Tim Walz was a clear-eyes, full-hearts kind of coach

Minneapolis’ Metrodome hummed, its sidelines jammed on a fall Friday night. The Mankato West Scarlets, who had started the 1999 high school football season with a miserable record of 2-4, had improbably swaggered into a state championship game.

Now, less than 3 minutes stood between them and a title.

Their defense, though, would first have to repel the Cambridge-Isanti Bluejackets, who were from north of Minneapolis and trailed by a single touchdown. The quarterback hurled a desperate pass toward the end zone. But inside the 10-yard line, a Scarlets defender intercepted the ball, effectively clinching a 35-28 victory and Mankato West’s first championship.

A coach lifted Tim Walz, then the defensive coordinator and now the Democratic candidate for vice president, skyward. In Walz’s telling, the victory also eventually proved a launchpad for politics.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign are touting Walz’s coaching to broaden the Democratic ticket’s appeal, a time-tested strategy that Walz has long used.

His time as a coach serves as a glimpse into the personality he is bringing to the playing field of politics, with friendliness and warmth masking a contagious competitiveness. And Walz’s years in coaching show a ruthless willingness to change tactics as necessary.

As a high school coach in Minnesota and Nebraska, Walz was not a master tactician, interviews with more than a dozen players and coaches suggest, nor an exemplar of athleticism himself. He never seemed to angle for a team’s top coaching job – practical experience, perhaps, for where he finds himself now – and spent much of his time defying the profession’s stereotypes, preferring pumped-up pep talks to vengeful tirades.

“We knew all the coaches had confidence in us and our abilities, but coach Walz was like the one where you knew it, you felt it,” said Chuck Wiest, who played wide receiver for Mankato West.

Walz took to coaching in the early 1990s, more than a decade before he became a candidate for public office. Hired at Alliance High School, in one of Nebraska’s westernmost counties and near the state college from which he had graduated, he worked with the football and basketball teams.

His style took shape there, with Walz a bellowing, commanding speaker with a soft touch – a counterweight to coaches with fearsome hollers and knacks for play-calling.

“He’s got a way of knowing each child and knowing each athlete, and he will work to their strengths,” said Rocky Almond, who was the basketball coach at Alliance and whose daughter was the flower girl in Walz’s wedding. “But the guy was never negative. That’s what we loved about him. Everything was a positive.”

Indeed, Almond recalled, when a despondent player was bound for the bench, “Tim would be the first one we’d send over there to get him jacked back up.”

That assumed, though, that the player had not already sidled up to Walz, who adored the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers and was known, before he married, for trying to play tackle football with other coaches in his living room.

But Walz was not seen as maneuvering to become the head coach.

“The guy,” Almond said, “has been the supporting actor for his whole life.”

A 1995 drunken driving arrest upended his time on the sidelines.

Walz, who eventually pleaded guilty to reckless driving, kept his teaching job but resigned from his coaching roles, despite pleas from his colleagues to remain.

“We all tried to talk him out of it because, in our eyes, none of us were perfect,” Almond said. “But in Tim’s eyes, he made a mistake on something he preached to the kids.”

Jeff Tomlin, the head football coach at Alliance who had brought Walz aboard to tutor linebackers, remembered his assistant coach’s stubbornness.

“He was determined, based on his principles and his values, to do the right thing,” Tomlin said.

But after the Walzes moved to Minnesota in 1996, the future governor joined Mankato West’s coaching staff. He imported a catchphrase from Nebraska: “11 to the ball,” goading all 11 players on the field to swarm toward the action.

He regaled players with stories they found unusually relatable, such as the time his wife had seized his Dreamcast, the Sega video game console, because he had been playing to excess.

“I think if we could have thrown pads on him, he would have been out there with us,” Wiest said.

Players said they had few discrete memories of Walz’s words to them, his exact exhortations to them as teenagers lost to time. They remember, though, an insistent energy that became a no-fail optimism and his introduction of a pregame quiet period for players to sharpen their focus.

“He’d get the message across without having to scream, and never belittled people, never lost his cool like a different coach,” said David Schoettler, who played for Mankato West. “Walz would just be one of those people that gets your attention and makes sure you’re focused and gets you rallied up if you are a little bit down.”

In his 2021 State of the State address, Walz hinted at his approach, recalling an urgent huddle just before a halftime.

“Fellas, it is not often in life that you get a moment like this, one that can define you,” Walz, speaking from his old classroom at Mankato West, said he told his players. “This is your moment. This is our moment.”

The urgings worked, helping to keep alive the 1999 playoff run that has become Walz lore.

The season had an abysmal beginning, with the Scarlets, as Wiest recalled, even “stomped at homecoming.”

The players met, Wiest said, and considered two paths: “One, we just finish out the season and we’re a mediocre team, or we put these losses behind us.”

But a frustrated Walz was also at work, weighing new defensive looks to move beyond the four linebacker-four lineman approach that Mankato West had used in a conference where running games reigned.

“He’d watch film, and he knew what it was going to take for us to win,” said Eric Stenzel, a defensive star who broke a thumb early in the season and was subsequently hailed by the Star Tribune, Minnesota’s biggest newspaper, as the “best nine-fingered linebacker in the state.”

Recollections vary on what Walz used to try to turn around a disastrous season, but most remember a shift for at least a few games. Some, including head coach Rick Sutton, remember plans hinging on four linemen and three linebackers, including a zone defense with a pair of deep safeties. (A Minnesota State High School League spokesperson said the association did not have archival film of Walz’s games.)

“He brought us together and said, ‘Here’s the plan. I believe it can work,’ ” said John Considine, who played for Mankato West. “And people bought into it.”

Mankato West debuted its new strategy in the Jug game, a crosstown rivalry showdown, and won. The Scarlets rampaged through the rest of the season, like a state semifinal game they won 45-8.

Then came the championship.

“I don’t really think he changed from when we were losing to when we were winning,” Stenzel said of Walz.

Walz has said, seemingly only somewhat facetiously, that the season enabled his political career. He told the politics podcast “Pod Save America” in February that he was “absolutely convinced” that the title had helped propel his first campaign for Congress in 2006.

Walz made certain that voters knew he had been a coach, the latest in a long line of candidates to turn sideline notoriety into political muscle.

“When I coached football, these stands held about 3,000 people – that’s a lot,” he declared in a 2006 advertisement as he strode across a field. “It’s also the number of American soldiers who have died fighting in Iraq.”

Walz’s ability to convert his coaching record into a political weapon is remarkable, in part, because of the low profile he maintained as a coach. His name was absent from many news accounts of the Scarlets’ successes. Glen Mason, then the head football coach at the University of Minnesota, said he did not recall knowing Walz then, even though he successfully recruited the Scarlets’ star player, Stenzel.

But Walz is no longer a largely anonymous No. 2, and Democrats are leaning into his time on the football field.

When Harris introduced her running mate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, she called him “Gov. Walz” just twice. Nine other times, it was “coach Walz.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.