When Anna Albright entered a basketball gym in suburban Austin with her ten-year-old son during a tournament in early 2023, she walked past the man who, decades earlier, had been her coach. The encounter nearly stopped Albright in her tracks. “It was shocking,” she said. “I never thought I’d see him again. My body went into fight-or-flight mode. I looked at him and he was with a team of girls, laughing and joking, and I immediately recognized his demeanor.”
Albright kept moving toward the bleachers, and when she sat down, she did a quick internet search on her phone to confirm that the coach was the man she remembered. The first link she found, a February 2023 story from the Killeen Daily Herald, confirmed it. The headline read: “Lampasas High girls basketball coach arrested on misdemeanor charges.” Other stories referenced court records and improper “communications” between Mark A. Myers and a student at the school, located an hour’s drive northwest of Austin, and that he faced two counts of “official oppression.” This charge includes various abuses of authority—including, the article noted, sexual harassment. “You know how gyms are super loud? It was like it all went silent,” Albright recalled. “I just sat there and I thought, ‘This is what it was. It has a name now. It has a name for what he did.’”
The discovery led Albright to look further into Myers’s career path. After she had played for him at Waco’s Vanguard College Preparatory School in the mid-nineties, he continued his coaching career, bouncing from school to school until he eventually landed at Cedar Park High, roughly fifteen miles northwest of Austin, in 2000. Then, early in the 2016–2017 school year, Myers left Cedar Park, citing “stress” as a reason. He found a new job at Lampasas High the next school year. (He resigned from that position in January 2023, after the school district began its investigation into his behavior.)
Albright knew that he had continued his coaching career despite allegations of grooming and sexual harassment that she and others had made against him decades earlier. But she was astounded that even after his arrest, Myers was still coaching young girls. (Albright’s name has been changed to protect her privacy as someone who has experienced childhood sexual harassment.)
Myers is now 62 years old and says he is retiring, though he can still often be seen on the sidelines when Phoenix Select, the Central Texas club team he runs with his daughter, competes in tournaments. He arrived to an interview at Texas Monthly’s office carrying a small, long-haired dachshund in a shoulder bag, and said he couldn’t find a sitter for the dog. During the hour-long meeting, Myers stressed the ways he has helped the students he’s worked with. He showed images of players, during a team trip to Philadelphia, running up the steps that Sylvester Stallone triumphantly mounted in the movie Rocky. He mentioned taking players’ families to historic sites and theme parks. He talked about the young athletes who had gone from his club teams to college basketball scholarships. “I just want you to know that’s why so many kids come play for us. It’s not just the opportunity to go get a college scholarship and get their education paid for and play a sport that they love, but because they trust us and they know us,” he said. “I know you’ve heard some bad stuff, but I just want you to know that I’m a good person.”
That claim, however, is hard to square with Myers’s guilty plea to the February 2023 charges in a courtroom in Lampasas months later, on May 7. He was sentenced to two years of deferred adjudication probation and fines worth $2,000.
In his interview with Texas Monthly, Myers denied some of the allegations about his behavior while coaching in Waco and declined to answer some of our questions about that period. He said our publishing a story about these accusations could cost his current players a shot at playing college ball because of their affiliation with him, if those allegations became public. “I don’t mind if I don’t ever coach again,” he said. “I just want those kids to hold onto those scholarships. That’s what my concern is.”
Despite his professed concern for the kids he has coached, some of them—several of whom are now adults, well into their forties—say they’ve been hurt by Myers’s actions.
Myers began coaching the girls basketball team at Waco Vanguard, a private grade 6–12 school, in the early eighties. He won four state titles there before leaving at the end of the 1997 season. It was the first stop in a career that saw Myers achieve more than nine hundred wins. In 2020, the University Interscholastic League, which oversees high school sports in Texas, honored him as one of the hundred greatest basketball coaches in state history. His time in Waco might have been a bright spot for Myers professionally, but for two of the twelve former Vanguard students and parents who spoke to Texas Monthly, the years they spent around him were among the darkest in their lives.
In seventh grade, Albright made the middle school team, and Myers took a special interest in her. He affectionately called her “Laura,” she said, because he told her she reminded him of the character by that name on the TV series Little House on the Prairie. “He said it was because I was so sweet and gentle.” He’d shoot baskets with her in private summer workouts.
