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by Abe Asher

Two years ago, Rich Linwood was watching his son play an eighth grade football game at Sandy High School. When the game ended, he realized something was wrong. 

“Players were coming off the field crying, and we were like, ‘Okay, we’ll get ‘em next time,’” Linwood said. “And they were like, ‘You don’t understand. The kids are calling us [n-words] as they are tackling us.’”

Linwood, whose family lives in East Portland, said parents were outraged by the lack of action from Sandy administrators following the game. This fall, with Linwood’s son now playing on the David Douglas High School team, was even more trying.

“This year, [the racial abuse] started from the very first game out at Forest Grove,” Linwood said. “And it’s just gotten worse.”

The David Douglas varsity football season began in late August with a jamboree game against Wilsonville. A month later, Marcell Frazier, who was working with David Douglas as a volunteer coach, was fed up.

On September 28, Frazier, a former standout player at Missouri who had a short stint in the NFL, posted to his Instagram account that in all three of the junior varsity team’s away games to date, players had been called the n-word and had monkey noises chanted at them. At Nelson High School in Happy Valley, Frazier said, a group of students threw a cake at David Douglas parents who were sitting in the stands.

“I’ve coached and played all around the nation, and also have played or coached internationally,” Frazier wrote. “NEVER have i witnessed this level of racism on the playing field.”

In an email sent to community members following the games, Nelson High School principal Greg Harris wrote that his administration was working with David Douglas administrators to “hold those responsible accountable, and provide greater supervision throughout this season and into the future.”

It wasn’t an isolated incident. In early October, a Sam Barlow High School student in Gresham was investigated and faced discipline after using a racial slur against a David Douglas player during a Friday night football game.

Meanwhile, Frazier was receiving numerous messages on social media accusing him of lying and accusing his players of being the aggressors. The comments escalated to a point that Frazier had to turn the comment section on the post off.

“Everywhere your kids go, it seems the n-word follows them,” Frazier recounted one message saying. “So that means you all are the problem.”

In fact, allegations of racial abuse have made headlines numerous times in recent high school sports seasons in the Portland metro area—suggesting the problem of racist abuse at high school sporting events is longstanding and widespread.

The Oregon School Activities Association’s (OSAA) data seems to support the notion that, despite increased media attention this fall, there have not been an unusually high number of reports of racial abuse this year.

Nate Lowery, OSAA’s director of media communications, wrote in an email to the Mercury that the number of complaint forms filed in 2024 “is down a little from the last couple of years.”

“It’s always gone on. I just don’t think we’ve gotten much attention for it. I don’t know why. I think it’s just one of those things that’s accepted as reality—‘Oh you’re going out to the Coast? Good luck, you’re going to be called the n-word,’” Frazier told the Mercury.

It’s similar, Frazier said, when schools with significant populations of Black students travel to other parts of the state.

The challenge was compounded in the fall, Frazier said, by the fact that referees repeatedly failed to identify and eject the offending players from games. The frequency of the abuse, and the lack of clear action taken to combat it, had a significant impact on the team’s morale over the course of the season.

“What do you say? It’s a downtrodden neighborhood that experiences gun violence, that experiences fentanyl use and poverty—there’s no Batman coming to save anybody,” Frazier said of the David Douglas team. “I think our kids just know, we’re left out here in East Portland to rot and we fend for ourselves.”

A portion of the school community felt further alienated by the response from administrators at schools where they allege their players faced abuse, as well as by the response from OSAA. 

The most visible aspect of that response to David Douglas community members was when OSAA officials came to the school to hold a listening session—an event Linwood found unsatisfying.

“When OSAA came out here to meet, they didn’t really say anything,” Linwood said. “They just listened. But even when we asked ‘How many African Americans are on the OSAA committee,’ we weren’t given an answer. Who is in that organization who can represent us?”

Linwood’s question speaks to a broader frustration with what David Douglas parents and staff felt was OSAA’s unwillingness or inability to hold schools accountable.

Indeed, Lowery wrote that OSAA mainly works in support of investigations conducted by the schools and school districts who have had community members accused—a paradigm that means some allegations are not investigated by a neutral third party if they are not caught in the moment by referees or match officials. 

Lowery wrote that OSAA does enlist a third-party investigator “on occasion,” and wrote that the association has historically imposed a variety of penalties on students and schools for violating its guidelines.

“We’ve had students and schools receive penalties for contest ejections related to discriminatory language/acts that include suspensions from next contests and monetary fines,” Lowery wrote. “Additionally, ejected students are required to complete the NFHS Sportsmanship online course, and ejected coaches must complete the NFHS Teaching and Modeling Behavior online course.”

Nevertheless, the relative lack of accountability for schools whose community members use derogatory language has remained a problem.

In 2019, the issue caught the attention of then-State Rep. Janelle Bynum, who introduced a bill mandating that schools “address the use of derogatory or inappropriate names, insults, verbal assaults, profanity or ridicule that occurs at an interscholastic activity” through a formal complaint process to be members of interscholastic organizations like OSAA.

The bill passed, and OSAA launched an initiative to help schools comply with the new law and combat racism and discrimination at their sporting events more broadly.

But that was more than five years ago, and while Lowery said OSAA remains in compliance with the law, racist abuse and harassment has continued in multiple sports. 

Aside from improved enforcement or broader societal changes, there may be other avenues to address the issue. OSAA largely creates conferences and schedules based on school size as well as geography, which, Frazier said, puts certain schools in vulnerable positions. He said he’d like to see OSAA consider grouping schools by geography, even if there are disparities in school size.

Frazier said he didn’t experience any racist incidents, for instance, during his previous stint coaching at David Douglas in 2019 when the team’s schedule was considerably different that year and included games against teams like Gresham, and Portland’s McDaniel and Franklin high schools.

In the meantime, Frazier said, kids at schools like David Douglas are being forced to brace themselves to face more abuse.

“You don’t want to play football to say, ‘Here we go again,’” Frazier said.