Stephen F. Austin assistant women’s bowling coach Steve Lemke has resigned from his position after the school discovered he was having an affair with a player on the team.
Lemke—who is married to the team’s head coach, Amber Lemke—resigned on April 10 rather than be fired.
“He’s not working here anymore,” Stephen F. Austin athletic director Ryan Ivey said, per Nathan Hague of The Daily Sentinel. “From a departmental standpoint, he had a choice and he chose to resign.”
The program won two national championships during Lemke’s time on the staff, with two runner-up finishes. Steve and Amber have since filed for divorce, per Hague, while Steve cited the program’s success as a contributing factor to the story getting added attention. He also offered a justification for his actions, though acknowledged that his relationship with the player was “kind of a no-no.”
“I knew it was kind of a no-no but there’s not a rule saying it can’t happen,” Steve said. “There’s not a law saying I’m going to go to jail for doing something like this. There’s nothing in stone. I guess it’s just an ethics code, like we frown upon it, but there’s no rule, there’s no law broken.”
Ivey told Hague that the relationship violated the school’s rules. The pair’s affair was discovered by Amber Lemke after seeing a text message on his phone.
Amber Lemke took over as the program’s head coach in 2011. Steve was a volunteer assistant until September ’19, when he was officially named an assistant. He mentioned his frustration with his status when speaking with Hague about his resignation.
“I was the stay-at-home dad for five years with the kids while Amber got to go off and coach the team and when she’d get back, I’d run practices on top of taking care of the kids while she was back,” Steve said. “When they’d travel again, I would sit back and take care of the kids. Then when I got hired on, she almost forced me to run practices. I was a volunteer the entire time before that trying to help out Amber. Once I got hired on, one thing stemmed from another. I felt like I was doing too much for what I was being valued at.”