Several of her teammates told Texas Monthly that Myers clearly favored Albright. “We were in class sitting at a table together . . . and [Albright] started telling me that Mark [Myers] had been sending her letters. He would leave letters in her locker before games verbalizing things that he wanted to do with her or that he was attracted to her,” recalled Emily Fowler-Offill. She said the notes were “romantic in nature.”
Sitting in her living room in Austin, Albright, who is now 44, produced notes she had written toward the end of her high school career, as she reflected on her relationship with Myers. She can, she said, recall the words he would tell her during private training sessions. “He would say things like, ‘If you were a little older and I was a little younger, we could really have something;’ [or], ‘You’re the kind of person I would marry.’ That started in ninth grade.” Albright was fourteen then; Myers was in his mid-thirties. He declined to comment on this allegation. At the time, Albright said, his behavior didn’t bother her. “I thought it must be normal,” she said. She thought of him as some combination of best friend and father figure, so when she was in tenth grade and he advised her to break up with her boyfriend, she did so. “He was so proud of me, and so happy,” she said. Myers said he couldn’t recall this incident.
Albright said Myers would also flash an intimidating temper that seemed to push the boundaries of the normal player–coach dynamic. After she was caught drinking before a school dance, he called her into his classroom alone. “He was screaming,” she said. “It felt very scary because my parents already talked to me about it, and the school already talked to me about it, but he had this huge reaction. It was a gut sign to me, like, ‘I don’t know what this is, but it doesn’t feel good anymore.’ ”
A pattern developed during her senior year, she said. She and Myers would fight, then rebuild their relationship, and then something else would set him off. After her brother threw a party at their parents’ house, where she and other guests had been drinking, Myers again called her into his classroom alone. “He said, ‘I saw you drinking,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I was there. I came to your house.’ ” She didn’t believe him, but he insisted. “He said, ‘Look under the first big tree in your yard as soon as you get to your driveway. That’s where I was hiding, and I wrote your name in the dirt,’ ” she recalled. Albright drove home and checked the tree for her name, but if it had ever been there, it was gone. She still doesn’t know if he hid in her yard watching her, but she allowed Texas Monthly to review a letter he sent her before she graduated. “You do not have to be scared to go outside,” Myers wrote. “I will never go to your house again.” Myers declined to answer questions about Albright’s account.
Before a game late in her senior season, Albright strained a muscle in her upper right leg. Myers took her to the training room and massaged the leg, and she was able to play. That night, she recalled, she played “very well.” Afterward, she said, Myers approached her. “He pulled me over and said, ‘If a massage can do that, let’s up it next time and see what happens,’ ” Abright said. “That was the final thing that made me think, ‘This does not feel good.’ ” Myers said that at small schools without professional trainers, a coach would be responsible for activities such as taping ankles and working out muscle cramps, but did not recall if he ever did so for Albright.
After the season, in the spring of 1997 Albright told a few of her teammates about Myers’s behavior, and they responded that it seemed inappropriate. She then told her parents, who reported Myers to school administrators. Shortly thereafter, other students and parents at a school with a graduating class of 37 found out about Albright’s allegations and she faced a backlash from the coach’s supporters. Albright received an anonymous letter in the mail outlining her supposed misbehavior—drinking, an overnight trip to her boyfriend’s family ranch, a time she sat on a classmate’s desk while wearing a skirt. Teammates and their parents accused her of trying to sabotage Myers because she’d been unsatisfied with her playing time.
Although some in the Vanguard high school community responded negatively to Albright’s accusations, the news of her decision to report Myers reached a former Vanguard girls basketball star and persuaded her to speak out.
Inside her Austin living room, Samantha Reichardt retrieved a yearbook photo of herself from 1987. In the image, she’s kneeling with a basketball between her hands and her wavy brown hair brushing her shoulders. Years later, she said, Myers told her that was the year he first felt physically attracted to her. She was twelve. (Because Reichardt is a survivor of sexual abuse, her name has been changed in this story.)
That was also the year that Reichardt joined the basketball program at Vanguard. She was a gifted player already, and Myers promised to coach her up to the next level. “He was telling me, ‘You’re going to be a good basketball player. I want to help you do that,’ ” she said. “He became very invested in me.”
That investment came through informal summer training sessions—sometimes in small groups, sometimes one-on-one—in which Myers would have Reichardt shoot hundreds of three-pointers. They spent a lot of time together, she recalled, but it took years before she noticed patterns that made her feel uncomfortable around the coach. Myers, she said, would drive one of the team vehicles to and from games, and she typically rode with him, along with other players. “He would playfully adjust his mirror and act like he was looking at us changing,” Reichardt said. “It felt so normal going through what I now understand was grooming.”
