 He was also an accomplished high school track-and-field competitor and set school records for shot put and pole vault, as well as being the starting nose tackle on his school's Georgian Bay championship winning football team.His athletic and scholarly aptitude earned him entrance bursaries at McGill University's Schulich School of Music and the University of Toronto, Faculty of Music.Lightfoot moved to California in 1958 to study jazz composition and orchestration for two years at Hollywood's Westlake College of Music, which had many Canadian students.