‘Clear eyes, full heart’: the unlikely championship that launched Tim Walz

“We’re hiring another football coach,” Mankato West high school principal John Barnett told Scarlets head football coach Rick Sutton after interviewing Tim Walz about a geography teaching position. “You’re definitely gonna want to talk to him.”

This was back in the spring of 1997, when Walz was a 30-something national guardsman relocating to Minnesota from Nebraska so his wife could be closer to her family. So Sutton arranged a second informal interview at his house, one that would ultimately decide whether Walz’s $25,000-a-year teaching gig would come with a $2,500 bonus for working with the football team. “I knew very, very early on in our conversation that this was a guy that I definitely wanted on my staff,” Sutton recalls of Walz, who took the job.

By all accounts Walz made as strong a first impression with Kamala Harris; strong enough that the Democratic presidential nominee picked him to be her running mate over more popular choices. On Wednesday, the Minnesota governor takes center stage at the Democratic National Convention to accept the party’s vice-presidential nomination. His primetime speech could well come off sounding like one of his old half-time pep talks.

Walz, whose progressive wins in the state legislature also recommended him for the job alongside Harris, has only recently emerged as a national figure since describing Maga Republicans and their retrograde politics as “weird” . With that one simple word, which suddenly has the right taking offense , Walz did in a single news cycle what Democrats haven’t been able to do in 16 years – and that’s retake control over the national political narrative by stealing a page from Donald Trump’s negative-branding playbook. “He’s always been pretty good at one-liners,” says Seth Greenwald, a standout Mankato West linebacker who played for Walz.

“He hasn’t changed,” adds Chris Boyer, a former Mankato West running back.

When Harris introduced Walz as her running mate in early August at a packed rally in Philadelphia, she referred to him as “governor” twice. Otherwise, she either called him “Tim” or “Coach” – a title that, in America, is arguably more respected than “Doctor” or even “President”. Walz’s coaching resume seems ripped from Friday Night Lights ; the highlight, a worst-to-first turnaround that launched Mankato West as a perennial power in the state, is a study in flinty midwestern self-determinism. “The first couple times he gained political office, it was like ‘Wow,’” Greenwald says. “But then after seeing him accomplish more, after playing for the guy, having class with the guy – this is gonna sound crazy, but after a while nothing really surprises you. Now this is just his story.”

About two hours south of the Twin Cities, Mankato West was considered a relatively large Minnesota public school, with about 750 students back then. Tom Boone, who started out coaching junior varsity football under Sutton, didn’t think he’d lack for turnout until just eight kids showed up for the first tryout in the summer. He was told more kids would show up once school began, which didn’t leave him much time to prepare for the season opener. “If it wasn’t rock bottom,” Boone says, “it was one step below us.”

Walz brought a fresh energy to the school, challenging everyone and accepting challenges in kind. In the teachers’ lounge, Walz became renowned for his rolling debates with the theater teacher over whether the Great Wall of China could be observed from space, leveraging a connection to Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in hopes of settling the debate – which just mushroomed into a new argument about where space begins. (“What made his classes so fun is that he had been to so many of these other countries we would talk about,” Boyer recalls.) Walz offered extra credit to students for their civic engagement, explicitly during the 2004 presidential election. Famously, he served as faculty coordinator for the students’ gay-straight alliance. “It really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married,” Walz told the Star Tribune in 2018 of the symbolic significance of his decision to advise the group.

He took that same open-minded energy into football meetings, stirring up passionate strategic arguments among his fellow coaches. “But once we made a decision, we walked out and carried out the mission,” Sutton says. Outside of work, Walz was the colleague who’d bail you out of a snowstorm and sign up for any adventure. “I remember one time he asked me what I was doing after school, and I told him I was gonna replace my dishwasher,” Boone says. “And he was like, ‘I’ll come over.’ We didn’t know what we were doing. It didn’t matter.”

When Mankato West replaced their old dungeon of a weight room with a new space, Walz turned it into a showcase for lifting competitions against his fellow coaches, some of whom were throwing up an impressive 350lbs in the bench press and the squat. “Back in the day it was on the players to put in the prep work, and they weren’t,” says Greenwald. “It took the coaches showing up at the ages that they were and saying, ‘Hey, if I can do it, you can do it too’, for the culture to change.”

As Sutton tells it, the athletes in that weight room, many of whom played sports in addition to football, were the ones who spurred Mankato West’s “ascension” along with a number of large lineman who played in the trenches. All the while, he leaned heavily on a three-man staff that included Walz; Boone, the math teacher; and Aaron Miller, who taught social studies. Sutton made his assistants coach both sides of the ball. After a promotion to offensive coordinator, Boone also coached the defensive backs. Miller coached the offensive and defensive lines. Walz doubled as the running backs coach and defensive coordinator. The high demands they put on players ran the gamut. “I just remember having to compete in practices, on game days, even in the classroom,” Greenwald says. “The coaching staff was really good in terms of not letting us get away from working hard.”

