Western Oregon Women’s Basketball Players File $28 Million Lawsuit Claiming Coach Abuse

Nine former Division II Western Oregon women’s basketball players are suing their coaches and school, alleging abuse they say they suffered in the program.

The players are seeking $28 million and additional punitive damages.

The 58-page lawsuit filed Wednesday in Marion County Circuit Court claims coach Jessica Peatross and assistant DJ Marlow physically abused and bullied the players. The coaches called them “brats” or “babies,” caused multiple overuse injuries, bloody feet, and vomiting from excessive drills, threatened them after bringing their concerns to the athletic department, and forbade anyone who reported the abuse from rejoining the team this season, the suit says. Peatross and Marlow started at WOU in June 2023.

The athletic director, Randi Lydum, is also a defendant in the suit, which claims she misled the players by assuring them their complaints would be heard and taken seriously. The suit even says Lydum acknowledged that she had a poor track record with coaches because she had already fired a soccer and volleyball coach over abuse claims. But, the filing says, the coaches punished the players for being “dramatic” and “tattletales” by going over their head to Lydum, who didn’t resolve their concerns.

“She made me feel like I could confide in her,” player Ana McClave said of Lydum. “And she told me that everything that was happening was wrong, and that it would get fixed, and there would be solutions to the problem. But it only made it worse.”

WOU, president Jesse Peters, and dean of students Malissa Larson are also named as defendants. The suit says multiple parents reached out to Lydum and other school officials, but that led to reduced playing time for their daughters and no action.

“We received the lawsuit and are currently in the process of reviewing its contents,” a spokesperson for the university said in a statement to Front Office Sports.

Claims of Physical Abuse

The suit says the coaches punished the team with excessive running, overpracticed the players beyond NCAA guidelines, made comments about their bodies, told them they were worthless, and called them “weak” and “lazy,” among other things. The suit says coaches insisted athletes play through various injuries and were callous to players who did sit out.

The filing also says coaches exceeded NCAA limits on practice days—including telling players anything “optional” on the calendar was not actually optional—and forced religion onto the team with prayers before every game and religious music on the road and at practice, the suit says.

In another wrinkle, Peatross filed a police report accusing a player of “intentionally elbowing her” resulting in the “worst pain she ever experienced.” But when police reviewed the practice footage, they “did not see anything in the video that would substantiate the claims made by the coach,” according to a police report obtained by FOS. The suit says the player accidentally ran into Peatross during a drill where the coach was standing in the middle of the court. That player and teammates who stood up for her were kicked out of practice, including one who was escorted out by campus public safety officers because she had been videotaping what was going on, the suit says.

The suit also says Marlow was “unnecessarily and intentionally aggressive” while working with the players, intentionally fouling them at practice. One player says Marlow gave her a season-ending knee injury, shortly before the athletic director said the coaching situation wasn’t bad enough to do anything because no one had been “physically abused.” 

Claims of Bullying

The emotional abuse alleged in the suit includes the coaches telling the players they shouldn’t be friends with one another or pick each other off the floor, pitting them against each other, encouraging “shit talk” between teammates, and that Marlow in particular posted “demeaning” messages about the team on X/Twitter. Coaches hurled insults that players were “too weak,” “too emotional,” “lazy,” “entitled,” “dogshit,” drunk or hungover, and forced them into “extreme weight loss,” the suit claims. The suit says players at Salem University, where Peatross and Marlow previously coached, shared similar experiences of physical and emotional abuse.

The complaint says the coaches told one player to stop taking her antidepressants and called her “Eeyore,” a reference to the Winnie the Pooh character. The complaint says she reported the situation and her side effects to a trainer and the athletic director, but “nothing came out of it.”

The suit says the coaches made a player from Hawai‘i feel “racially unaccepted,” and suspended her for having travel issues flying back after Christmas. In another airport-related incident, the suit says Peatross left her team at the airport in Los Angeles with “no direction of where they were supposed to go.”

A “Sham Investigation”

Western Oregon’s season ended six games early last year (against a vote by the players to continue with new coaches, the suit says) before a university-commissioned investigation by an outside firm. The investigation found the allegations were “not sustained” and the coaches were reinstated in April. The lawsuit calls it a “sham investigation,” saying the firm interviewed only four of 12 players who made complaints and didn’t request any documents, recordings, emails, or videos.

The coaches then met with players who had remaining eligibility, but allowed just the ones who hadn’t complained to stay on the team, the suit says. That led the athletes to lose their academic scholarships, and Lydum and the Board of Trustees did not respond to parental concerns about this.

The suit has been anticipated since September when the attorneys filed a 40-page notice of claim that included a photo of bloody socks and allegations of emotional and physical abuse.

The team is 7–10 so far this season with Peatross and Marlow at the helm.