A Mom at Lincoln High School Gets to Coach Her Big Boys

Lincoln High School’s boys basketball team is a little unusual this year. The Cardinals have three players 6-foot-8 or taller, and they are at the top of the Portland Interscholastic League. The team often better known for GPAs than PPG has smoked perennial powerhouses Jefferson and Grant as well as emerging power Roosevelt on its way to a ranking among the state’s best teams.

But what’s really unusual is the relationship that the head coach has with the team’s two best players, twins Malachi and Moroni Seely-Roberts. She’s their mother.

Heather Seely-Roberts is also the only female head coach of a 6A boys varsity team in Oregon. She coached high school girls teams for 16 years in Oregon before moving into the college ranks at Southern Virginia for four years. But she and family wanted to come home to Oregon—and she wanted to coach the twins, the youngest of her five children.

Seely-Roberts, 53, first coached her boys at Yamhill-Carlton High School, where the twins won a state 3A (smaller schools) title in 2021, scoring 50 of the team’s 52 points in the title game. During the pandemic, when Oregon schools shut down, the Seely-Roberts family relocated to Utah so Malachi (6-foot-8, 180 pounds) and Moroni (6-foot-6, 205 pounds) could keep playing. Then, when they returned to Oregon, a former Lincoln girls coach told Seely-Roberts that the Cardinals needed a new boys coach.

She knew that parents at Lincoln, the city’s most affluent public high school, were a tough audience. But Seely-Roberts had long ago sought advice from peers about the pitfalls and benefits of coaching your own kids: Make sure you have good assistants and hope your kids are either very marginal or very good. She thought the move would be positive.

“In terms of the classes that are available, and basketballwise, it’s a good move for the boys,” Seely-Roberts says. Not easy however: “We still live in Newberg and drive 40 minutes each way every day,” she adds.

The team is winning (17-3 and ranked fifth in the state at deadline), but Seely-Roberts says the best part of coaching her sons is what most parents of teenagers want: quality time with her sons.

“What I’ve enjoyed the most is that I see things other parents don’t,” says Seely-Roberts, who teaches P.E. at Lincoln. “I watch them in the halls or on the floor. I watch them being good human beings. I’m getting to see them step up as people.”

That’s also the hardest part of being their coach—putting the whistle away. “I’m always making sure that when we leave the basketball floor that I don’t keep hammering them,” Seely-Roberts says. “Then, I’m Mom and we don’t talk to talk about the games anymore.”

Lincoln will enter the state tournament as a leading contender later this spring, and both boys have interest from multiple college teams. But they will both defer for two years to complete a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—their choice, their mother says.

And where does the coach hope to see them play next? “They say they are open to going to different places,” Seely-Roberts says, “but as their mom, I’m eager for them to go to the same college.”