As the 2023 Lake Highlands Wildcat soccer team advances to the regional semifinals, Lake Highlands resident Colby Jones shares his photo of Lake Highlands High School’s very first playoff team in 1973.
Photo of the 1973 LHHS Wildcat boys soccer team. Courtesy Colby Jones.
Jones, now an artist known as Sir Colby, also was a young Ted Lasso 50 years ago.
“Back, right,” he says when asked where he stands in the black-and-white team photo. “I was the coach.”
At the time, Lake Highlands High was but a wee adolescent. (The new high school was founded in 1960, despite some confusion surrounding the est. date).
Here’s what Coach Colby can recall of the 1973 postseason:
“We played a play-in game against Garland. We tied and then won on kicks. In fact, the winning kick hit the left post, rolled behind the goalkeeper, hit the right post and went in. Our win was an upset because Garland had a very good team. We had only two boys who had ever played soccer before. Richardson was the team to beat in our district. They were undefeated. We were the only district team to score on them. Twice,” he notes in an email.
“Then we played one of the area’s elite teams, North Dallas. They were loaded with kids who had grown up with the game. They beat us handily, 5-1.” Here’s the photo with the names he can recall:
In the 1960s Jones played on a state championship soccer team and later was a referee. When I interviewed him in 2011, he had recently illustrated “Soccer Federation Laws of the Game Made Easy,” a soccer rules book that is just adorable.
“I’ve been involved since 1966 so I’ve had time to pile up a resume and hang some plaques on my utility room walls,” he says now. “If I try to tell you about it it’ll sound like bragging. I don’t want to do that. So, yes, I played, coached, refereed, ran leagues and tournaments and so forth.”
After university and soccer, etcetera, Jones worked some 30 years for the Park Department, about 20 of them at the Lake Highlands North Recreation Center, which originally was called Skyline.
Now he creates amazing cartoons, portraits and other drawings that you can see on his Sir Colby website.