A diehard fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, Walz ran a 4-4 scheme that took inspiration from the hard-nosed defenses assembled by legendary Huskers coach Tom Osborne. Like Nebraska, Mankato West’s school colors are red and white – but Walz began outfitting his defensive starters in black shirts during practices, a longstanding Huskers football tradition. Eric Stenzel – a 6ft 3in, 240lb outside linebacker who also ran track, put the shot and played basketball – was the gleaming cornerstone. “[He] ended up playing fullback at the University of Minnesota,” Walz said in a recent Pod Save America interview.

While coaching football in the state at Alliance high school in Nebraska, Walz gained a reputation for getting the most out of available talent, defying students’ drill sergeant expectations and embracing them and exhorting them whether they succeeded or stumbled. After 1995 drunk driving arrest, Walz pleaded guilty to lesser charges for reckless driving. He stepped down as Alliance’s linebackers coach over protests from colleagues at the school, which kept him on the teaching faculty. Two years later, when Walz returned to football at Mankato West, the mistake became his oft-cited life lesson on what not to do; his insistence on not letting the mistake define him set an example for how to overcome.

With passing not yet being en vogue at the high school level in Minnesota at the turn of the century, Walz ran a basic defense: the large linemen took up space, and the linebackers took care of the rest. “You weren’t getting too many blitz calls,” Greenwald says. “So when that call came in and you looked over to the sideline and saw him looking back, you knew he was rewarding you for having done something well. It gave you a little extra juice.” In 1998, Walz’s second season, the Scarlets made a shocking turn. Improbably, the squad was flush with playmakers. Early in that season, the Scarlets beat a team that finished runner-up in the state championship. That victory had them believing that maybe they could make a deep playoff run, too.

But those hopes were dashed when their starting quarterback tore his ACL midway through the season. Without a dedicated backup, Sutton was forced to put his punter in at quarterback. Boyer, the feature back, became the Scarlets’ entire offense. (“That didn’t go well,” he says.) A once-optimistic season ended in a letdown. “You gotta understand, we were trying to do something that had never been done,” Greenwald says of the Scarlets’ title aspirations. “It was like we were trying to go to the moon. The seniors ahead of us in ’98 did a really good job of showing us what it was like to try to do it.” But that breakthrough put extra pressure on the team to improve on those results. It nearly cracked them.

In 1999, Mankato West started 2-4. The seniors on the team wrestled with their leadership roles. New quarterback Jay Nessler, a baseball and basketball star coming off a season-long football sabbatical, floundered. And all these growing pains came into sharp relief as Mankato West were pitted against bigger schools from the Twin Cities area. Greenwald remembers Walz telling the seniors on defense: “This is it, the breaking point. Your high school career could be over in as little as three weeks. You’ve got to decide who you are.”

“The coaching staff in general did a great job of kind of laying that out on a silver platter and saying, ‘It’s right here if you want it,’” Greenwald adds.

Ultimately, the Scarlets decided not to lose again, ticking off wins in their next seven games to streak into the state championship at the Metrodome, formerly the home of the NFL’s Vikings. Facing Cambridge-Isanti, a suburban Minneapolis high school, Mankato West hung on for a 35-28 triumph; a fourth-down interception by defensive back Jake Schmiesing deep in Scarlets territory sealed the Class 4A championship. “I remember us being upset with him because we coaches always talked about going for the knockdown instead of the interception on fourth down,” Boone says. “But Schmies was like, ‘Coach, it’s the state championship!’ Then it was like: ‘Alright, alright. We’ll let it pass.’”

Once the Scarlets’ legacy of failure had been lifted, it was time to celebrate. After the game, a procession of emergency vehicles escorted the Scarlets back home for a massive pep rally in the school gym. But amidst the happiness and euphoria was a twinge of sadness.

Here after all was a team breaking up at its peak, not because it wanted to but because it was all grown up. The seniors moved on to college. Boyer, who ran for 202 yards and three touchdowns in the title game, was looking forward to a big career at Division III Augsburg University until he suffered a grand mal seizure while driving and crashed into a utility pole his college freshman year. Physically and cognitively disabled now, he struggles to recall moments from that season – not least the fact that Walz was his position coach. It goes to show how fragile the memory of that championship is. And it’s no surprise that Walz was one of the first people to reach out to Boyer after the accident. “He’s just my teacher and my coach and my friend,” Boyer says.

Before long, the Scarlets coaches would move on to other jobs. Walz quit teaching three years later to start his political career. And while Mankato West have gone on to win four more state titles, those who were part of that first championship in 1999 can’t help feeling that was the high point.

The 25th-year anniversary of that championship team is coming up this fall. Walz’s recent rise would certainly raise the stakes for any reunion plans, especially if the Scarlets’ canny ex-coordinator pulls off another historic upset in November . “I can actually say I’ve been in the showers with a guy who could be in the Oval Office,” jokes Boone. “I would be lying if I said I agreed with every political decision Tim’s ever made. But I also know Tim’s doing what he believes is the best thing. Most people around here, whether they affiliate with the Democrats or Republicans, I know they can say Tim is a good guy that you can get behind regardless.”