Jim Bortzfield has taken Lake Highlands High School’s athletic teams into cyberspace.
His brainchild is www.fridaylights.com, which started with the 1998 football team and will eventually include all sports, boys and girls, at the high school.
Last season, the football received the type of coverage found in small town newspapers, combined with the interactive features available through modern technology. There were game summaries written by Bortzfield, along with team rosters and schedules, game predictions and scores. And Internet fans created their own interactive community through links to a chat board, where they discussed their team loyalties.
“The Dallas paper has so many schools and so many focuses,” Bortzfield says. “The Richardson News does a decent job, but not many people in Lake Highlands get it.”
Bortzfield is working to include other Lake Highlands sports teams on the page. He needs volunteers passionate enough about the school’s teams to attend games and provide write-ups, and he is looking for students to work more extensively on the site.
And he hopes to develop links and sell advertising to make the site self-supporting. “It’s truly a hobby,” Bortzfield says, but as with most hobbies, it comes with a price tag. Until January, MNA Technology provided free space on its server for Bortzfield’s site. Now, he must foot the bill.
The idea to sponsor a football site first occurred to Bortzfield, who grew up in West Texas, almost two years ago. He is an ardent fan who has attended Lake Highlands football games since the late 1970s. He heard rumors that the school itself would create such a web page, and he decided to wait. When, in the summer of 1998, no site appeared to be materializing, so Bortzfield — a business manager at MNA Technology — worked with his football player son to provide team members with the kind of exposure he thought they deserved.
“It was five to six games into the season when people started to look at it,” Bortzfield says of the site. “Several members of the Wildcat Club became aware of it. Then it was in the program for the Tyler game. It just kind of spread from there.”
Now, alumni log on to the site, pleased to find news from their alma mater readily available. And competitors from schools such as Midland Lee and Tyler can offer their opinions.
