What is this I don't even...
Look, minors being involved or not, it's still an incredibly skeevy move for a person in a position of authority to abuse said authority and use the people over whom he is in charge--for whatever, be it a sport or a retail manager or a boss or a teacher or anything at all--for personal gain. Especially when it involves unsolicited, well, soliciting of people. It's CREEPY. It's INAPPROPRIATE. It's NOT OKAY. Whether he's too shy to meet women elsewhere or not, he still abused his position as a coach in order to get the girls on his team to pick up women for him. The fact that they're underage in addition is just an extra bonus fail because it would STILL have been terrible even if everybody involved was in their thirties.
As for calling him 'shit-eatingly smug' about it, I'm gonna stand by that. This sounds pretty smug to me:
“Genius, great way to meet a girl, use my girls lol,” he wrote in another text, patting himself on the back for the scavenger hunt.
The guy did something incredibly inappropriate, just SIX DAYS after starting this new job, after having left the old one because he was caught suggesting one of his players meet him alone. It's certainly POSSIBLE that he meant it only in a purely platonic and appropriate mentoring way, but it doesn't seem likely considering what he did here. Even if he DID mean it innocently, it doesn't require great mental acuity to understand that it may be perceived as inappropriate for an adult to tell a high school girl that he wanted to 'meet her alone'. Admittedly we don't know what all happened there, but that doesn't make what he did with the 'scavenger hunt' any more okay.
To address the point of apparently insulting the softball team's intelligence by wondering why they went along with it: this is bullshit and it's a totally legitimate thing to question. Teenagers are, whether you like it or not, generally impressionable so it isn't a huge leap to wonder if the just assumed it was okay because their coach--an adult, a grownup, a person who possibly in their minds likely knows what is and isn't okay--wanted them to do it. People can simply 'not know better' about something at any age. All I was wondering was why the girls didn't think to question it since from my perspective it seems like a really inappropriate request. Equally likely is the girls were afraid to speak up for fear of possibly getting into trouble or not being allowed to play.
Just because nobody else came forward to complain about the coach doesn't mean that nobody was bothered by what happened. Fear of criticism--and fear, coincidentally, of being honed in on by apologists who use your exact arguments, B-Man--can lead victims of sexual harassment to stay quiet about their experiences. The fact that the young woman was initially somewhat flattered by the attention before it occurred to her that he was being pretty skeevy STILL doesn't make his actions okay.
And finally: YES, it actually kinda bothers me that the guy used the wrong 'your/you're' in a text message. He's my age. He's a grownup. He's a coach at a high school. He should know better. It's a huge pet peeve of mine that people make such silly mistakes when they should have learned better more than a decade ago. It's not anywhere near as bad as the whole sexual harassment thing, but I still find it annoying just because I think it looks incredibly stupid to make such silly mistakes.
