Before he was a VP pick, Tim Walz turned a high school football program around

Seth Greenwald, a linebacker on a southern Minnesota high school team called Mankato West that won a state championship 25 years ago, glanced at his buzzing phone earlier this week. The caller ID flashed with a location: Paris.

Greenwald answered. A reporter introduced himself over the phone, then asked if he could interview Greenwald about one of his former coaches, a man named Tim Walz. Greenwald laughed. You’re in Paris to cover the Olympics, and you want to talk to me?

He would find out that this wasn’t an outlier. Last Tuesday, Walz was selected as a running mate to Vice President Kamala Harris for her 2024 presidential campaign. Since then, many members of the 1999 Class 4A title-winning Mankato West Scarlets are getting to relive old glory days. They’ve received calls from TMZ, The Daily Beast, CNN and Newsweek. Another former player, now an insurance salesman, chuckled when looking at his normally mundane email inbox, suddenly flooded with messages about a prospective vice presidential candidate they all knew. Many of them began texting and calling each other.

“It feels like we’re the ‘72 Dolphins or something,” said Eric Stenzel, the team’s star linebacker, referencing the only undefeated team in NFL history.

“I’m pouring my morning coffee, and I look at my email, and I’m, like, ‘Am I getting pranked?’” said Miles Haefner, a safety on that team.

“We’re talking about an assistant football coach who taught history,” said Mitch Salsbery, another former linebacker.

Before he was elected governor of Minnesota, before he represented the state’s first district in Congress and long before he became a candidate for vice president, Walz was a coach and social studies teacher in the Midwest, first in Nebraska and then in Minnesota. The night he introduced himself on the national stage in Philadelphia, many of his fellow coaches and former players at Mankato West thought back to sticky fall evenings as they listened to their old defensive coach, who used to light them up in the film room and challenge them on the practice field 25 years ago.

“I think if they had given him a helmet,” said Salsbery, “he probably would have played in practice.”

“I still hear the cadence,” said John Considine, an offensive lineman on those West teams at the turn of the century.

Walz got his start in teaching and coaching at Alliance High School in Alliance, Neb., a town of 8,000 people, which was about twice the size of West Point, Neb., where he was born. In 1996, he and his wife, Gwen, moved to Mankato, Minn., a town of about 31,000 and a 90-minute drive south from the Twin Cities.

Rick Sutton, head coach, Mankato West: Tim and his wife, Gwen, were teaching and living in Nebraska. Gwen is originally from southwestern Minnesota, and they wanted to get closer back home.

Jeff Tomlin, head coach, Alliance High School: I taught for 36 years and I’ve been around few coaches as good as him.

Pat Zochol, linebacker, Alliance: He’d look right at you on the practice field and say, ‘They’re coming for you because they think you’re small and weak. You’ve gotta be ready!’ … I was small and weak. But I made all-conference.

Sutton: So he got here (Mankato), and when I interview coaches, I really tend to be very intuitive and make quick decisions. There was no doubt he was definitely somebody that I wanted to have on our staff.

Lance Resner, linebacker, Mankato West: Tim came in with a different swagger. We were pretty dogs—t for a long time.

Sutton: The first three years I was there, we were 1-26.

Tom Boone, assistant coach, Mankato West: Our weight room was subterranean. It was a dungeon. It was the most, like, something you’d see in the 1800s for lifting.

Resner: For a while, the team didn’t even lift weights.

Paul Keenan, quarterback, Mankato West: Yes, that was part of the problem. One year, The Mankato Free Press was going to take a picture of a couple of us in the weight room. They were, like, ‘One of you guys lift, and the other, spot.’ Me and my buddy flipped coins to see which one of us has to lift because we’re not going to go on there and put 25s on the bar. I’m putting on more weight than I can handle for the picture.

Boone: We were so bad before his era.

