Hartland's Nathan Oake selected to Michigan golf coaches' Hall of Fame
Nathan Oake doesn’t have to rack his brain much to find an example to encourage a struggling golfer.
He’s used his own experience countless times as Hartland's coach.
Oake’s career trajectory in golf began at the very bottom as a freshman at Chelsea in 1989 when he was, by his own admission, “the worst player on the high school golf team.”
He made himself into a competitive high school golfer, became a PGA-sanctioned golf professional and has been a successful high school coach since 2000.
Oake will now go down as one of the best high school golf coaches ever when he’s inducted into the Michigan Interscholastic Golf Coaches Association Hall of Fame in August.
He will be one of only three Livingston County coaches among 128 in the Hall of Fame, joining Brighton’s Mike Sanderson (2002) and Hartland’s Mike Joseph (2022).
“I got to see Mike Joseph go in last year, which was great,” said Oake, who is still Hartland’s coach. “It was a very humbling phone call to get. I guess I was speechless for a moment. I wasn’t exactly expecting that to happen at this juncture in my life, but I’m thrilled and honored.”
Had Oake’s knees cooperated, he may never had made a career out of golf.
He planned to run cross country at Chelsea, but Osgood-Schlatter disease, a common cause of knee pain in growing adolescents, made it too difficult to run.
Plan B became golf, a sport he played only occasionally during the summer with his father. Despite averaging 64 for nine holes as a freshman, he was determined to become competitive in his new sport.
“I felt I had a lot of control,” Oake said. “There was nobody to blame but myself. There was no playing time. I also played baseball and basketball; playing time is a part of that. I just controlled it all. My effort I put in was going to be in direction proportion with the output that came. That stuck with me in just about everything I do in my life.”
Oake averaged 40 for nine holes and was a 6 handicap by his senior year. He moved on to Ferris State University, not to play golf, but to take part in its professional golf management program.
Upon graduation, he began working at Barton Hills Country Club in Ann Arbor. Into his second season at Barton Hills, he had the opportunity to return to Chelsea as an assistant coach for two years under his former coach, Jim Tallman.
There were brief stops at Britton-Deerfield and Flushing before he became the head coach at Hartland in 2005.
The Eagles have qualified for the state Division 1 tournament eight times in the past 13 seasons while competing in one of the toughest regionals in Michigan. Hartland has finished in the top 10 in the state seven times during that stretch, its best finish being fourth in 2015. The Eagles won regional championships under Oake in 2009, 2018 and 2021.
Oake has coached four first-team all-staters and five others who received honorable mention at the state level.
“If we qualified out of regionals and got to the state finals, that was a real measure for us,” Oake said. “Some years, we were the third regional team, but fifth-place state team. That’s not too uncommon for this regional.”
Some of the players Oake has coached come into high school with extensive junior golf backgrounds. Others, like him, are relatively newcomers to the sport who need encouragement to get through the inevitable early rough patches.
“I can spot that kid,” Oake said. “If you can light the fire and they’ve got the work ethic, it’s incredible. I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of kinds subscribe to the mindset of resilience. I’ve walked that walk. It’s a joy to watch the improvement and see some late bloomers.
“I’ve taken inventory of that mentally over the last couple weeks, not that I lost track of it. I’ve gone back over 20-plus years and thought back of really great stories of men who have done something special after having this opportunity.”
Besides his work at Hartland, Oake co-founded what’s now known as the Kensington Junior Golf Tour in 2006 with Ethan Hawker, the Eagles’ current girls coach.
“Flint Junior Golf planted the seed for me when I got to Hartland,” said Oake, who was Flushing’s junior varsity coach for one season before coming to Hartland. “We needed to do something like that in Livingston County. There wasn’t much. If you were an Oak Pointe member, you had junior golf. Besides that, there wasn’t a lot of cultivation. Myself and Ethan Hawker started that to build a pipeline for literally every school in the county, not just Hartland.”
What was originally called the Livingston Junior Golf Tour eventually spread into Washtenaw County, as well as western Oakland and Wayne counties.
“Now kids, who are a lot like me at that age who wanted to get better, have that opportunity for an affordable rate,” he said. “That don’t need to be a member of a private club to do it.”
Oake will be inducted along with Steve Burke of Trenton and Southfield Christian; Randy Johnson of Oakland Christian; and Tom Koert of Grand Rapids NorthPointe Christian, Lowell and Sparta.
Contact Bill Khan at wkhan@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillKhan.
This article originally appeared on Livingston Daily: Hartland's Nathan Oake selected to Michigan golf coaches' Hall of Fame
