Hermosa 2024 Olympians: Budinger’s dream
He left volleyball behind to play in the NBA. But he always intended to return to the sport he loved to chase an Olympic gold.
by Mark McDermott
Chase Budinger had a tough but enviable choice to make.
It was 2006, and his high school days at La Costa Canyon in Carlsbad were coming to a close. Budinger was the most accomplished high school athlete the San Diego area had ever produced.
As a volleyball player, he led La Costa to three state championships, been named CIF Player of the Year in California two times. Nationally, he was named Player of the Year by Volleyball and Parade magazines.
As a basketball player, Budinger was also twice named CIF Player of the Year. His senior year, he led La Costa to a CIF championship, was named California’s Mr. Basketball, and made the vaunted McDonald’s All-American first team. In the McDonald’s All-Star game, he won co-MVP honors with another young phenom, Kevin Durant, who was his teammate on the West squad.
“I just remember he scored a lot of points,” Budinger recalled.
Sixteen of the high school basketball players who played in that All-Star game would go on to become NBA players, meaning not just the starters but most of the bench players. It was one of the most highly touted prospect classes in basketball history. Basketball scouts had Budinger ranked as the fourth best high school player in the nation. The received wisdom of NBA scouting is that a player must possess at least one truly elite skill, in addition to a high so-called “basketball IQ.” Budinger possessed two: he was an elite long-range shooter, and his vertical jump measured 47 inches, only an inch less than the man known as “His Airness,” Michael Jordan. By contrast, Kobe Bryant had a 38-inch vertical jump, at his peak.
Miles Evans hits past Theo Brunner in the 2022 AVP Manhattan Beach Open. Photo by Ray Vidal
And this is where the choice came in. Budinger received scholarship offers from both USC and UCLA to play both volleyball and basketball. Basketball powerhouse Arizona also made him an offer but didn’t have a men’s volleyball team. What the school did have was legendary coach Lute Olsen.
He decided playing at Arizona for Olsen offered him the best chance to become an NBA player.
At the time of his decision, the San Diego Union Tribune asked Budinger which sport was his favorite.
“I love volleyball,” he said. “But if I’m as good at basketball as people say, I can make a living playing basketball.”
Almost as an aside, Budinger said this didn’t mean he was done with the sport he loved most of all.
“I can always come back to volleyball, play on the beach when basketball comes to an end,” he said.
This wasn’t idle talk. It was Budinger’s plan. What he didn’t say out loud at the time was that the plan was accompanied by a dream. Budinger intended to one day come back to volleyball, not simply to play, but to compete at its highest level. Budinger’s dream was to play in the Olympics for the USA Beach Volleyball team.
“My plan was to always come back to beach volleyball,” Budinger told Sports Illustrated. “It was always a sport I loved, and I always had the goal of pursuing the Olympics in the back of my mind for when I retired from basketball.”
The Olympics were a big deal in the Budinger family all throughout Chase’s childhood. Chase’s father, Duncan, played basketball at USC in the early ‘70s. Both of his older siblings, Brittanie and Duncan were elite volleyball players who would go on to play professionally. And one of the most cherished times for the clan was when they gathered to watch the Olympics.
“It kind of started as a kid watching the Olympics with my family,” Budinger said. “We were a big family that would sit on the couch together and watch all the events, you know, start at 5 p.m. and would go all the way till 10 p.m. at night. I just fell in love with it. And I think that’s kind of where it started, was just being a household of fans and watching the Olympics and sitting there as a kid just kind of dreaming about how cool it would be to be able to play in an Olympics, one day.”
This month, Budinger and his former All-American co-MVP, Kevin Durant, will once again be teammates. They are both members of Team USA at the Paris Olympics starting on July 26. Durant, of course, has gone on to become one of the greatest players in the history of the NBA. And while Budinger did indeed play in the NBA for seven years, he will compete in the Olympics as part of its beach volleyball team. And while his basketball career didn’t reach the rarefied air of Durant’s, his achievement is perhaps more singular. He will be the first NBA player ever to play in the Olympics in another sport.
Budinger, who lives in Hermosa Beach with his wife and young family, was known as “The Legend of Chase” in his native San Diego. Now that legend has reached a new level. Even the ultimate NBA legend, Michael Jordan, reached out to Budinger with congratulations upon learning of his unusual Olympian feat.