After the basketball season in her senior year, Reichardt joined the softball team, which Myers also coached, and the two continued what Reichardt believed to be nothing more than a friendship. To her, the idea that a grown man would see her as attractive seemed preposterous. “I am one hundred percent telling you that I had no idea that he had feelings for me,” Reichardt said. “I didn’t know adults could feel like this for kids.”
Myers, Reichardt said, finally expressed his feelings for her after their last softball game together, in the spring of 1993. Before she went home that day, Reichardt said, Myers pulled her aside and said he wanted to talk in the gymnasium. It was well past school hours, and the campus was mostly empty. Reichardt said her friends, who were waiting to go home together for a sleepover that night, opted to wait outside while she spoke with the coach. “This is when it all started,” Reichardt said. “He took my hands and said, ‘I’m so excited that our relationship as coach and player is over. And I’m ready for a new relationship with you.’ He started telling me how he’s been attracted to me since I was twelve years old and that every time he had sex with his wife, who was pregnant at the time, that he always thinks of me.” He said he envisioned them getting married, and “spending the rest of our lives together.”
Then, Reichardt said, he kissed her. (Myers declined to answer specific questions about this incident, but he denied kissing any athlete who ever played for him. According to a statement provided by Vanguard, the school investigated the claim at the time and determined that the allegation Myers kissed a former student was “well-founded.”) Looking back, Reichardt said part of her felt flattered by the attention from an adult man, but she also sensed something wasn’t right. “I felt super special, but my body was saying this is terrifying and gross and you need to get out of there,” she said. That night, she told some friends what Myers had done. She “had the whitest face you’ve ever seen,” recalled Katie Starr O’Connor, who attended the sleepover with Reichardt. “She just started crying and she was like: Mark is in love with me and has been since the seventh grade.”
Back then, Reichardt said, she didn’t know what to do. She trusted Myers: He was an adult who had spent the past six years coaching her to be Vanguard’s best basketball player. Where other adults treated her like a child, it felt to her that Myers saw her as something more. On her graduation day, she said, she received two dozen red roses from a “secret admirer” who she believed could only be him. The two began a months-long relationship. Reichardt said she liked the attention at the time, but she has come to believe that she didn’t understand how Myers was trying to take advantage of her. “We would leave for lunch and he would want to drive me around in his car. And there was a place that he went where he would kiss me. He held my hand all the time,” she said. “It was all such a game to him. It was almost like he dared somebody to catch us. It was such a mind game that he was playing.”
As time went on, Reichardt said she began to feel uncomfortable around Myers. He’d take her to his home, she said, and call his wife to make sure she wouldn’t return unexpectedly while Reichardt was there. Reichardt said she’d never seen an adult act like this, and she was becoming increasingly unnerved. Finally, she said, she snapped after Myers wrote her a letter expressing his love, and Reichardt felt repulsed while reading it. She said she was so shaken that she and O’Connor burned the note. “I remember at the time being like, ‘This is not okay. This is disgusting,’ ” Reichardt said. “That’s why we burned it.” (When asked about these allegations, Myers denied having romantic relationships with any of his players.)
Reichardt said she tried to distance herself from Myers. She graduated and left Waco to attend Southwestern University, seventy miles southwest, in Georgetown. Myers continued to contact her, she said, leaving voicemails and asking to meet her. He even asked Reichardt’s younger high school friends for advice. “He’d call us into his office and try to talk to us about why she wasn’t responding to his calls, and how in love with her he was,” recalled one former Waco Vanguard athlete who had been a year behind Reichardt. Meanwhile, Reichardt struggled to process what she’d been through. Her grades began to slide. She was admitted to the hospital three times for alcohol poisoning. She shut out everyone from Vanguard, too ashamed to share the cause of her suffering.
Then, in 1997, she reconnected with Albright. The two had been close when Reichardt, a senior during Albright’s eighth grade year, had been in Waco. Albright had dated her younger brother and would occasionally join Reichardt’s family on trips. When Reichardt learned that Myers’s inappropriate behavior had continued with another high school girl, she finally reported him.
Things moved fast after that. Albright and Reichardt both shared their experiences with Linda Goble, who was then head of the school. Vanguard’s statement confirmed that school administrators quickly began looking into the allegations, but that Myers, “believing the school would ultimately terminate his employment,” resigned while the investigation was underway. “It is wrong that a young person would ever feel isolated during an investigation and if that was the case at that time, VCPS sincerely regrets any action or inaction that resulted in those feelings,” the statement reads.
