“I needed him to know my expectations,” the mother said.

Hurd’s response to that encounter was “perfect,” the woman testified. Hurd himself is a husband and the father to a girl only a few years younger than the victim, which added to the mother’s trust in him. Over time, “Coach Hurd” became somewhat of a family friend, the mother said, and was even invited to a Thanksgiving meal one year.

The mother was then “devastated” when Child Protective Services alerted her in October 2014 of an “inappropriate relationship” between her daughter and the coach. While she did not go into details, the mother said that the fallout from that “fateful October night” was staggering: the victim was called out by her peers for having gotten their favorite administrator fired from the school, the mother fielded calls from worried friends about the rumors of an affair and stress from the situation eventually led the victim’s father to be hospitalized, she said.

Above all, she said, her once rule-abiding daughter had started lying to her face and was tacitly communicating with Hurd even after evidence of their relationship had been exposed.

“I’ve prayed constantly for the healing of her heart,” the mother told the judge through tears.