“It’s always been a dream of mine, to go to the Olympics,” Budinger said, speaking at a Team USA media availability in June, shortly after he and his partner Miles Evans made the Olympics. “To finally have that dream come true, it means the world to me.”
Hoop dream
Like all the most elite athletes, Budinger’s real superpower is his single-mindedness. His high school basketball coach, Dave Cassaw, told the Union Tribune that NBA general managers called him to ask if volleyball would “get in the way” of his basketball career. But Cassaw himself had always marveled at Budinger’s unwavering ability, throughout his high school career, to totally switch focuses from one sport to the other.
“There was never a conflict between the sports. Once basketball started, he was 100 percent, all in,” Cassaw said.
His decision to go to Arizona reflected this focus. Playing both sports at USC or UCLA were attractive options, but Budinger knew it was time to go all in.
Miles Evans and Chase Budinger training under the watchful eye of 1996 Silver Medal Olympian Mike Dodd (top photo, left corner in background) at 16th Street in Hermosa Beach last month. Photos by Kevin Cody
“While I had choices to go to UCLA or USC, I think if I would have gone to those schools, I would have tried to play both sports,” Budinger said. “But once I went to Arizona, I really just wanted to focus on basketball and see how far basketball could take me and see the career I could have in basketball. Because lucratively, you could have a much more successful basketball career than you could in volleyball.”
Budinger excelled at Arizona. He was Pac-10 Freshman of the Year in the 2006-2007 season, 3rd Team All-Pac-10 as a sophomore, and 1st Team as a junior. But the program was in turmoil. Olson stepped away after Budinger’s freshman year then returned briefly his junior year before it was announced that he’d suffered an undiagnosed stroke and was retiring permanently. Budinger, as a result, had three coaches in three years. He left for the NBA after his junior season. He was selected 44th overall in the 2009 draft by the Detroit Pistons and then immediately traded to the Houston Rockets.
Thus began his NBA adventure. He remembers being welcomed into the league by none other than his childhood hero, Kobe Bryant.
“I grew up a Lakers fan, so playing against him my first time was my one starstruck moment,” Budinger told the MSG network. “I checked into the game, and I had to guard him, and he comes up to me and pats me on the butt and goes, ´Welcome to the League.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s so cool. He knows who I am, knows that I’m a rookie. That’s awesome.’”
Then, next time down the court, the Lakers called a play for Kobe.
“He gets the ball in the post, he does his fadeaway jumper towards the baseline, but before he does that, he goes and gives me this elbow right to the chest, almost knocks the wind out of me, then hits the jumper,” Budinger said. “And then, as we are running back down the court, he pats me on the butt again, and goes, ‘Welcome to the League.’”
LeBron James gave him more of a wordless welcome during Budinger’s second year in the league. Budinger attempted to take a charge from the 260-pound James, who was in peak form during his first championship season with the Miami Heat. What occurred was so jaw-droppingly violent for a basketball court that video of it went viral around the league.
“I remember it perfectly,” Budinger said. “It was in Miami. He was on a fast break, and he did like an in and out move on one of my teammates. I went down the middle of the lane, and I slid in. And I don’t know if it was the right move or not, but he hit me so hard in the chest that it lifted me off the ground, and then I went backwards. Usually when you get hit, you just take the hit and slide backwards. But I felt like I went up, then back, then fell. He was like a robot machine, just so strong and shredded and athletic.”
But Budinger was also making a name for himself around the league. He wasn’t a star player, but he was a stellar role player. His extraordinary leaping ability landed him in the 2012 NBA All-Star Game dunk contest in Orlando, Florida. Budinger told the MSG Network that for weeks before the contest, he was trying to cook up something special, reaching out through mutual acquaintances to Woody Harrelson, the actor who starred in the 1992 movie “White Men Can’t Jump.” The idea was Harrelson would stand in the middle of the lane, his back to the hoop, and Budinger would run from midcourt just as Harrelson tossed the ball over his head, grab it in midair as he leaped over the actor, and throw down a dunk. The problem is Harrelson was otherwise engaged. But the night before the contest, an unexpected volunteer emerged – rap mogul P. Diddy.
“One of the guys who works for the NBA knew Diddy, and was like, ‘Dude, he loves doing this stuff. Let me give him a call.’ And he gave him a call the night before, and got him to agree to it. So literally like an hour before the dunk contest, he came in and were able to practice for like 10 minutes.”
It wasn’t an easy maneuver to pull off. They tried it about 10 times and succeeded once. Then they went out into the arena and tried it in front of 20,000 fans.
