Nate Oats looks back on his career journey, how he got into coaching

Everyone has their own personal journey to get wherever they are today. For Nate Oats, his featured several different kinds of steps along the way to reach where he is in the coaching profession.

Oats replayed his process of becoming coach during a recent interview with Mark Gottfried. For him, the path began when he realized that he wouldn’t be able to continue playing basketball for his career. That shifted his direction to the bench so that he could stay in the sport that he adored.

“Well, it was a little bit different than you. You were actually a real player and I believe got drafted if I’m correct. I was a Division III player,” laughed Oats. I love basketball so, right about early high school when I figured I was never going to make money playing basketball, I figured the next best thing to do was to coach it if I couldn’t play it for a living.”

Man, it was like junior high. I think I bought, like, the Pistol Pete, all four of those, like his Homework Basketball. Then Rick Pitino had, like, his coaching tapes out. I think, in like ninth grade, I bought Pitino’s coaching tapes. You go through moves and you’ve got to pack your boxes. I’m like, ‘Why do I keep moving these VHS tapes from one house to the next? I don’t even have a VHS recorder anymore to play them!'” Oats said. “So, early high school, I kind of figured I was never going to, you know, be a good enough player to make money playing so let’s figure out how to be a good coach. Right kind of then through high school, I started studying it.”

It wasn’t easy once he made that choice, though. Oats essentially had to start from scratch networking and connecting with others in similar jobs.

“I tried to work some camps through college, used to work Five-Star all the time. Shoot – my dad has got his PHD in theology as a professor at Maranatha Baptist where I went to school so I didn’t really have any ins. My college coach was a great guy. I loved playing for him but he didn’t really have any ins,” Oats explained. “I kind of had to make my own connections if you will. Just kind of hustled, went to some camps in the summer, was a Division III assistant. I went from where I played at Maranatha for a few years. I went to University of Wisconsin-Whitewater for a couple years.”

However, the decision that changed it all came when a former teammate told him about a high school job just outside of Detroit. That’s where Oats, although going from college back to the prep love, took his first steps toward his tenure today.

“I was fortunate I got the head job at Romulus. One of my teammates was from Detroit. He was back teaching at Romulus – a guy by the name of Ed Horn,” Oats recalled. “I never planned to go to high school. I was trying to stay in college and try to work up if possible. Ed kind of talked me into applying for the job. Went out there, I liked it, and I took the job on a whim.”

“I was not a full-time assistant at Whitewater. I was making $37,000 as a high school teacher at Watertown High in the city I grew up while I was coaching at Whitewater. Got a big jump, was going to make $42,000 my first year at Romulus. You could get to the top of the teacher salary in 10 years at Romulus and it took like 20 years at Watertown,” continued Oats. “We got some talent at Romulus. They’d had four guys play in the NBA. So I took the job. I ended up being there 11 years. Detroit is kind of where I cut my teeth in coaching.”

The rest is history from there. He got his first DI gig on the bench at Buffalo before becoming a first-time head coach and now, as of today, being at a job that he has excelled in in Tuscaloosa.

“Then, next thing you knew, Bobby Hurley offered me a job. Caught a few breaks and somehow I’m down here at Alabama,” said Oats.

It’s always fascinating to follow the storyline of how successful people made it to where they are today. That includes Oats who worked his way into this life and is now one of top overall coaches in college basketball.