After Myers left Waco Vanguard, he was hired to coach in Bremond, a tiny burg about 42 miles northwest of College Station; from there, he got an offer at a larger school in Sweeny, a Gulf Coast town an hour southwest of Houston. Then, in 2000, he was named girls basketball coach at Cedar Park High School. Administrators from Cedar Park’s school district did not respond to requests for an interview.
Myers’s time in Cedar Park was largely successful in athletic terms. The program was a consistent presence in the district playoffs, and the coach added regular season wins to the tally that would earn him recognition from the UIL. But Myers’s tenure at Cedar Park came to an abrupt end. In 2016 he was accused of misappropriating school funds and running a “pay to play” program in which athletes who signed up for his private club teams were promised more playing time than those who did not. After a school investigation, administrators sent him a letter informing him that his contract would not be renewed; he opted to resign less than a quarter of the way into the 2016–2017 season, telling the Austin American-Statesman that he did so because of “stress.” In his interview with Texas Monthly, Myers denied all allegations of wrongdoing in Cedar Park.
Leander ISD reported the allegations to the Texas Education Agency, but there’s no indication that officials at the school notified their counterparts in Lampasas before Myers began working there, and the TEA took no further action in his case. According to Richard Carlson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, schools in the state aren’t required to report when former employees have left because of misconduct. “In general, employers don’t have any duty to call [future] employers, even when they know another employer has hired this person,” he said. “For a lot of employers, this presents a dilemma, because maybe they’re troubled by the employee’s conduct, but at the same time, they worry about the prospect of either a defamation lawsuit or a discrimination lawsuit.” Employers, he noted, are “litigation-averse,” even when they believe they’ll win at trial. “Winning could still cost them tens of thousands of dollars,” he said. To avoid that cost, Carlson explained, many schools won’t comment on the performance of past employees other than to verify the individuals’ start and end dates at the institution. Vanguard’s statement said the school did not track Myers’s employment over the years and said he “would not have been recommended to the best of our knowledge if contacted by another school.”
Vanguard, according to the statement, “did not discourage any student or family from contacting any of Myers’ employers—it was up to each of them whether they wished to share their knowledge with anyone in the public realm.”
And so, in 2017, administrators at Lampasas High School, seemingly unaware of the complaints against Myers, hired him to coach its girls basketball team.
When Anna Albright encountered Myers in that gym in the north Austin suburb of Leander, after decades of not seeing her former coach, she calmed herself by searching for information about Myers’s recent arrest. She learned that the allegations involved two student athletes who played for him at Lampasas, in what appeared to her to be part of a pattern of behavior.
Monica Fineman, a junior at the school, said Myers began scouting her games when she was in eighth grade, and recruited her for his club team, Phoenix Select. (Her name has been changed to protect her privacy as someone who experienced childhood sexual harassment.) Her freshman year, she played for both the club program and Lampasas’s junior varsity squad. As a sophomore, she was selected for the varsity team. That, she said, is when things with Myers got weird.
The two agreed to meet for a one-on-one training session, Fineman said, and she arrived early. She had recently gotten into trouble at school, she said, and Myers decided to discipline her for it. He told her he was glad she was early because it gave them time to discuss her punishment. He gave her two options: “He said, ‘You can run four or five miles, like what the football boys do, but I don’t want to stand there and watch you do that,’ ” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Okay . . . do you want me to run or not?’ ”
The other option, she said, involved trying out a new use for Phoenix Select–branded face masks that players had worn during the pandemic. The masks resembled neck gaiters, and Myers told Fineman he was trying to decide if it would be appropriate for the eighth-grade players to wear them as tube tops. “He asked me . . . to put [one] on, so he could see what it looked like,” she said. “So for my punishment, that’s what he made me do.” Myers denied asking Fineman to model the garment.
