Nate Oats' journey from high school coach to Final Four with Alabama has Indy connection

Before Nate Oats was a Final Four coach at Alabama, he was coaching Romulus High School in Detroit. In mid-January of the 2012-13 season, he brought his team to Indianapolis to play Cathedral.

“Probably my favorite game I’ve ever coached in,” said Andy Fagan, who was coaching Cathedral at the time.

Romulus won that game, 77-73, on the way to a 27-1 season and a Michigan Class A state championship. Oats, whose team included Rhode Island recruit E.C. Matthews, caught the eye of then-Rhode Island coach Dan Hurley, who was recruiting Matthews.

When Dan's brother Bobby Hurley was hired at Buffalo in the spring of 2013, Danny told Bobby about Oats, who then joined the Bulls staff as an assistant. That move put Oats on a trajectory that led him to replace Hurley as the Buffalo coach two years later when Hurley moved on to Arizona State. After a four-year run at Buffalo that included three NCAA tournament appearances and two first-round wins, Oats was hired in 2019 at Alabama, where he will coach against Dan Hurley and UConn in the Final Four on Saturday.

That is one full-circle moment. Another involves Fagan and Oats, who had only talked twice briefly on the phone prior to that game in the Cathedral gym on Jan. 12, 2013.

“It was probably the highest-level game I ever coached in,” Fagan said. “We were down by 16 at halftime and came back in the second half to get it close but just couldn’t get a stop when we needed it. It was just a great game. Nobody was out there talking a bunch of trash, just a tough, gritty, unselfish type of game. After the game ended, the two teams kind of hung out in the lobby for about 45 minutes. I always took that as a sign of mutual respect. It wasn’t like they knew each other before.”

The loss dropped Cathedral to 6-5. But with senior Collin Hartman getting healthy after suffering a broken wrist early in the season and then-sophomore Jalen Coleman-Lands coming into his own as a star player, the Fighting Irish ripped off 19 consecutive wins. Cathedral won its first 4A sectional (and first sectional overall in 15 years), making it to the state finals before losing a 57-53 game to Carmel.

The game against Romulus was the start of a four-year series between the schools (Cathedral won just one, in 2016) and was a bit of a fluke.

“We ran into a stretch where some of the local teams weren’t playing us and we felt like we needed to play better competition to play the big 4A schools,” Fagan said. “We looked in Illinois, Kentucky and Michigan and tried to find the best competition who would play us.”

That led to a call with Oats, who stayed in contact with Fagan after he made the move up the ladder to college basketball. Fagan stepped down as Cathedral’s coach in 2016 and moved his family to South Carolina, leaving the coaching world for a career in sales. But when Fagan’s son, Jack, was playing as an eighth grader for Christ Church Episcopal in Greenville, S.C., Oats made sure one of his assistants stopped and said hello in person while recruiting another player, John Butler Jr., who signed with Florida State and is now in the NBA G League.

“He does a great job of cultivating those relationships,” Fagan said.

Those ties eventually led to Jack Fagan visiting Alabama and sitting down with Oats about the potential of joining the team as a walk-on.

“He talked to him about coaching or wanting to get into an NBA front office,” Andy Fagan said. “Nate kind of laid that all out for him on what that could mean long term.”

Jack Fagan officially announced his commitment as a preferred walk-on Monday.

“It was a very neat experience from that relationship going back to 2013 to now Jack going to play for him,” Fagan said.

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.