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Competitive fire is a good thing on the basketball court. But at Lincoln High School, the coach and players are threatening to battle each other in a different kind of court.
Both Lincoln varsity basketball coach Heather Seely-Roberts and four of her players have filed tort claim notices against Portland Public Schools—in other words, they’re threatening to sue the school district. Seely-Roberts, the only woman to coach a 6A boys basketball team in the state, says the district treated her differently than its male coaches and then failed to protect her from a smear campaign waged by parents of a player she didn’t place on the varsity squad. The students say Seely-Roberts retaliated against them for playing for a rival coach, and that they heard her repeatedly use a homophobic slur.
PPS spokeswoman Valerie Feder says the district does not comment on pending litigation. That’s an especially useful policy when the two sides disagree on nearly every detail of what happened inside the celebrated Lincoln basketball program. But in addition to the tort claims, WW has learned, the district conducted at least two investigations into the actions of Seely-Roberts while she coached the program.
Here’s how the two accounts match up.
WHAT THE COACH SAYS: Heather Seely-Roberts made headlines when she coached Lincoln to a third-place finish in the state 6A championships during the 2022-23 season. But behind the scenes, she alleges the district has discriminated against her because of her gender.
Seely-Roberts’ attorney Steve Lindsey filed a tort claim notice on her behalf. It alleges PPS is in violation of federal Title IX regulations and subjected Seely-Roberts to treatment different from her male counterparts. The claim alleges the district required her to open her gyms to supervision by PPS athletic director Marshall Haskins. Haskins and eight basketball coaches also attended Lincoln basketball tryouts this year and made roster selections, says Ross Denison, another attorney for Seely-Roberts. Deciding who made team rosters used to be left to Seely-Roberts’ sole discretion, the notice alleges.
The notice also accuses PPS of failing to protect Seely-Roberts from parents who, in the coach’s words, subjected her to “harassment, intimidation and bullying.” “Despite defending myself against numerous baseless accusations, they continue a very public campaign against me with knowingly false, defamatory claims about me and my coaching decisions,” she wrote in a Nov. 4 email to Sharon Reese, PPS’s chief human resources officer, which Seely-Roberts’ attorneys provided to WW along with her tort claim notice.
Seely-Roberts’ claim alleges the district is violating state and federal anti-discrimination laws, engaging in unlawful defamation, jeopardizing her career, creating a hostile work environment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and violating multiple state laws that protect her privacy.
WHAT THE STUDENTS SAY: Portland lawyer Kevin Brague filed the tort claim notice on behalf of the four students, who are all identified only by their initials. Their tort claim alleges Seely-Roberts retaliated against students who played for a rival coach, and that she used a homophobic slur in front of students on multiple occasions.
Some of the boys on the Lincoln team also play for Will Boettcher, who coached second junior varsity basketball under Seely-Roberts during the 2021-22 academic year. Boettcher now coaches for Amateur Athletic Union, a national nonprofit that helps kids and teens compete in several sports. The claim alleges kids who play for him at AAU were barred from the Lincoln varsity team, and that Seely-Roberts lied to one student about when basketball tryouts were.
The more explosive allegation in the students’ tort claim notice is Seely-Roberts’ repeated use of the homophobic slur. The tort claim alleges three instances in 2024—once at a practice, once in a car with students, and once when, following a player getting his ears pierced, the coach remarked that “back in my day we called those kind of people faggots.” They also allege she made a comment to a group of Black students, asking if they were “doing gang signs.”
The students allege the district is in violation of several district and state teaching regulations, which prohibit harassment based on sexual orientation and race.
WHAT THE SCHOOL DISTRICT FOUND: A district investigation, conducted on behalf of a Lincoln family and whose findings were released Aug. 2, substantiated “some claims of retaliation by Coach Roberts.” In that investigation, PPS found the coach had tried to intimidate and force the family to comply with a “chain of command” complaint-reporting system in which all complaints first needed to be taken to Seely-Roberts.
The district found Seely-Roberts tried to withhold a basketball team placement from the family’s son until the family agreed to comply, a move PPS deemed “was intended to punish, intimidate, and prevent the [redacted] family (and perhaps other families) from making complaints outside of the communication ‘chain of command’ as you had done.” When the family appealed the investigation’s “inconclusive” finding on another matter, the PPS Board agreed with the family, finding that Seely-Roberts had intentionally omitted the family from teamwide emails and communications.
In a letter to Lincoln boys basketball parents last Friday, Matt Wiles, the school’s athletic director, said a second PPS investigation “did not find evidence of homophobic or racially discriminatory behavior within the LHS basketball program.” In a statement to WW, Denison, the attorney for Seely-Roberts, added that “in response to these false allegations, Coach Roberts has been investigated by the district twice, and there’s never been a finding that she engaged in racist or homophobic conduct.”
WW has requested the findings of the second investigation but has not received them.