“I was mostly nervous because we didn’t get much practice,” Budinger said. “Like, how was he going to do in the spotlight? When we did practice it, I think we were successful for maybe 10% of the time. And doing that dunk, jumping over him — I didn’t want to do it multiple times, because then it wouldn’t look as cool. And also, a lot of things that go wrong, jumping over somebody.”
An astonishingly nonchalant Diddy, wearing sunglasses, a white T-shirt, and a silver crucifix necklace, somehow made the perfect pass. The ball reached its peak height right as Budinger passed overhead, catching it with his right hand as he soared over Diddy and tomahawk slammed the ball through the hoop.
“That’s when the weight on my chest and shoulders just kind of went away, like, ‘Whew, this is awesome,” Budinger said.
Budinger carved out a niche in the NBA as a solid rotation player, averaging about 20 minutes a night and nearly 10 points a game through his first four seasons. But after he was traded to the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2012, he suffered the first of multiple knee injuries, and though he still managed to have productive years afterwards, he had more and more trouble staying on the court.
“I feel like my basketball career ended shorter than what I wanted it to,” he said. “I started having these injuries. I’ve had knee surgeries, I’ve had multiple ankle sprains, so my body was kind of breaking down on the basketball court.”
In 2015, he bought a home in Hermosa Beach. He’d spent a lot of time in the South Bay during his offseasons, and as he started thinking about life after basketball, he knew this was the place to be in order to begin his return to volleyball.
“Hermosa Beach is the mecca for beach volleyball, and in my offseasons, I played a ton of beach volleyball,” Budinger told CBS Sports. “I think it’s really good cross-training, and there’s a lot of good players around…That’s how I kept around beach volleyball.”
Another NBA player and Arizona basketball alumni, Richard Jefferson, also bought a house in Hermosa Beach, not far from Budinger, and former Wildcat and Los Angeles Laker Luke Walton was in Manhattan Beach. Though he didn’t play at Arizona with Jefferson or Walton, who played together under Olson in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they were all friends. Jefferson had a late career resurgence that he in part credited with two things he picked up in the South Bay – yoga and beach volleyball.
“I take a lot of credit because I got him into playing beach volleyball,” Budinger told CBS. “We play all the time in Hermosa Beach.”
A few other NBA players lived locally and they’d all get together to play beach volleyball in the summers.
“Blake Griffin, when he was living in Manhattan Beach, he would come down and play a lot,” he said. “Steve Nash would come play. He’s got that soccer footwork. Sasha Vujecic, from the Lakers, he’s actually pretty solid. Not beach volleyball pro level, not quite that good, but above average.”
Another Laker heard about these games. Budinger was playing for the Indiana Pacers in 2016 when they played the Lakers. It was Kobe Bryant’s final season, and during the game, he pulled Budinger aside. According to the Orange County Register, Bryant joked that he’d soon have some free time.
“When you have time let’s go to the beach and play some beach volleyball,” Bryant said.
That also turned out to be Budinger’s final NBA season. He played in Europe in 2017, but in 2018 got an unexpected call. It was from Sean Rosenthal, the beach volleyball great who’d represented Team USA in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics.
“When Sean Rosenthal calls, you answer,” Jessica Fine, Budinger’s girlfriend and future wife, told the OC Register at the time.
Rosenthal wanted Budinger to be his partner in the upcoming AVP season.
Budinger officially retired from basketball. He’d achieved one of his goals, and earned $18 million in his NBA career. Now he was ready to pursue his Olympic dream.
“I think one of the toughest things for basketball players is when they retire, what are they going to do next?” he said. “And I was fortunate enough to kind of have a plan ready in place — to pursue beach volleyball.”
The road to Paris
Budinger hit the sand running. He was the AVPs Rookie of the Year in 2018. He couldn’t believe how good it felt to be back on the beach. Literally.
“The sand helps your body,” Budinger told MSG in 2019. “My body’s never felt so good, because it’s on the sand, and it’s so much easier on your joints and everything compared to the hardwood.”
Mike Dodd, who earned the silver medal in the first-ever Olympic beach volleyball competition in 1996 at the Atlanta games, also made the transition from hardwood to sand. He was a basketball player at San Diego State in the late ‘70s and then played indoor volleyball for Team USA and then professionally in Europe. He had a similar experience of euphoria upon returning to the sand in the ‘80s. On the Sandcast podcast, he described the experience as both physically and almost spiritually liberating.
