This local Colorado football commit is ‘hands down the fastest kid in the nation’

Arlington Grace Prep running back D.J. Oats is not your normal teenager.

Within a four-year span, Daniel Lamont Oats, Jr. has lived the nightmare of losing both parents to fulfilling one of his dreams.

After playing only one season of varsity football in high school, Oats plans on signing with the University of Colorado on Feb. 6 to continue his quest of one day making a National Football League roster.

“It’s a beautiful place,” said Oats of the Boulder campus. “I just felt like that’s where God led me to.

“Coach Mel Tucker (CU head coach) called me and let me know how he felt about me and that he really wanted me there. I could feel it through what he was saying, but when I got there to visit I could see it with his actions.”

Oats added that the security of feeling that he would be looked out for by Tucker also meant a lot, especially with his turbulent past.

He grew up in tiny Mounds, Illinois in the most southern part of the state, a stone’s throw from Kentucky and Missouri where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi.

Meridian High School in Mounds - enrollment 130 - didn’t offer football, but Oats was athletic and fast and grew up playing basketball and running track.

But tragedy struck just before Oats’ freshman year at Meridian when Kenyetta Phillips, D.J.’s mother, lost her five-year battle with breast cancer.

Anitra Clemons, Oats’ aunt, had been like a mother to him ever since Phillips’ diagnosis in 2010. But after Oats’ freshman year, Clemons and D.J.’s grandmother, Sandra Clemons, couldn’t bear staying in that house in Mounds any longer so they packed up and moved to Texas.

Oats opted instead to move in with his father, Daniel Oats, Sr., in Romeoville, Illinois on the southwest side of Chicago.

It was there that D.J. got his first taste of football.

“I’ve always been a fast guy,” said Oats, who won track events at state in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. “It was my first time ever to touch a football field and the coach lined up the running backs for a race. I beat them all and was the starting running back for the JV at Romeoville.”

But just a few weeks after football season ended Daniel Sr., who was diabetic and had heart problems, suffered a fatal heart attack leaving a stunned D.J. with no other choice than to follow his aunt and grandmother down to Texas.

Life’s struggles were tough for Oats to overcome during his junior year at Arlington Martin.

He did play football for the Warriors, but a mix up in transfer paperwork and his inexperience landed him on the JV B team where he started at running back and scored 25 touchdowns.

Oats admits that there were a lot of dark days, mourning his parents and wondering if he really even wanted to play football at all.

“I love my grandma to death,” Oats said. “She’s always been there for me. She’s always picked me up on days that I was down, and I was down a lot of days with the situation I’ve been in.

“She always tells me to ‘go hard’ and just keep it going every day. I just look to her and she keeps me going, her and my auntie.”

Having seen Grace Prep numerous times on I-20 on his way to shadow his aunt, who is a radiologist in south Arlington, Oats was intrigued.

After checking out the school and sitting down with his aunt and grandmother, he decided to transfer in hopes of getting better prepared for college.

Grace Prep head coach David Reese was pleased to have D.J. out for football, but told him that he would have to earn his way on the team, which he did.

Reese spent much of his time with Oats at cornerback, where D.J. will likely play in college. But Oats rushed for nearly 1,300 yards and 15 touchdowns his senior season at Grace Prep, earning TAPPS Division III first-team all-state honors at running back.

“D.J., with his speed, if he gets a crease he’s gone,” said Reese, whose team finished 8-4 this season before bowing out in the quarterfinals. “Early on he was more of a picker and had to see a hole to explode through it, but as the year has gone on I think he was feeling more comfortable about hitting it where the hole was supposed to be even if he didn’t see it right away.”

With only one season of playing varsity football, Oats wasn’t on any college coach’s radar despite his blistering speed and 6-foot, 190-pound frame.

It took a lot of work from Oats’ uncle, Enloe Clemon,s who is Anitra’s brother, and recruiting guru ‘Coach MIL’ to get his name out there. And that they did.

“D.J. is hands down the fastest kid in the nation,” said Coach MIL, National Director for Elite Talent/Baller$ Choice Recruiting. “And I’ve clocked forties for kids all over the country. He can fly.”

Oats, sporting tattoos honoring each of his parents on his arms, admits he doesn’t know where he would be without the love and support of his aunt, uncle, and grandmother.

D.J. hopes to follow in aunt Anitra’s footsteps and become a radiologist. He plans to pursue that and business at Colorado.

“It actually shocked me to get any offers,” said Oats, who turned down 27 other schools including Louisville, Syracuse and Kentucky. “It just changed my mind about everything and had me thinking that maybe this is what I really want to do. Now I just want to go dominate at the next level.”

This story was originally published February 5, 2019 at 8:00 AM.