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Sharing Netflix password part of the reason SEMO women’s assistant resigned

headshot_2_Ben Coomes

SEMO athletics

An assistant coach for the Southeast Missouri State women’s team resigned earlier this year for recruiting violations, and it appears that the sharing of a Netflix password was part of what cost him his job.

The Southeast Missourian obtained a report from the university regarding the violations, and in that report it says that Ben Coomes, who was placed on administrative leave before resigning earlier this year, had committed a number of NCAA recruiting violations this past summer.

Among them? Sharing his Netflix password with a recruit and giving away a handful of t-shirts and water bottles to some of the high schoolers that had come to campus for an elite camp.

Both of those are silly violations. And while they will get the headlines, they’re not what cost Coomes, who was not named in the report, his job.

This was. From the SE Missourian:

[Coomes] asked [head coach Ty] Margenthaler “for permission to leave the office early to finish some errands before departing town the following afternoon to recruit,” according to the report.

The report said the assistant left the office and drove to Franklin, Tennessee, about 220 miles from Cape Girardeau.

There, the assistant “picked up a prospective student-athlete at her hotel and drove her, in a university vehicle, to an outlet mall located in Lebanon, [Tennessee], roughly 60 miles away.”

In an email to the Missourian, Barke later confirmed the recruit the assistant met with was a minor.

The pair shopped together for an amount of time not disclosed in the report. The recruit purchased items with her own money, but the assistant paid for their dinner.

After returning the recruit to her hotel, the assistant, “drove through the night to return to the institution’s campus in time for [6 a.m.] team weights the next morning.”

That’ll do it.