Former members of the Mankato West High School football team played a key role in cheering on their former coach, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as he formally accepted the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night.
But the reference to Waltz as a football coach who transformed a losing team into a state champion caused a stir on social media.
“In Minnesota, we trust a coach who took a team from 0-27 to a state championship,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said in a speech on the third day of the Democratic National Convention.
Ben Ingman, one of Walz’s former students who was coached by the governor in basketball and track and field as a seventh-grader at Mankato High School, echoed similar sentiments.
“Coach Waltz got us excited about what we could accomplish together. He believed in us and helped us believe in each other, and his leadership took hold. That track team, just like the football team, won a state title.”
Afterwards, several players took to the stage for a sort of pep rally, and the crowd cheered as the school’s cheer song played.
However, some on social media couldn’t help but point out that Waltz only served as an assistant coach during his time at Mankato.
“Amy Klobuchar presents Timothy Waltz as the coach who ‘made his team a state champion,'” one person said in a post on X. “He was never a head coach. He didn’t make anyone a state champion.”
“He was an assistant coach, not a coach,” former U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell told X.
“I’m still really really confused why they keep pushing the ‘Coach Waltz’ thing when Tim Waltz was a Volunteer assistant coach a million years ago…why don’t they focus on his work as Governor…?…no…they just want to focus on Coach Waltz…weird,” another wrote.
Waltz served on the Mankato faculty from 1996 to 2006. During that time, he served as the Scarlets’ linebackers coach and defensive coordinator until 2002. Under head coach Rick Sutton, the school won its first state championship in 1999.
He was inducted into the school’s hall of fame in 2019.
