Most coaches dream of having their team play and make a deep run in the NCAA Tournament.
The ultimate dream, however, is Houston, the site of the 2016 Final Four.
One rookie coach has a different dream.
Sure he wants to take his team to the tournament, a place it nearly pulled off an improbable upset last year. But this particular dream ends in the Bahamas in 10 months, which would be the biggest win he could ever hope for.
Imagine walking onto the floor Friday for your first game as a Division I head coach -- a new coach of a team that last season made its first NCAA Tournament. You are the former assistant, now in charge of team that was led by a legend who took the program to new heights in unforeseen short order.
Imagine for a second that just three short years ago you were a high school coach of 11 years and that you kind of thought that once you took a high school gig the possibility of getting back to your home state of Wisconsin for a D-III job or working up to a D-II job was remote. So instead, you dug in on building a high school program and grew roots.
In a different era, high school coaches often climbed the ladder to college basketball success. John Wooden's coaching career began in Dayton, Kentucky. Hubie Brown started coaching high school basketball in New Jersey only to become a world renowned coach, analyst and clinician. A college hall of famer like Eddie Sutton began at Tulsa Central. Ralph Miller, Lute Olson and Big John Thompson all cut their teeth in high school before tearing up the college game. But those days seem to be long gone or few and far between now.
Sure Danny Hurley made the jump, but for the most part, the stars of tomorrow in college basketball coaching are former players who grinded as assistants or starred in the NBA and came back home. The obscurity of a high school job makes for a difficult leap, if not by the administration, then by the search committee paid to head hunt for the next head coach.
A few more factors to consider for this first-time college basketball head coach. Your top two scorers from 2014-15 are both gone. One followed the departed head coach and took his 15 points per game with him. Meanwhile, the conference Player of the Year was kicked out of school for stealing. Oh, and his replacement is out with a foot injury.
But there's hope. The team returns four players from its eight-man rotation. There was a solid recruiting class and a tremendous sophomore point guard signals hope that on this night your athletic director will look wise for naming you the head coach.
When Nate Oats walks onto the floor representing the largest state school in New York, his mind won't be on his journey to the big chair on the Bulls bench. Nor will he think of Shannon Evans following Bobby Hurley to Arizona State or Justin Moss' unfortunate decision this summer, which caused him to leave just two classes short of graduating. Nate Oats likely won't even be able to prepare as thoroughly for this matchup as he'd like or as he did for Hurley the past two years. Forgive Nate Oats' mind wandering a little. It may be in a Buffalo hospital room where his wife of nearly 18 years has a far more difficult opponent than the Bulls' first opponent, Pittsburgh-Bradford.
Double Hit Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Oats was an all-conference point guard at Maranatha Baptist, a D-III school in Watertown, Wis. where he grew up. Wisconsin is known for one of the great D-III basketball leagues in the country. Dick Bennett and Bo Ryan are the two most famous coaching alums and Terry Porter famously played for Wisconsin-Stevens Point as the headline DIII player. Maranatha is in more of a secondary league, but Oats' dad was a professor at Maranatha so he went for free and starred there. During his freshman year he dated a volleyball player. They broke up and he started keeping an eye on a girl from Colorado, who somehow was recruited to play at tiny Maranatha. By their sophomore year they dated and by the end of their college careers they were engaged. Oats became an assistant at his alma mater and during the week-long winter break of his first season coaching, he married the former Crystal Girton and they traveled to the Bahamas for their honeymoon.
Oats would leave Maranatha after three years to coach under Dave Vander Meulen at Wisconsin-Whitewater. Vander Meulen was the Jerry Tarkanian of D-III hoops, offering a second chance to many a talented kid. Oats learned a lot, and enjoyed being part of the dominate program of Wisconsin D-III ball for three years until Vander Meulen retired. His fellow assistant Pat Miller got the head coaching job and before he could decide his next move an old friend called him.
Ed Horn had played with Oats at Maranatha and interestingly enough, had married Nate's next door neighbor and close friend before they moved to Detroit where Horn became a well respected teacher. Horn called Oats and said his high school, Romulus, had talent, but had no program to speak of. The high school finished 10-11 and was looking for a new coach.
Oats didn't think he wanted to be a high school coach. He had imagined that he would eventually get a D-III job, then a D-II job and who knows. But at Horn's urging he applied, they offered, he accepted and three years later Romulus High was in the state championship. Horn died shortly after that third season of lymphoma, living just long enough to see that his push to hire Oats was the right move for Romulus.
Oats first met Bobby Hurley on the phone. When Danny Hurley got the head coaching job at Wagner (ironically straight out of high school), Oats wanted to take his top assistant to see the team practice, meet the Hurley boys, and if possible, sit with Bob Hurley Sr, and pick the legend's brain. Oats called the basketball office and as you can imagine, Wagner either didn't have a secretary or the one wasn't answering phones. Turns out Bobby was. Oats and Bobby became friendly, but Danny and Oats had developed a closer relationship.
