She married a real gutter ball.
An assistant women’s bowling coach at Stephen F. Austin State University, whose wife is the head coach, chose to resign after the school discovered he had an affair with a member of the team.
Steve Lemke, 38, who is married to head coach Amber Lemke, resigned from the program on April 10 — and said in a statement obtained by The Daily Sentinel that although “I knew it was kind of a no-no, there’s not a rule saying it can’t happen.”
The outlet said it chose not to identify the student-athlete, who was a member of the Ladyjacks bowling team.
Steve was brazen and unapologetic about his actions.
“There’s not a law saying I’m going to go to jail for doing something like this,” Steve said. “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.”
Steve and Amber have since filed for divorce, according to court records.
SFA athletic director Ryan Ivey said although Lemke and the student-athlete are two consenting adults, they violated the university’s relationship rules.
Although consensual sexual relationships between faculty and students at the college level are not prohibited under state law, some universities have policies in place forbidding those types of relationships.
SFA is a four-year teaching and research university located in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Steve said the affair was discovered when Amber saw a text message from the student-athlete on his phone.
“It didn’t have anything in detail,” Steve said of the text. “It was just about how amazing I am, basically, in general perspective.
“Amber saw that and questioned me and I got to the point where it just built up so much that I basically told her the truth after she dug through my phone.”
“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,” Lemke 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.”
Amber was hired as head coach in the 2011-12 school year, two years after SFA’s bowling program started, according to The Daily Sentinel.
Steve was a volunteer assistant until Sept. 1, 2019, when he was officially hired as an assistant coach — and reported directly to Loree McCary, Associate Athletic Director for Administration due to state nepotism laws.
“He’s not working here anymore,” Ivey said of Steve. “From a departmental standpoint, he had a choice and he chose to resign.”
Amber has coached the women’s bowling team at SFA to two national titles and two second-place finishes.
Amber will return as head coach and the student-athlete involved in the affair will not return to the team, as she has no eligibility.
“As soon as we found out, we went through the process,” Ivey said. “We support our student-athletes and obviously Amber, with what was going on.”
Steve Lemke’s bio no longer exists on the SFA athletics website.
Steve and Amber welcomed their first son, Ryder, in the summer of 2015 and their second son, Ayden, in the spring of 2017, according to her SFA bio.
Amber did not respond to requests for comment, The Daily Sentinel reported.
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