Fineman said she went into the bathroom and put the face mask on over her sports bra. When she came out, she said, “He was like, ‘I need to see it without the sports bra.’ ” Fineman said she was immediately uncomfortable. “I knew it was wrong,” she recalled, but she didn’t want to question Myers’s authority. “I didn’t want to run five miles, and I wasn’t going to say ‘no,’ ” she explained, “because he’s my coach.” She put on the mask as instructed, then came back out and spun around at his instruction. “‘I don’t understand why you didn’t just do it the first time,’ ” she recalled him saying. Then she returned to the bathroom, put her clothes back on, and gave him the mask back. He then instructed her to run once up and down the length of the gym. “He was like, ‘If anyone asks, you did a punishment and there was running involved,’ ” she said. “‘And then he told me, ‘Remember, if anyone finds out, it’s because you told them.’ ”
Fineman called the rest of the training session “weird.” Myers asked her about her sports bra, she said—if she really took it off to try on the mask or if she just hid the straps. He asked her probing questions about why she thought girls wore push-up bras. “I just kept saying, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Fineman recalled.
At first, Fineman decided not to tell anyone about Myers’s behavior. Later, though, she learned that the coach had asked another player to submit to the same “punishment,” and she decided to tell her parents. The morning after she told them, Fineman and her mother met with a group of Lampasas High administrators, including the principal and a law enforcement official, and Fineman wrote down what Myers had asked her to do. Three and a half weeks later, on February 9, he was arrested on two charges of official oppression.
The Lampasas County courthouse sits in the middle of the town square. It’s a stone structure, smaller on the inside than it looks from the outside, with old, narrow staircases and wooden banisters leading to its courtrooms. On Tuesday, May 7—the day Myers was set to plead guilty to the official oppression charges—the second-floor courtroom was packed with more than forty observers.
Many of them were classmates of Albright and Reichardt from Vanguard, or the parents of those classmates who remembered why Myers left the school so abruptly in 1997. Both women attended the proceeding with their families, as did Fineman’s mother. It was a school day, and Monica wasn’t there. According to her mom, she never wanted to see Myers or be in the same room with him ever again. The other Lampasas player whom Myers harassed, however, was in attendance with her family.
After Myers entered his guilty plea, that player’s mother gave a statement to the court about the impact of his behavior on her family. She addressed Myers directly, speaking of her daughter’s love of basketball—how the girl discovered the sport at eight years old, took a ball with her on car rides to school, and told her parents the following year that she wanted to focus on the game to the exclusion of other extracurricular activities. The mother described how the family felt when her daughter was in middle school and Myers showed an interest in her. “We thought we hit the jackpot” because of Myers’s experience and reputation. “He was her mentor. When [she] had problems, whether grades or typical teenage angst, we reached out to Myers to speak with her . . . Little did we know that Myers would take advantage of that trust and confidence we placed in him.” Over the course of her daughter’s junior and senior year at Lampasas High, she said, Myers’s behavior began to change. It replicated the pattern of behavior that Albright and Reichardt described. “I believe that Mark Myers was grooming my child,” she said.
The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., has published a five-item list of warning signs that indicate that an adult might be grooming a minor for an inappropriate relationship. One of those signs is “trust development and keeping secrets.” The players who reported Myers to authorities all said he worked to establish shared secrets with them, such as wearing a face mask as a tube top or hinting at his desire for an intimate relationship. “What can start out as seemingly innocuous secret-keeping can be a gateway, and that’s part of the grooming behavior,” said Erinn Robinson, director of media relations for RAINN. “It’s important to understand that [most] perpetrators don’t just jump right into physical or sexual contact.”
After Albright ran into Myers last year, she heard from Reichardt, who had learned of Albright’s encounter with the coach through mutual friends. It had been decades since they’d seen each other, and Albright says their reunion felt powerful. “When [she] decided to come forward [in 1997], I was saved from being totally alone in this really scary situation,” she said. “When she walked in the door and I saw her after twenty years, it was like, ‘Oh, here’s my big sister, and we’re going to do this together.’ ”
The two began piecing together the common threads in their stories and looked for ways to make their experience useful to others. They contacted the United States Center for SafeSport, a congressionally mandated oversight organization for amateur athletics, which, in conjunction with USA Basketball, suspended Myers’s coaching license because of the arrest. They’ve contacted tournament organizers hosting the Phoenix Select teams to notify them of Myers’s pending criminal charges and of the SafeSport suspension. Reichardt said she has contacted two local tournament directors, four host sites (or gyms where tournaments were held), one facility that allowed Myers’s teams to practice there, and four national tournament directors since March 2023. Despite those efforts, Myers remains a regular presence at amateur basketball events. His club program, which fields multiple teams starting at the fourth grade level and running through high school, provides revenue for tournament organizers through enrollment fees, and even though his suspension means that Myers is often denied official coaching credentials at tournaments, there is nothing to stop him from attending events as a member of the public. And once he’s in the gym, he often winds up near the sideline, performing the duties of a coach. Myers told Texas Monthly that he is still involved with the club teams, but that he’s in the process of turning over direct coaching duties to his daughter.
