Tim Walz asserted that his experience as an assistant high school football coach means he “took football back” from Republicans, during a campaign speech in Wisconsin on Friday.
“I will claim this. I did this on a personal thing. I took football back from ’em,’ too, by the way,” the Democrat VP candidate said at the indoor venue before being met with a cheer by the attendees.
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The comment was the Harris-Walz’ campaign latest effort to tie the Minnesota governor’s candidacy to his stint as the assistant coach on 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, 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 senator 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.
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Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said the records of Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, prove they are harmful to parental rights in America. ((Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP) (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images))
“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.
Tuberville responded to Walz’s comments in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on Aug. 15.
“I think he’s trying to make himself look good. Kind of comparing himself to a coach, which he was only an assistant coach in high school. And if he had been any good, he would’ve been a head coach, to be honest with you,” Tuberville said.
“I don’t know what he’s trying to do. He’s kind of conned his way up the totem pole, I guess. He’s second in line to being the president of the United States if they were to happen to win, which I don’t think that’s going to happen, but . . . if you just look at everything he’s done, it doesn’t coincide with being a coach.”
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.
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Harris and Walz celebrate at the DNC in Chicago ( Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“He was the Assistant Coach not the Coach,” Grenell wrote.
Still, Walz has continued to tout his connection with football throughout the campaign. Friday’s comments came in the middle of a tirade about his belief that he and Harris are on the right side of family values over former president Trump in the upcoming election.
However, several members of Walz’s own family, including his own brother, have come out in support of Trump.
Jackson Thompson is a sports writer for Fox News Digital. He previously worked for ESPN and Business Insider. Jackson has covered the Super Bowl and NBA Finals, and has interviewed iconic figures Usain Bolt, Rob Gronkowski, Jerry Rice, Troy Aikman, Mike Trout, David Ortiz and Roger Clemens.
