.
The two teams started from the bottom of Mount Katahdin, the tallest mountain in Maine, and set their moose up for the departure.
Originally, there was a finish line, but with all 3 athletes on one moose, it was decided that the goal was just to get as far as possible since there was no telling if the moose would even cooperate.
For the first ten minutes, the two teams kept in close proximity of each other, with the moose stopping to smell all of the elements around them. Moby Dick, a player for the University of Maine’s team, started to get aggravated with the moose, and told his team, “I’m hopping off to go to the bathroom, these moose aren’t going very far anyway.”
His other teammates were concerned that Moby would lose them, so all three hopped off the moose and tied him a tree.
Clearly, they did not realize how strong moose are, and when they came back, their moose had fled.
Soon after, the UMass Dartmouth team had similar struggles when their moose seemed to get irritated that there was so much weight on him, and shook off all three athletes, and before they knew it, their moose had fled as well.
Since the Corsairs made it about 50 feet further than the University of Maine Bears, they were declared the winners, and are ecstatic about their success.
If you’re interested in joining this small team, or if anyone has any tips for capturing moose please email aprilfoolsmoose@umassd.edu to help out our talented team!