Even if Myers’s guilty plea means he’s unlikely to continue coaching at the high school level, Albright and Reichardt worry that he could continue working with Phoenix Select. Myers was sentenced to a kind of probation known as “deferred adjudication,” which means that if he avoids further legal trouble and he doesn’t violate the terms of his two-year sentence, his guilty plea will not result in a judgment of guilt against him and he can petition the court to seal his criminal record. But in the loosely regulated club basketball scene, the guilty plea could have hardly any effect on Myers’s ability to continue coaching. There’s little anyone aware of the allegations against him can do beyond informing tournament organizers and parents about Myers’s past, and hoping they take action.
Even that may not make much difference. In April, Myers could be seen on the livestream of a tournament in Knoxville, Tennessee, watching Phoenix Select games from the baseline and speaking with a current player at courtside. John McGraw, one of the event’s directors, told Texas Monthly that Myers could not have received a coaching credential because of the suspension from USA Basketball and that he was under the impression Myers wouldn’t be attending. “He may have paid as a spectator and then went down there and coached on the sideline,” McGraw said. “There’s really no way for us to know if he circumvented the process to do that.” In an email to Texas Monthly, Myers wrote that “I bought a spectator admission band and watched games” and that limited seating meant that he stood “mostly on the baselines but sometimes I had to stand on the sidelines.” He also wrote that he had occasionally volunteered during the tournament to work the scorer’s table, and “there could have been players or coaches asking me how many fouls they had [or] how many free throws they had missed.”
Meanwhile, local tournaments that aren’t bound by USA Basketball or SafeSport rules are free to make their own decisions. In an interview conducted before Myers’s guilty plea, Eddie Clemons, director of Gametime Basketball, one of the state’s largest organizers of club tournaments, said, “We follow our own guidelines, and I know Mark well.” He said that SafeSport didn’t affect Gametime’s privately organized events and that while the case was still pending, Myers was eligible to coach. “Once I have documentation that he’s pleaded guilty or the judge finds him guilty, the court system finds him guilty, at that point Gametime will make a move.” Clemons confirmed to Texas Monthly on May 23 that “Mark will not be allowed to coach at our tournaments” after the guilty plea.
Other event organizers have pleaded ignorance of the allegations. Michael Robertson, the founder of Central Texas–based RiseUp Tournament Series, said he learned of Myers’s suspension only when contacted by Texas Monthly and that an emailed letter sent by Reichardt’s lawyer in June 2023 informing him of the suspension and containing copies of the arrest affidavit went to his spam folder. “We will make sure that he is not on any of our benches,” Robertson said, but he added that he believed the ultimate responsibility for keeping young players safe rested with their parents. “The only way that this man will ever not be coaching girls basketball is if those parents step up and decide that they don’t want this man coaching their teams,” he said.
Even Myers’s recent guilty plea doesn’t appear to have made much difference to some within the club basketball community. On May 11, four days after he pleaded guilty in Lampasas, Myers could be seen once more offering instruction to Phoenix Select players from the sideline of a tournament at Leander’s Premier Athletic Complex.
Albright and Reichardt both struggle with the thought that telling their stories may not change much. “The system that’s supposed to be in place to protect athletes is actually in place to protect successful coaches,” Reichardt said. “That’s a hard thing to accept.” Albright feels similarly but searches for a silver lining. “Mark could very well keep coaching after this. That’s an outcome we have to accept,” she said. “But if kids and parents have this information, no one can take that away. Mark can’t do anything about that.”
One day last October, Albright said she met with a salesperson to discuss building a backyard basketball court for her four children. The visitor mentioned that his own young daughter played the game and that he’d just signed her up for a club team. The program, he told her, had come highly recommended—Phoenix Select.
Albright didn’t say anything in the moment, but the next week, she called him and suggested he research Mark Myers before trusting his daughter with the coach. The salesperson was taken aback, and thanked her for the warning. “He asked me if I had a daughter who had played for him,” she said. “I told him ‘no. It was me.’ ”
Image Credits: Archival Images: Courtesy of Anna Albright and Samantha Reichardt; Myers in 2015: Lourdes M Shoaf/American-Statesman; Myers Mugshot: Lampasas Dispatch Record; Background Images: Getty
