When Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz quickly rose to prominence in national Democratic politics this summer and then was chosen by Vice President Kamala Harris as her running mate on the presidential ticket, high school coaches around the country paid attention.
“That was pretty cool for most coaches in America,” said Gary Rankin, the head football coach at Boyd Buchanan School, a private high school in Chattanooga, Tenn. “Regardless of one’s politics, this is exciting for a lot of us.”
Joe Aresimowicz, the head football coach at Berlin High School in Berlin, Conn., said he quickly learned what he could about Walz, including that he had helped the Mankato West High School Scarlets football team go from a winless streak to the 1999 Minnesota state championship.
“It all started to fit,” said Aresimowicz, a former Democratic speaker of the Connecticut house of representatives. “Coaching and politics are one and the same in a lot of areas.”
Many coaches saw an inspirational moment at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as 15 former football players at Mankato West took the stage in a tribute to their former assistant coach.
Moments later, Walz would accept the Democratic vice presidential nomination.
Walz’s coaching experience has been a major part of the narrative that Harris and her campaign have emphasized about her 60-year-old running mate. The elevation of Walz has been a source of inspiration, pride, and discussion for some coaches, educators, and others as they consider the outsized role that such on-field leaders play in guiding student-athletes and their communities.
“I was really excited to see Tim Walz get chosen,” said Aresimowicz, who now works in government relations in Connecticut but remains as head football coach at Berlin High. Coaches are constantly evaluating team members and pushing them to do their best and be prepared for the unexpected, he said. Not unlike politics.
“I think the White House and the federal government could use some coaching,” Aresimowicz said.
Rankin, the winningest high school football coach in Tennessee history, was inducted this year into the hall of fame of the National Federation of State High School Associations, the Indianapolis-based rule-setting body for secondary school activities.
Football coaching is about building relationships—with players, other coaches, and the community, he said.
“I’m sure it’s the same way when you get into politics,” Rankin said. “There are teams around you whether you are a congressman, the vice president, or the president.”
The quality of coaching matters, research shows
Karissa Niehoff, the executive director of the National Federation, said she was touched by the scene at the Democratic convention when Walz’s former Mankato State players took to the stage.
“What we see in Coach Walz is this person who is authentically a guy who cares about the development of young people,” she said. “A coach is a teacher, educator, and mentor, and that is someone who we now have as potentially helping to lead the nation.”
Dan Gould, an emeritus professor at Michigan State University’s College of Education and the former director of its Institute for the Study of Youth Sports, said that all indications are that Walz was a popular teacher and a good coach.
“All the research suggests that the quality of coaching matters,” he said. “The better the relationship between the athletes and their coach, the more likely it is that life skills such as hard work and persistence will transfer to their lives off the field.”
Gould has conducted some of that research. In a 2007 study by Gould and three other academics, the researchers found that the best high school football coaches did not separate their efforts to promote winning from tactics to impart life skills to their players.
Those skills include academic focus, setting goals, discipline, avoiding taunting or “trash talking,” and stressing achievement, among others.
“What was especially impressive with these coaches was the consistency with which they implemented these strategies,” the study said. “Looking across all coaches, it was clear that the players knew what was expected of them and that they would be held accountable for meeting those expectations.”
A more recent study by Gould and others, not yet published, involved interviewing a sample of former high school athletes 50 years after graduation. The study concludes that the athletes all had meaningful experiences that stuck with them and contributed to their development as successful adults.
The newer study was premised on observations by Alonzo Stagg and John Wooden, legendary college football and basketball coaches, respectively, who when asked whether they had a successful season essentially replied that they would have to wait 20 to 30 years to find out. The implication was “they would judge their success as coaches by evaluating the character and accomplishments of their players once they became men,” the study says.
Gould acknowledged that most coaches, at all levels, like to win, and that there are some who take it too far or fail to put enough emphasis about their players’ development.
“We know [bad coaches] exist,” he said. “Most people in education don’t want to see that. But for most [coaches] at the scholastic level, the more important thing is developing better people through this extracurricular activity.”
It isn’t only high school football coaches who share those philosophies or have found inspiration in Walz’s story.
“As a coach, yes, I want to win, but what skills can I give these kids that will last throughout their lives,” said Mitchell Cooper, the boys’ soccer coach at Mott High School in the Waterford, Mich., school district. “My students have told me the way I taught them to communicate and problem solve are the things they took from me.”
Pete Jacobson, the men’s wrestling coach at Hunter College in New York City and a former high school coach in that sport for 21 years, said coaching is not just about the strategies of a given sport, but it is about getting the best out of student-athletes and helping them get the best out of themselves.
“You’re pushing them sometimes to places they don’t necessarily want to go,” he said.
Political leaders with coaching on their resumes can use their experience dealing with diverse sets of personalities—students, parents, officials—and transfer that to the political world, Jacobson said.
“They have the ability to listen and read the room,” he said. “Coaches have the kind of communications skills that would be beneficial in politics and frankly are what politics needs more of.”
Comparisons to another well-known high school football coach
There have been comparisons in recent weeks of Walz to the head football coach of the Texas high school team featured in the 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights, which spawned a successful motion picture (with Billy Bob Thornton as the coach) and TV series (with Kyle Chandler as a more fictionalized version of the coach).
The book’s author, H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger, wrote in an Aug. 15 op-ed in The New York Times that he was flattered that Harris had invoked “Friday Night Lights” when introducing Walz.
“The high school coach has come to occupy a central role in the lifeblood of an idealized small town,” Bissinger wrote in the op-ed. “Everybody knows who he is, and everybody wants a piece of him: backslapping when he wins, starting a whisper campaign to get rid of him when he loses.”
Bissinger discussed how Hollywood, particularly in the TV series, crafted an ideal high school coach—“empathetic, humane, with a drive to win but compassionate after a loss”—that was “markedly different” from the real world of a football-obsessed community where there were “shocking excesses.”
“When we talk about Coach Walz, we should hope for [the] kind of coach … who understands how coaching can maybe carry over into politics, not just as an approach to winning, or to motivating people, but in excelling at the details and responsibilities that go beyond merely X’s and O’s,” Bissinger wrote.
Josue Zamora, a 34-year-old teacher at Paramount Park Middle School in Paramount, Calif., is probably as far removed as a coach can be from the big-time legend of a leader depicted in Friday Night Lights. He is the head coach of a struggling team of 7th and 8th graders in a Hispanic community where soccer is king.
“This is a hard-working community,” Zamora says of the Los Angeles suburb where he grew up and now works. “So many of these kids are talented. We are trying to make a difference by keeping them away from the gangs.”
He says he didn’t know much about Walz until his sudden rise to a national political ticket. However he was impressed by Walz’s coaching experience and the story of his willingness to be the faculty sponsor of the gay-straight alliance club to serve Mankato West High School’s LGBTQ+ students.
“As coaches, we’re in the thick of it with our students,” Zamora said. “We have respect for someone who taught and coached and is moving up in the world.”
