As a teacher and coach at Mankato West High School, Tim Walz gave out hallway high-fives, was named “most inspiring teacher,” motivated students to become educators themselves and helped create a turnaround story for the football team.
Now governor of Minnesota and the vice presidential pick on the Democratic presidential ticket, Walz is still remembered fondly by his former students and players.
“He was probably one of the most well-liked teachers in the school while he taught there,” said Katie Heintz, 41, who had Walz as a teacher her junior year of high school and is now the director of a library in the area.
His lectures on topics like history and government have stuck with her to this day, she said.
He really taught both sides of everything,” she said. “He wasn’t pushy about, you know, right or left or whatever.”
He was also an influential assistant coach who mentored students beyond the field and helped lead the football team to a state championship.
Both Walz and his wife, Gwen Walz, worked at Mankato West, and Tracy Frederick Corcoran, 41, took classes with both of them.
“Between Tim and Gwen, those were two people in the high school that were always there for students,” she said. “Both Tim and Gwen had this magic of helping you see possibilities and potential in yourself that maybe you didn’t actually know was there.”
Walz, a Nebraska native, moved to Mankato after having served in the military for almost 20 years. It’s a city of around 45,000 people 80 miles south of Minneapolis, and residents describe it as the ideal place to raise a family.
Both Corcoran and Heintz, Walz’s former students, moved back to Mankato years after graduation to raise their families. They’ve seen their old teacher a handful of times each since then; he still attended some high school football games as governor, they said.
Despite his political ascent, Heintz said, his disposition is exactly the same.
“He’s standing true to what he believes in,” she said. “We hadn’t spoken in 15 years, but he remembered I was a student. We just picked up right where we had left off, no awkwardness.”
Corcoran now works in educational consulting and is making her own foray into politics by running for the local school board. It’s something she said Walz inspired her to do.
“Tim is definitely one of those teachers that left a lasting impact on me,” she said. “Tim really provided a window for me to see that actually you can have a bigger impact on a larger scale and public office is one of those ways that you can do that.”
Mankato is fairly mixed when it comes to politics, Corcoran said, nearly split down the middle between Democrats and Republicans. But with his deep community ties, Heintz said, Walz is liked across the board. She thinks he has the potential to attract those on the right to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“I think people that know him will vote for him because of who he is,” she said. “My dad is a die-hard Republican, served in the military, and he is fond of Walz.”
Watching their high school teacher become their representative and governor and now join the running to be vice president has been strange and thrilling, Corcoran and Heintz said. They’re both voting for him and Harris in November.
“You can just feel the excitement from everyone who has been impacted by him,” Corcoran said. “He hunts and fishes like many Minnesotans do, and I think that really humble, human side of him is what makes people rally around him.”
Patient but ‘full bore’ as a coach who helped lead a lagging team to state championships
It was his junior year, and Dan Clement wanted to drop out of Mankato West. A self-proclaimed “troubled youth,” he hung out with a group of kids who preferred to skip class, drink alcohol and do drugs rather than sit in a classroom. But a conversation in the summer of 1998 with his linebackers coach, Walz, changed his mindset heading into the final year of high school.
“He really pulled me along,” Clement, 43, said. “He really just showed a lot of care for me to the point where I’m like, ‘OK, I’m going to continue going to school, and I’m going to work hard for you.’ I played football for him. I didn’t really play football for much of anything else.”
Clement’s recollection of Walz is far from unusual from former coaches and players, who say he was an integral part in turning a once-lackluster football program into the best team in Minnesota.
“They didn’t win a game for two or three years,” Clement said. “Mankato West was awful. A really bad football team for many, many years. And then quite literally from ’96, ’97 and ’98, within those years, it just went from awful to state champs.”
Walz moved to Minnesota from Nebraska with his wife, Gwen, in 1996 to be closer to her family. They both joined the school as teachers, and Walz was brought up as a possible assistant to then-head coach Rick Sutton.
Sutton, 62, said they immediately hit it off.
“Tim is the kind of guy that just makes people feel comfortable. He’s got really good people skills,” Sutton said. “Without a doubt, one of the most important things in coaching and teaching is the ability to build relationships with students and other people, and that’s definitely Tim’s strength. No question, when I first met him for that informal interview, that this was a guy that I wanted on my staff.”
Walz initially coached the linebackers and then transitioned to defensive coordinator. In 1999, they had a team with major potential but started the season 2-4. Sutton and Walz made sure to emphasize to the players that the year was not done quite yet.
They then rallied for eight straight wins and eventually took home the state championship with a dramatic 35-28 victory over Cambridge-Isanti. Walz’s defense limited one of the state’s star running backs to just over 100 yards, a major success considering he was coming off a semifinal game in which he had more than 250 yards on the ground.
Seth Greenwald, a linebacker on the championship team, said Walz’s energy on the sidelines helped change its fortunes that season.
“He brought a lot of energy,” Greenwald said. “He wasn’t a big yeller; he wasn’t a big screamer at us. He was always coaching with us. Always very present as a coach. Never took days off, never wasn’t prepared. He just enjoyed the game. His passion stood out. When he rolls up his sleeves and decides that he’s going to go ahead and attack something, he goes full-bore.”
Clement added: “He wasn’t screaming when you failed. He was screaming when you did well. He’s two fists over his head, jumping 3 feet in the air. That’s how I envision Coach Walz.”
‘The Education Governor’
Walz attributes his decision to switch from educator to legislator to an incident that happened in 2004.
President George W. Bush was in Mankato to give a speech, and Walz brought a group of children to listen to him, hoping to give them a unique educational experience. But the students were denied entry because they had previously volunteered for the Democratic Party, according to Walz.
“My students, regardless of political party, deserved to witness the historical moment of a sitting president coming to our city,” Walz tweeted in August 2020, adding: “It was at this moment that I decided to run for office. While I had a passion for politics, I had never been overly involved in political campaigns, and many people thought that a high school teacher and football coach didn’t stand a chance.”
Educators and advocates applauded Walz, a fierce proponent for children’s causes who they felt was a welcome addition to the national stage.
“Gov. Walz is known as the ‘Education Governor’ because he has been an unwavering champion for public school students and educators and an ally for working families and unions,” Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement Tuesday.
Among the actions he has taken: Last year, Walz signed a bill into law that enabled all K-12 students in Minnesota to receive free school breakfast and lunch, regardless of their families’ incomes. His legislation followed a Covid-era federal waiver that had temporarily made universal free school meals available to all students nationwide during the height of the pandemic; only a handful of states other than Minnesota have made the free school meals permanent.
A group of children fist-bumped and hugged Walz when he signed the bill into law at their Minneapolis elementary school.
Republican critics in his state, meanwhile, have panned the free-meals legislation, arguing that the more than $400 million in taxes spent on it could serve a better end.
Walz has been steadfast in his defense of the legislation.
“The haves and the have-nots in the school lunchroom is not a necessary thing,” he said at a news conference last summer. “Just feed our children.”
He has taken the same straightforward approach to other aspects of education, singing off on increasing spending by billions of dollars.
The National Education Association, a union representing about 3 million teachers and other school staff members, said educators are “fired up and united” to elect a Harris-Walz ticket.
“We know we can count on a continued and real partnership to expand access to free school meals for students, invest in student mental health, ensure no educator has to carry the weight of crushing student debt and do everything possible to keep our communities and schools safe,” Pringle said.