Keenan: We didn’t score a touchdown until our seventh game one season. Our defensive tackle led us in points. He had a safety. That year, against Mankato East, our crosstown rival, we finally scored a touchdown with 4,000 people in the stands. Our student body is so excited that 10 of them run on the field to congratulate us. We got an unsportsmanlike conduct, which pushed us back so far we had to go for the 2-point conversion, and we end up losing in overtime.

Resner: Tim came in with a different tempo.

Nate Hood, defensive lineman, Mankato West: He was always kind of looking after players. It’s kind of how I got my first varsity tackle. I remember Tim comes up and he’s like, ‘Alright Hood, what’s the score?’ And I’m like, ‘We’re down 0 to 34.’ And he’s like, ‘Alright, you can get in now.’ He kind of had a fun way about it. Two plays later, I got my first tackle.

Chuck Wiest, receiver, Mankato West: He was so full of positive energy. He was our hype man.

Adam Friedman, safety, Mankato West: When I was a junior, I was a punt returner. I muffed a punt, and they could tell I had the yips. Coach Walz came up to me and said, ‘We’re not going to fix this today. We’re going to put somebody else in for you, but we’re going to figure this out, don’t worry.’ I was pissed at the time and remembered it. A year later, I returned a punt 80 yards. We ended up scoring and won, and I got interviewed after the game. Coach Walz came up to me and said, ‘What’d you say to them?’ I said, ‘I thanked my blockers.’ He said, ‘Aw, man, good work. You should take credit, too, though. That was amazing!’

Keenan: It was, ‘Let’s go! You’re better than that! This is how we’re going to do it! We’ve got to understand our past, but that’s not our future!’

Resner: That s—t is contagious. He would go, ‘Are you dedicated? Do you want to be a football player or somebody who plays football? We’re in it! Together!’ That was kinda the biggest thing that he brought to the table. The culture of enthusiasm.

Walz’s defining characteristic as a coach had less to do with X’s and O’s and more to do with motivation and intensity. Walz gave the pregame speeches. Walz jumped into drills.

Wiest: He was definitely the most animated coach we had.

Resner: Animated as heck. He’s high energy.

Mitch Salsbery, linebacker/tight end, Mankato West: We had this dusty old, dingy football locker room, and we would watch film of the other team, and we had a whiteboard, but then some people would watch it on, like, cement block walls. The lights are out. You’re after school. It’s like 5 o’clock. Half the guys want to sleep, and Walz would stand up there and just scream and yell and point at this crappy old film on an old cinder block wall, trying to teach a 15-year-old kid how to play football. And it was the same every day, just screaming and yelling at the film, teaching and teaching and teaching until he got blue in the face.

Resner: Spit would fly out of his mouth as he’s talking. He’s flexing every time he’s showing to you and demonstrating.

Miles Haefner, safety, Mankato West: I remember we were hitting at one point in practice, and there’s a play where they threw it to the tight end, and I ran up and smashed him, and the tight end ended up dropping the ball. And we had this thing called ‘the big stick.’ They’d give it every day at practice to the person who had the biggest hit. You get to take it back to your locker. And I ended up getting the big stick for the day, and Coach Walz was, like, dapping me up and all excited. I got the big stick.

John Considine, offensive line, Mankato West: Mr. Walz had a background with the National Guard, and so he had a way of motivating us.

Aaron Miller, offensive line coach, Mankato West: He loved those Tom Osborne Nebraska teams, too. We went to a game together once.

Boone: He brought back the black shirt idea. The defense wore black shirts on game day.

Haefner: I remember wearing the black shirt to school, like, ‘This is sweet! I’m on the starting defense!’

Resner: I remember him doing this tennis ball drill with us. It was all about quick twitch, getting off. Attacking! He’d have two tennis balls, one in each hand. The linebackers would line up on the five-yard line. And he’d drop the balls, and the first one to get the tennis ball wins. You’d try to get it off the first bounce, maybe two bounces. That kind of thing. It was just about exploding off the line as soon as you saw a movement. He was all about providing that giddy-up.

