Minnesota governor Tim Walz waltzed onto the bleachers at Mankato West High School on Friday night to watch a team he once coached as an assistant play a big rivalry game.
Walz’s appearance also coincided with protests at the high school, as Pro-Palestine supporters were seen standing outside the venue.
Multiple reels of footage of Walz interacting with families on the bleachers at the game showed the game’s crowd behind him. Many were visibly indifferent to the vice presidential candidate’s presence. Multiple attendees were seen staring silently. However, some attendees were talking to and even hugging the governor.
The one recorded instance of Walz garnering cheers from the crowd was when he joined both teams just before the game to help with the coin toss. When his name was announced on the loudspeaker, a few mild cheers from the Mankato West bleachers could be heard.
Walz’s presence at the game prompted controversy among locals.
Former Republican Minnesota congressman Jeremy Munson urged people to show up and boo Walz days before the game, in a post on X.
Meanwhile, chair of the Blue Earth County GOP Yvonne Simon told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that Walz’s appearance at the game was due to desperation.
“They’re getting desperate to get the word out,” Simon said.
The Harris-Walz campaign’s latest effort is to tie the Minnesota governor’s candidacy to his stint as the assistant coach of the Mankato West High School football team in Minnesota in the 1990s. During Walz’s tenure as an assistant on the staff, the team won the state championship in 1999. Walz’s first job out of college was as a teacher in China, before being hired by Mankato West in 1996, where he was a geography teacher.
He was also the first faculty advisor of Mankato West High School’s first gay–straight alliance, and he worked to organize summer educational trips to China for high school students.
Walz’s short tenure as an assistant football coach has been a talking point for the Harris campaign since he was announced as the running mate for Harris on Aug. 7.
Walz even brought out members of Mankato West’s 1999 state championship team during his speech at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 21, when he formally accepted the nomination. During that speech, Richard Grenell, former U.S. ambassador to Germany, critiqued the display in a post on X.
“He was the Assistant Coach not the Coach,” Grenell wrote.
The lukewarm reception that Walz got at Mankato West was actually a warmer reception than what he has received at football games since joining the ticket.
When Walz attended a Sept. 28 game between Minnesota and Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, fans waited outside afterwards and gave him a harsh farewell. Several in attendance booed him, with another fan even yelling, “Get out of here!”
Walz, despite never having coached past the high school level or even as a head coach in high school, compared his background as a football coach to that of Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who served as the head coach at four different NCAA Power-5 football programs from 1995 to 2016. Tuberville led Ole Miss, Auburn, Texas Tech and Cincinnati as head coach and even won an SEC Championship with Auburn in 2004.
“I feel like one of my roles in this now is to be the anti-Tommy Tuberville, to show that football coaches are not the dumbest people,” Walz said during a fundraiser event in Boston in early August.
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