Throwback Thursday: A ‘Wicket Time’

Faculty and staff members met for a friendly game of cricket on July 2, 1966.

With today being Thursday — the day for all things throwback — and with July 4 ever closer, we’re throwing it back to the spring 2016 issue of UT Dallas Magazine, which included a snippet on a celebratory pick-up game of cricket between faculty members on a hot Texas summer day more than 50 years ago.

In the late 1960s, when campus boasted little more than the Founders Building, the surrounding prairie land was ideal for a pick-up game of baseball or soccer — or cricket.

A cricket match was played July 2, 1966, on a makeshift pitch near where the Cecil and Ida Green Center now stands. Teams consisted of faculty and staff drawn from both the geosciences and atmospheric and space sciences departments of the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest (the University’s precursor).

Al Mitchell, who chronicled the early history of the Graduate Research Center and UT Dallas, wrote that “faculty and staff members of British origin joined in their own ‘Fourth of July’ (to show no hard feelings, they said),” a light-hearted reference to the defeat of the British by colonists during the American Revolution.

The teams braved the July heat and nagging chigger bites, with geosciences claiming the laurels in a 63-24 victory.

Have UT Dallas memories to share? Send them our way! Email [email protected] with your photos and recollections.

–Paul Bottoni

Geosciences captain Glen Riley strategizes with Herbert Haas in the foreground, while space sciences batsman Paul Edwards defends the wicket.