Kids need a transformational influence, and so does the country

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From the moment I first heard Gov. Tim Walz speak, I recognized a trait I deeply admire: The man talks like a coach. That’s hardly a stretch given that he was a coach, a championship one, for the Mankato West High School football team in the early 2000s. Americans are hungry for somebody to look up to, and Walz seems to have that essential coach’s skill of inspiring people to follow his lead.

Talking to coaches is part of my job as a sportswriter. My most recent book — “Twin Cities,” published last fall by Hachette — tells the story of another title-winning Minnesota high school football coach, Charles Adams, now entering his 15th year at the helm of his alma mater, North Community High School in Minneapolis. For 20 years, Charles was also a Minneapolis police officer, including during the George Floyd riots. His tale is astounding.

In 2016, Charles led the Polars to their first-ever state football championship — not to mention the first won by a Black coach — but that is not what makes him great. Raised in Minneapolis’ downtrodden North Side neighborhood, he has spent virtually his entire life trying to raise his people up. Winning is great, but Charles’ real goal is steering his players toward productive lives. He has sent kids to major college football programs and even to the NFL, but speaks just as proudly about those who have gone on to become barbers and businessmen and preachers.

Another coach with whom I’ve spent time, Nick Hoeper-Tomich, has weekly discussions with his coed mountain bike team roster at Berkeley High School in Northern California about things like social hierarchies and how to call out peers for bad behavior. Ultimately, it boils down to maximizing kids’ ability to do the right thing, no matter the situation.

Charles and Nick are transformational coaches. It’s a term I first encountered while researching a story on an inmate-run program inside California’s San Quentin State Prison geared toward helping young people stay out of trouble. Instead of focusing directly on kids, however, it targeted the coaches of the teams for which those young people play. In populations lacking father figures, such positions of authority can wield stunning amounts of influence. Those inmates showed me how easily coaches with misguided priorities can send malleable teenagers careening through life.

The San Quentin terminology was cribbed from former NFL lineman Joe Ehrmann’s book “InSideOut Coaching,” which identifies both transformational coaches and their negative counters: transactional coaches, for whom players hold importance only so long as they remain useful. These are exploitative relationships, and frequently inspire the worst examples from the athletic world, inflating players’ self-importance at the expense of anybody perceived as weaker. “It was as if we had to tear somebody else down to pump ourselves up” was how one of the inmates put it. San Quentin is filled with ex-athletes, many of whom had coaches like this. The catch is that once a player no longer merits the transactional coach’s attention, all that remains is the emotional poison used to spur their athletic aggression. This male toxicity leads too many young men down too many dark paths.

Unfortunately, the tropes of transactional and transformational coaches track to our current political climate. Tearing down people outside our tent with divisive “us vs. them” rhetoric is a tactic invented to win games or elections, and can be just as traumatic to everyday citizens as inner-city athletes. Once a demographic can no longer affect the bottom line, its members are, like the athletes of transactional coaches, effectively forgotten, left with nothing but the toxicity they have been so consistently fed along the way.

Think about your own coaches, who led the teams of your youth. Think about the ones you loved best, and why that might be. It’s probably because they had transformational qualities, and saw you for the person you were rather than as just another player. Think about how they made you feel. Think about the walls you were willing to run through on their behalf.

From where I sit, Walz sure looks like a transformational coach. Which is exactly what this country needs.

Jason Turbow (jasonturbow.com) worked with Charles Adams on “Twin Cities,” a book about Adams’ time with the Minneapolis Police Department and as a football coach at North Community High School.