There is a great story in The Sunday Times today about Tim Walz turning around the fortunes of the 1999 Mankato West High School American football team from long term failure to becoming state champions for the first time. At the time Walz was the assistant coach. The team was struggling. They'd just been trounced by Owatonna High.
Almost forgot: Walz likes cats! Great. And Kamala is an animal champion. They've got to win for animal welfare.
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| Tim Walz's Coaching Style: How He Led Suburban High School to State Championship - Newsweek. |
Walz persuaded the coach to change the team's defensive alignment. The team was called the Scarlets and they learned the new formation in a week.
John Considine was a member of that team. He is now 43 years of age and he said that "We all bought into it". He played right tackle, one of the players who protects the quarterback. He added that Walz told us "we could resurrect the season. And we did. That was the turning point."
From the next game, the team went on to a winning streak and ultimately crowned state champions for the first time in the school's history.
The Democrats will hope that Walz could do the same thing for their party. You may know that Walz, who is now the governor of Minnesota, spent more than a decade of his career as a geography, history and government teacher, mostly in Mankato. This was a town of about 40,000 people at the time and a big farming community.
The students remember a "man with bouncing enthusiasm who couldn't stop socialising, who acted as a fatherly figure and set high standards for others."
Kamala Harris, calls him loudly and proudly and often as "Coach Walz."
The former head coach of that team, Rick Sutton, says that he immediately recognised the advantage of bringing Walz onto the coaching staff because he cared. And he could bring energy and enthusiasm as the team's defensive coordinator.
They had lost 27 games straight when the two coaches started their first season together in 1996. Expectations were low. They had to convince their players to be more dedicated and more optimistic.
They trained every night after school for two hours until 6 PM. For these two coaches it was like running two jobs, their teaching job and the coaching job.
Considine remembers the motivational pre-game speeches from Walz. "He had high standards for us and did a great job motivating young men to do their absolute best."
Becoming state champions for the first time was "pure jubilation". They had never achieved it before. It was unheard of.
It looks as though Walz is a good pick as Kamala Harris's running mate. They are doing well. On X today there is an excellent video of a huge audience welcoming and listening to Kamala Harris deliver her speech. This brings to mind immediately Don Trump's lies about the audiences that he manages to cobble together. He always exaggerates their numbers. He always has. Right from the day he was inaugurated.
I'm afraid he's a liar, and a narcissist. He has a borderline personality disorder in my opinion and there are concerns now that, at 78, he is entering the phase of life when dementia starts to creep in and if he is appointed president, over the following four years he may well develop dementia. It is said that his rambling speeches are possible signs of early dementia. American wants a young, vibrant and enthusiastic president and that person is Kamala Harris.
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