Walz was a teacher in the classroom and a teacher on the field. He has said that he enjoyed the week of practice and preparation almost as much as the games themselves.

Keenan: He loved power football.

Dan Clement, linebacker, Mankato West: Nobody passed back then.

Seth Greenwald, linebacker, Mankato West: It was downhill football, man. If you could line up with eight fullbacks in the backfield, you would. It’s coming at you. It was not the most rocket science football you’ve ever seen.

Boone: He was very good about teaching the fundamentals of defense and where to be. But it was also, like, ‘OK, you’re going to get there, but now you’ve got to get there with some enthusiasm!’

Salsbery: There were times where he would line up at linebacker and go through plays with us because he had to show everybody how it was done and people weren’t getting it right. He wasn’t sitting on the sidelines with a clipboard. He was in there.

Haefner: There was a lot of talk about tackling, and how to tackle.

Greenwald: I distinctly remember junior year, the first day of contact. Everybody’s geeked up. We were all hitting each other, just getting after it. That first tackling drill was aggressive. I remember him yelling, ‘If you guys all hit like this, we will play you!’

Resner: I remember making one play in practice. It was on a smaller kid. And I crushed him in the backfield. It was a form tackle. I remember Coach Walz stopping the play and going, ‘This is a kid who is dedicated to form tackling!” The kid was, like, five feet tall. I could’ve just hit him with my shoulder and blown ‘em up. But I went low, drove through, lifted him, put him on his back. He stopped the whole thing and made an example out of it. He goes, ‘This is good! This is what we do! This is how we do it! It doesn’t matter how big you are!”

Haefner: We would watch tape. As high schoolers.

Boone: Back in those days, you’d meet the other team on Saturday and exchange VHS tapes. We’d get the tape and make copies of it. We’d watch it, and then Sunday night, we’d get back together. Many times, we didn’t wait until Sunday night.

Miller: One thing that Tim really brought to the table was, ‘OK, what adjustments do we need to make?’

Considine: We went from a 4-4 to a 4-3 with what he called ‘squatted corners.’ This was right before the big Mankato East-Mankato West game.

Greenwald: It was a personnel thing. Our opponent was going to try to exploit us on the perimeter with one particular dude. So, we basically lined an outside linebacker up at corner and baited them to do that. It worked really, really well.

Boone: After that game, it was, ‘We don’t lose anymore here now. That was enough.’

Haefner: We played Totino-Grace in the state quarterfinals game. They’re tough, and we’re losing to them at halftime. They kept running the option, and the quarterback kept keeping the ball and running the ball without pitching it. I remember at halftime, Walz goes, ‘If you make this guy pitch it, he’s going to put it on the deck, and we’re going to get the fumble.’ Sure enough, one of the first plays of the second half, we forced him to pitch the ball, and he put it on the ground, and we got the turnover. It was, like, amazing.

Walz stayed at Mankato West until 2006, when he left to run for Congress. He rose in the ranks, including being elected governor in 2018. Harris touted Walz’s experience as a coach after naming him her running mate, but it has taken some time for his former players to get used to seeing the man that would lose his voice from hollering pregame speeches now speaking to thousands at political rallies.

Hood: I just would have never guessed. We obviously had political debates in class, but you never knew where he stood on an issue. He’d always play devil’s advocate. Honestly, until, like 2004, ‘05 and ‘06, I actually didn’t even know that he was really political. I just kind of knew him as a coach.

Salsbery: You never see those things coming, so it’s certainly surprising. But at the same time, people who connect with people tend to continue to move and seeing him move up and be recognized as somebody who people want to work with, that’s the part that’s not surprising.

Wiest: I look at him, and am like, ‘I could probably just go up and talk to him. We could just talk about football, school, the ‘99 state championship.’

Boone: I was just talking to my brother after the speech Tuesday night, and I was, like, ‘That’s Tim. That’s the guy we got every day, every day, on that football field and in the locker room.’

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.