Hundreds attend watch party at Mankato West High School for Gov. Tim Walz's DNC speech

MANKATO – Red and blue tinsel pompoms shook to and fro Wednesday night in the auditorium of the high school where Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz once taught, as a crowd of about 400 watched him accept the Democratic Party's nomination for vice president.

In the crowd at the watch party were students who had taken Walz's geography class at Mankato West High School. They waved signs emblazoned with the word "COACH!" as he delivered his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

"My 10th-grade teacher is going to be the vice president!" said Larissa Beck, 38, who said Walz was her geography teacher in 2002.

He's been on a dizzying ascent ever since Vice President Kamala Harris picked the former Mankato West geography teacher and football coach as her running mate on Aug. 6.

As Walz spoke at the convention in Chicago, his lines about the 1999 Mankato West football championship, years as a public school teacher and his work as governor to provide free school lunches elicited the loudest responses from the crowd at the high school. The watch party was one of 80 remote events organized by the Harris-Walz campaign across Minnesota.

Before this month, Walz was mostly unknown nationally. As of early August, about 4 in 10 Americans said they didn't know enough to have an opinion about him, according to a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

But many in the crowd Wednesday night at Mankato West said they needed no introduction to Walz, having met him personally during his time in Mankato as a teacher and elected leader.

"I want to tell people that my experience with him really inspired me to go on and be a teacher myself," said Blake Frink, 41, who had Walz as a geography teacher in 1999.

Frink said he was a quiet student, but Walz made sure to call on him in class and read his articles in the student newspaper.

"I was one of those mediocre kids that often gets overlooked by teachers and admin, but Mr. Walz wasn't like that. He cared about every kid," said Frink, now a geography teacher in the Mankato area.

Walz didn't talk politics as a teacher, and students didn't know whether he was a Democrat or Republican before he first ran for Congress in 2006, Frink said.

He said Walz would talk about his trips to China and how his service in the military as an artilleryman gave him hearing problems. Republicans recently launched a probe on Walz's trips on China and have attacked his characterization of his military service, which the governor has defended on the campaign trail.

Frink is one of several former students of Walz backing him in the campaign. A group of about 25 former students have started Mankato West Alumni for Harris-Walz.

Ann Vote, another Mankato West alumna, spoke at the watch party Wednesday night. Walz tried to reach out to every student at the school when he taught there, she recalled.

"He never made me feel small, which is funny because I'm 4-foot-10," said Vote, 40, adding that "it's exciting to be so proud of the town you came from."

Rachel Bohman, a Democrat who is running for Walz's former congressional seat in the First District, and State Rep. Luke Frederick, DFL-Mankato, also spoke at the event.

Frederick said that Harris' move to the top of the ticket, and selection of Walz as her running mate, has reinvigorated Democrats in the Mankato area. "The energy has shifted," he said. "Like a light switch."