When the Hurleys went to Rhode Island they recruited current URI star E.C. Mathews, who played for Oats. The day Bobby took the Buffalo job Oats texted Danny Hurley congratulating him on placing another assistant, and confirming that Matthews was still all set to play at URI, despite his affinity for Bobby and his new job. Danny was taken aback by Oats not asking for a job and insisted that he call Bobby to talk as Bobby needed someone who had been a head coach. After a 20-minute conversation followed by an in-person interview at the Final Four, Oats was not just in. In fact, Bobby told Oats and everyone else who would listen that Oats was now his top guy.
Two years later with Bobby pacing the sidelines and Oats at his side, Buffalo won the MAC championship. But during their MAC Tournament run, Oats' wife Crystal felt like her lymph nodes were swollen. The team doctor gave her a Z-Pak of antibiotics. Buffalo made its first appearance in the NCAA Tournament a week or so later, giving West Virginia all it could handle. Crystal still didn't feel well and eventually she was diagnoses with mononucleosis.
A few weeks later Bobby Hurley was named the head coach of Arizona State. Danny White, the 35-year-old Buffalo athletic director polled the players about their wishes for their next head coach. Overwhelmingly they chose Oats.
On April 11, 2015 Nate Oats was named the head coach of SUNY Buffalo and with it, he had six of his eight rotation players coming back. Shannon Evans, who averaged 15 points per game and shot 38 percent from 3-point range, wanted to try high major basketball and followed Hurley. Torian Graham, who had yet to play for Buffalo, went too. Then during the summer Justin Moss, who had recovered from a heart condition to dominate the MAC and become the MAC Player of the Year, was dismissed after he was found to have been involved in a theft while performing his summer job of changing batteries in smoke detectors in campus apartments. Oats, who had recruited Moss was broken up about Moss' dismissal. Moss went to counseling, returned the money and begged for any sort of suspension. The school would not take him back.
Meanwhile Crystal Oats was still suffering from mono, her lymph nodes were swollen and she went to an ENT specialist.
On Oct. 22 at 9:30 a.m. Oats was in his usual Thursday staff meeting writing some practice thoughts with his staff present when his phone went off. He ignored it. There was a debate on how they, the coaching staff, wanted to run a certain set and how they wanted to teach it to their players. The phone kept vibrating. Finally Oats looked at the texts from his wife Crystal. They read, "Call me right now." There were several missed calls and numerous texts. Oats stepped outside and called his wife back.
"A nurse just called and the blood tests revealed that I have lymphoma," said Crystal with panic in her voice. Crystal Oats is also a nurse, and while the nurse haphazardly gave her the diagnosis, which is not protocol, and did not know the extent of the cancer, Oats knew about how deadly lymphoma was from what happened to Ed Horn, Nate's former teammate who brought him to Detroit to coach for Romulus.
Oats popped his head back into his office to tell his assistant, Jim Whitesell, a seven-year head coach at Loyola of Chicago, to set up the practice plan, and he may or may not be back for practice. While there was still a biopsy to confirm the details of the cancer, Oats talked to Danny White, who sprang into action and which helped get Crystal into the program at Roswell Park Cancer Center, one of the top places in the country, which just so happens to be in Buffalo.
By Saturday, Crystal had a biopsy on her lymph glands. The next day Nate looked at an update on his phone. It read, "Flip Saunders Dies from lymphoma." He chose not to tell his wife, acting as a buffer to anything negative in terms of the prognosis. Crystal found out about Saunders in the waiting room to see the doctor the next day. It got worse. There are different types of lymphoma. Crystal Oats had "Double Hit" lymphoma, which can be highly resistant to some forms of chemo.
In just the past two weeks, the Oats have found out they have a very tricky form of lymphoma to beat and already started chemo, all while Nate tries to ready his team to defend back-to-back MAC East titles.
It seems trivial to point out that Raheem Johnson, who Oats thought would replace Moss, is out with a foot injury, import Nikola Rakicevic has yet to be cleared, and Jarryn Skeete has been banged up a bit while Oats tries to balance the job with his family and caring for his wife. Ironically Lance Leipold, Buffalo's football coach, is also a Wisconsin native and his wife Kelly jumped right in to help with Oats' girls as Crystal's mom is helping with Crystal's needs in the hospital.
The basketball community is a tight-knit group. Billy Hahn, a former head coach at Ohio University and La Salle, called when Oats posted on Facebook his wife's diagnosis. Kathi Hahn is a two-time cancer survivor whose daughter has written a book on Kathi's survival. Hahn sent Oats the book and told him that Kathi kept telling everyone when she was sick that she would dance at her daughter's wedding the next year, and sure enough she did. The idea was to set a goal, and not let anything prevent your mind from wandering to a negative place during the fight.
Next offseason Buffalo is planning a foreign trip. Oats has already chosen the Bahamas for the team, but it's actually for his wife.
