Nathanael Justin “Nate” Oats

He was not a Watertown High Gosling. He was a Maranatha kid whose whole childhood and first adult job sat on one Baptist campus: church, classroom, and gym.

He was born in Watertown on October 13, 1974, the son of Larry Oats, a Maranatha Bible professor and seminary dean who never left the school, and Colleen. At Maranatha Baptist Academy he started three seasons and went 24–0 as a senior. He stayed for college as a math-education major, team captain, and all-conference player, then earned a master’s in kinesiology from Wisconsin in 1999 while still on the Maranatha staff. Weeknights meant youth-prison Bible study at Ethan Allen; summers meant roofing and more gym time.

He assisted at Maranatha from 1997 to 2000, coached at Wisconsin–Whitewater, taught math for eleven years in Michigan, and won a Class A state title at Romulus in 2013 at 27–1. Buffalo and then Alabama followed. The Watertown claim is birth, raise, and that first adult coaching job, not a later mailing address from Tuscaloosa.