Kenneth Wallace, Texas Tech and Lubbock ISD trailblazer, dies at 70

David Moody remembers Estacado coach Jimmie Keeling asking Matadors football players what they would be doing with their lives 10 years down the road.

The implication was he expected it to be something good.

Kenneth Wallace took it to heart, becoming a trailblazer on the field and off from the time he was a high-school athlete far into his professional life.

"It's amazing what he did with his career," said Moody, an Estacado teammate and fellow member of the Lubbock ISD Athletics Hall of Honor.

Wallace, selected by the A-J in 1999 as one of the South Plains' top 100 athletes of the century, died Friday at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 70. He was diagnosed with leukemia in August, his daughter Tonya said, and with a second form of cancer in October.

Wallace was the starting the quarterback on the 1968 Estacado Matadors, the first team to win a Texas high-school state championship in its first year of varsity competition.

He was an all-Southwest Conference cornerback on Texas Tech's 11-1 Gator Bowl champions of 1973 and the first Black football player to graduate from the university, according to Tech. He was co-winner of the Red Raiders' Donny Anderson sportsmanship award in 1973, sharing the honor with linebacker George Herro, and played in the 1974 Coaches All-America Game at Jones Stadium.

On the occasion of the Red Raiders' 1,000th game in 2015, the A-J selected an all-time Tech team that included Wallace on the third team. He started every game on the Red Raiders' 1972 Sun Bowl team and the 1973 Gator Bowl team.

James Mosley was his classmate and teammate, a running back on the '68 Estacado team that went 14-0 and, like Wallace, a Tech lettermen from 1971-73.

"He was serious about what he was about," Mosley said. "He had a vision for what he wanted to do, and he went after it.

"When we were in high school, he led us. He was the quarterback and he just had this smarts about him, football smarts and book smart. He would come up with plays. Even if Coach K (Jimmie Keeling) had sent one in and he (Wallace) thought it wouldn't work, he would change it."

At age 32, after going 25-15-2 from 1980-83 at Dunbar, Wallace took over at Coronado in what the A-J report at the time called "a monumental promotion of sorts."

He was the first Black man hired to be head coach in any sport at one of Lubbock's predominantly white public high schools. He also was the first person from within the Lubbock school system to be hired as head football coach at one of the city's then-Class 5A schools — Coronado, Monterey or Lubbock High — since 1966.

Though Wallace's coaching record was only 36-42-3, the A-J named him coach of the year on the All-City team for the job he did in 1981 at Dunbar and in 1987 at Coronado. He took the Panthers from 1-9 in his first season as head coach in 1980 to 7-1-2 in 1981 and 10-2 and regional finalists in 1982.

He went on to be a principal at Estacado, then an administrator from 2000 to 2019 at Houston's Galena Park ISD, whose North Shore High School football program has won five state championships since 2003.

Wallace was inducted into the Lubbock ISD Athletics Hall of Honor in 2016. He was on the selection committee for the Texas Tech football Ring of Honor, and in recent years he started the Kenneth Wallace Leadership Scholarship for students in the Galena Park ISD.

Wallace was principal at Estacado for 13 years. At Galena Park North Shore, he advanced from principal to assistant, then associate superintendent and ultimately deputy superintendent for educational support and school administration for the Galena Park ISD. He retired in June 2019.

"He went down to Houston and was principal at a high school and turned that school around," Mosley said. "Just about every year here lately, they have been in the championship game.

"But not only just the football part of it. He's gotten kids to stay in school, to graduate and to go on to college. So he was a great impact on a lot of people."

Mosley met Wallace in seventh grade. They roomed together for four years at Tech, where Mosley rushed for between 400 and 500 yards three years in a row on teams coached by Jim Carlen.

"We hit those books quite a bit sometime, and I knew when he had a test, because he would say, 'Hey, man, if you don't have a test, can you leave?' " Mosley said with a chuckle. "So he really was getting into his studies."

Wallace is the third prominent member of the 1973 Tech Gator Bowl team lost in recent years. Receiver-return man Lawrence Williams died in 2019, and noseguard Ecomet Burley died in 2020.

Moody, a star linebacker who rose to become a college football coach and an assistant at Tech, said Keeling's guidance of the teenage Matadors was critical. Moody said Wallace and center Joe Rose, a successful businessman, "probably did more with their lives ... in my opinion, professionally" than anyone from his Estacado team, given their backgrounds.

"Keeling was like a dad to so many guys," Moody said. "We both came from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and we used to talk about this all the time: Keeling would always ask us — almost daily — what are we going to be doing with our lives in 10 years? And that was huge, because, like I said, we were low socioeconomic. We didn't know where our next meal was going to come from sometimes.

"His daughter even sent him a message this morning, talking about how coach Keeling had molded so many young men, not just as football players, but young men."

Given a boat as a Father's Day gift in 2015, Wallace became an avid fisherman in recent years, his daughter said.

"Any lake," Tonya Wallace said. "He was more freshwater, but anywhere that had fish in it and he had a fishing pole, that was him."

Wallace's survivors include his wife Carolyn, son Reggie and twin daughters Tiffany and Tonya.

Funeral services are pending.

This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Kenneth Wallace, Texas Tech and Lubbock ISD trailblazer, dies at 70