The Kamala Harris presidential campaign thinks it has smart branding, labeling Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as "Coach." The vice presidential candidate was an assistant high school football coach at Mankato West High School from 1996 to 2006. The team won a state championship in 1999. At Harris rallies, people hold signs that say “coach” while the campaign website has "the coach's collection" of merchandise.
Maybe they should slow down. As someone who won a high school football state championship a decade ago, I see many opportunities for this branding to go wrong. Being an ex-coach creates some vulnerabilities for Walz since hazing was a widespread part of high school football culture in the 1990s and 2000s (overlooked by coaches who underwent the same stuff when they were younger), and coaches were indifferent to widespread concussions. Coaches also sometimes used inflammatory language against children—or assaulted them.
Maybe Walz and his colleagues were saints who never blew up at their players—and their players all treated each other with decency—but anyone who played high school football in that time likely understands this was never the case, even for those of us who mostly liked our coaches. A recent New York Times article says his former players described him as animated and a guy who screamed until he got blue in the face at film every day, so it's hard to imagine he never fucked up in over a decade of coaching. It said he participated in drills with the kids; it doesn't take much to see where that could go wrong.
When I was in high school (2011 to 2015), my football teammates a couple of grades older than me had baseballs thrown at them by the seniors when they were freshmen. Those same kids were pricks to our starting quarterback, a freshman at the time, and had us engage in a sophomore rumble. It was a brawl in football pads where the last man standing won. I enjoyed it because I liked fighting when I was a kid and exacted revenge on my friend who sucker-punched me in the balls at practice two days prior (he thought I was wearing a cup). The brawl was fun, and it beat having kids put icy hot in your helmet or kids touching each other with their scrotums—hazing stories I've heard from older ex-high school football players—or wet biscuit.
We also had coaches who called us pussies—except they wouldn’t say the word particularly loud, fearing that parents or their female teaching colleagues may hear it.
Concussions have also long been a problem in sports, especially football. Most football concussions happen at practice, and sports leagues only started taking concussions seriously in the early 2010s; the country saw a spike in reported concussions in children ages 10 to 19 because ignoring the brain-rattling injury became less acceptable. When I got a concussion as a freshman in high school, I played through it—a horrible experience. Our freshman coaches accused some kids of faking injuries, so I didn't want to be one of those quitters.
My school was also on the news because an assistant coach shoved a kid to the ground. Two years prior, some of my freshman football coaches threw footballs at kids in the back of the head when they weren't looking. We can safely assume Walz wasn't like my freshman football head coach, who lacked a driver's license and showed up to practice reeking of booze. He also probably didn't play seniors in junior varsity games because he cared about winning that much—like the JV football coach did when I was a senior in high school. And, most likely, he wasn't like the former head coach of Duxbury High, where the kids used anti-Semitic language as audibles.
Think of all the liberal white women that support the Harris-Walz ticket. If there are three things they love, those are abortion, illegal immigrants, and political correctness. The latter indicates that they would regard old school high school football culture as peak toxic masculinity. Walz may face scandals if there's ever an in-depth look at his high school football coaching career or if even one former player strongly supports Donald Trump. Or what if some former player thinks Coach Walz fucked him over?
Instead of emphasizing Walz's high school football coaching career—why not focus on the issues? The Harris-Walz campaign is running on vibes, so much so that stealing Trump's no tax-on-tips mantra that he stole from Ron Paul was one of the first substantive policy proposals anyone has heard from it. Maybe Walz should talk about how he gave free college and subsidized healthcare to his state's illegal immigrants while not doing the same for many of his state's middle-class residents. Or maybe he can talk about why boys need tampons, referencing Amanda Bynes claiming they're for nosebleeds in She's the Man. At least that involves politics and might not trigger a high school football scandal.