ROMULUS, Mich. — There is no Nate Oats Gymnasium or Nate Oats Hall of Fame. The school isn't located on Nate Oats Parkway, and the legacy of basketball success at Romulus High School transcends Oats' 11 years as the coach here.
But if you know where to look inside this school located just around the corner from the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, you can see the legacy Oats left behind and the footsteps of his unlikely journey to the Final Four.
Now in his fifth season leading Alabama, Oats is one of the biggest names in college basketball. He recently signed a long-term contract extension with the Crimson Tide that will make him one of the highest-paid men in the sport for years to come.
It's the dream for many coaches. It wasn't for Oats.
If it wasn't for Romulus — a job he reluctantly applied for and didn't plan to take — then Oats likely would have stayed on the path he intended to take in pursuit of his goal of leading his own small-college program.
"If I had a full-time job as a Division III head coach, I would have been really happy," Oats told CBS Sports. "I wanted to coach basketball as a full-time job. Never thought I'd be able to get into Division I."
But because life took Oats to Romulus in 2002, he eventually crossed paths with brothers Dan and Bobby Hurley, who were coaching together at Rhode Island in the 2012-13 season. Dan was the head coach, and Bobby was his assistant. They were recruiting a highly touted prospect from Romulus named E.C. Matthews and stumbled upon a coaching prospect in the process.
"Instantly, you could see his passion for the game and knowledge of the game, how much he loved talking about basketball," Bobby Hurley said of Oats. "Just watching how he conducted practices, it was high-level stuff. He really had a lot of intensity. The practice had great structure, and you could just tell he was a gifted coach."
Bobby left his brother's staff at Rhode Island for the head coaching job at Buffalo entering the 2013-14 season and was so impressed with Oats that he hired him as an assistant. Now, the Division I monster from Romulus that Bobby Hurley helped create is squaring off with Dan Hurley's UConn Huskies in the Final Four.
The No. 1 seed Huskies and No. 4 seed Crimson Tide are scheduled to tip at 8:49 p.m. Eastern Saturday night on TBS inside State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Bobby, now the head coach at Arizona State, lives just a short drive from where Oats, the prized branch on his coaching tree, will take on Dan, his little brother, for a spot in the national title game.
"It's crazy how things come full circle in life sometimes," Bobby Hurley said. "As Dan was building the Rhode Island program, Nate was a very successful high school coach in Detroit. Somehow, all our lives came together in that moment. You fast forward a bunch of years and here they are going head-to-head in the Final Four."
From college to high school
Oats was working as a teacher in his hometown of Watertown, Wisconsin, and helping out nearby Division III Wisconsin-Whitewater as an assistant when Ed Horn called him. The two had been college teammates at Maranatha Baptist University, which is also in Watertown.
Horn wanted to know if Oats, then in his late 20s, might be interested in the Romulus coaching job. Horn was from Detroit and had returned home after college to teach history at Romulus. Horn was approached about the coaching position but couldn't commit to it. Oats, who was Wisconsin to the core, told Horn he also wasn't interested.
But Horn persisted, following up and convincing Oats to send a resume.
Horn sent it to the Romulus principal, who subsequently requested an interview with Oats. Though still resistant to the idea, Oats agreed to make the six-hour trip around Lake Michigan to interview.
If nothing else, he'd have a fun weekend with his old college buddy.
"Me and Ed put together my portfolio," Oats said. "And I'm super competitive. So I get there and I was like, 'I'm not going to waste my time. I'm not taking this job, but I'm not losing the interview. They're going to offer me this job, and I'm just going to turn it down. But I'm going to win the interview.' So I went all in. I won the interview."
Then came the offer. Math teacher and basketball coach with a $42,000 salary, which constituted a $5,000 raise from what Oats was making at his teaching job in Wisconsin. Plus, Romulus offered a shorter path to the top of teaching payscale than what Oats was looking at back home.
The players at Romulus also seemed liked a "great group of kids," Oats remembered. So he accepted the job over his wife's objections and began a relentless pursuit of success that re-established Romulus as one of the most feared program's in the state.
"He just had that fire," said Herb Buckley, who was on the search committee that hired Oats. Buckley, who is a former Romulus player and now the Romulus coach, was impressed by Oats' youthful energy.
"When we talked about the feeder program, it was all the things we needed to get this thing back and rolling and get it back on wheels," Buckley said. "He came in and was out in the community, talking to everybody, knowing how to go out and get players. People wanted to be here. It's the same thing he's doing over there. He hasn't changed."
Doing more with less
Perhaps the reason Oats fits in so well at a football-first school like Alabama is because he's accustomed to building a program on his own without being spoon-fed an endless cascade of institutional resources.
Oats said Romulus had just $78 in its basketball budget upon his arrival. So he began finding creative ways to raise funds. He bought a van that he filled with snacks and drinks from Sam's Club and then sold them out of his classroom.
The black market snack shop was "frowned upon by some of the principals," Oats said. But it helped him generate the cash needed to buy six shooting machines worth thousands of dollars apiece. Those machines, which catch makes and misses and spit the basketballs back out, make practicing jump shots far more efficient.
They are still inside the Romulus gym, tucked away in a storage closet beside the auxiliary court when not in use.
Of course, making jumpers was a critical component to playing at Romulus under Oats, just like it is with playing for Oats at Alabama. The Crimson rank second nationally in made 3-pointers per game at 11.2 and No. 4 nationally in attempts at 30.1.
These days, coaches around the country are side-eying his 3-point heavy, analytics-oriented style and wondering if Oats might be accelerating a stylistic revolution.
High school coaches in Michigan were doing the same thing between 2002 and 2013 as Oats harmonized his position as a statistics teacher with his appetite for efficiency in basketball.
"He's got the recipe for success," longtime Romulus teacher Jennifer Lock said. "He had it here. He's very math-minded, which I think lends itself to all the metrics that he loves. I think that background has been super helpful as a coach."
Up the stairs from the gym and down a long, locker-filled hallway, Lock and fellow teacher Melissa Carr have an unofficial wall of fame inside of a classroom closet. It features photos celebrating the achievements of Romulus teams and players who have gone on to play in college. Many of them are players Oats coached.
They rave about how he rarely missed a day of school and how he ran the Romulus basketball program like a college program, working diligently to ensure his players had what they needed to succeed in the classroom and be ready academically for collegiate opportunities.
He would take his players to read to elementary school students. In the summers, Romulus players were the referees for camps and summer leagues. Oats would take them to church camps and college visits in the same van he used to load up on snacks at Sam's Club.
Among the photos is one of the 2013 Class A state champion Romulus Eagles. It was Oats' last team and the culmination of 11 years of work at a job he never expected to have.
Underneath the photo is a quote from Oats.
"It's been a long time coming," it begins.
It was the program's first state title since 1986. Not long after that victory, Oats accepted the spot on Bobby Hurley's Buffalo staff.
Though it was bittersweet to see Oats go, the Hurley brothers endeared themselves to the Romulus family while recruiting the school's players and by hiring Oats.
"It will be really fun to see them play against each other," Carr said.
Romulus High will have an indelible mark Saturday night on college basketball's biggest stage.
Matthews, the player who the Hurley brothers recruited from the school, went on to score 1,899 points over a five-year career playing for Dan Hurley at Rhode Island. As a three-time all-conference performer, he was critical in helping Dan Hurley achieve the success that landed him the UConn job.
Matthews was also critical in getting Oats the exposure needed to take his career farther than he ever dreamed
"If I didn't take the Romulus job, I never would have met Danny Hurley or Bobby Hurley, because they were recruiting E.C. Matthews from Romulus," Oats said. "I wouldn't be where I'm at right now if I didn't take that job."
Oats won't forget it. But in case he ever did, there is a reminder in his wallet of the people and the place that helped him reach the pinnacle of college basketball.
"As a matter of fact, my Sam's Club membership to this day still says Romulus boys basketball on it," Oats said. "If I go to order something and have it shipped to the house, it says Romulus boys basketball."
CBS Sports senior writer Dennis Dodd contributed to this story