“It’s something glorious,” Dodd said. “An instant catapult straight up with the clouds. The freedom. The biggest thing was physically, you show after years of indoor…and you’re just pulverized. Within a week of playing beach volleyball, all of those aches and pains are gone. The sand is just a glorious instrument of God, so good for your body.”
Chase Budinger celebrities winning the AVP 2019 Hermosa Beach open with partner Casey Patterson. Photo by Ray Vidal
Budinger’s rise through the beach volleyball ranks was unusually quick, but not without setbacks. He had to learn the game at a professional level. Growing up, beach volleyball had been a source of fun, a sideline from his time on the hardwood in both basketball and volleyball. Pro volleyball is a different world, one populated by an array of superhuman athletes who have been focused on nothing but this sport most of their lives.
“I definitely had to switch my body type,” Budinger said, noting he’d dropped from his NBA playing weight of 218 to 206 pounds. “I had to switch how I trained in the weight room, and how my cardio was different. Just because being on the hardwood and indoors is one thing, but you have to translate this different game, and being in different elements – as far as learning how to play in the wind, learning how to play in the rain, learning how to play when it’s super hot and humid and you’re just sweating like crazy. You have to learn all these things through experience and just roughing it out as much as you can, and practice. The best way to do that is through traveling and playing in all these different tournaments.”
The travel part of the equation is an adventure, albeit an often grueling one.
“The travel is ridiculous,” Budinger said. “You’re all over the world. International traveling, it’s pretty crazy. A month ago, we had to go from Brazil to China. I think from hotel to hotel it was 44 hours. And that was all commercial. It’s definitely not the NBA where you get chartered flights and everything is taken care of.”
As is common in professional volleyball, it was also challenging to find the right partner. Budinger expressed gratitude for his year with Rosenthal, which gave him a huge head start. He would go through five partners in the next five years, however, until finally identifying Miles Evans as the perfect partner with whom to pursue an Olympic birth.
Evans, who is 34, has an equally unconventional but very different journey towards this Olympic moment. He started playing indoor volleyball as a sophomore at Dos Pueblos High School in Santa Barbara, where he was relatively unheralded. He didn’t play club ball until he was a senior. But Evans had an exact moment when he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He was working at a summer volleyball camp on a Santa Barbara beach in 2008 when he saw Todd Rogers and Phil Daulhausser training for that year’s Olympics. He couldn’t believe the intensity with which they were working.
“All my attention was taken from trying to coach and was focused on them all the time,” he told Noozhawk.com. “That was all summer long.”
He watched them go on to win an Olympic gold in Beijing, and that became his own dream. But he had a long bumpy ride towards his goal. He started out at Santa Barbara Community College, where the coach cut him from the volleyball squad, not because he lacked talent but because he had an overabundance of attitude. He didn’t give up, returned and made the squad, and starred. He then played at University of California Santa Barbara for two years before deciding to move to Hermosa Beach and pursue a professional beach volleyball career. He made his first cut in 2016, and steadily built up a reputation, including a victory over Rosenthal and David Lee at the 2019 Hermosa Open, his first AVP finals.
In early 2023, Evans was shocked when he received a text from Budinger.
“‘Hey,” Budinger wrote, “do you want to go on an Olympic run?’”
At their Olympic media availability last month, Budinger and Evans readily acknowledged that the partnership had its rough moments. But that, Budinger said, was part of its strength.
“We’ve had plenty of tough conversations over our career together. Weekly,” Budinger said. “But I think that’s what makes us so special is we’re able to have these massive arguments, and after it’s done, we’re able to kind of calm down and show up the next day and know we have the same goal. We learn from the argument, and try to implement it the next week or next day – learn from it, and grow. That’s what we’ve done for the past two years, and that’s what’s made us so strong.”
They are somewhat of an odd couple. Budinger is relatively laid back, at least off the court, while Evans has more of an edge.
“We understand each other’s personality styles really well. I think that goes a long way,” Evans said. “We’re quite different, but we understand what each other needs, a lot. There are definitely times that we’re not giving that to each other, and then we figure it out, and then the next day, we’re both trying as hard as we can to make that work. Other teams aren’t caring about that as much, and I think that’s a big focus for us. It’s really helped us be in sync.”
Evans said that Budinger has also brought a different level of professionalism to their approach.
“I was practicing about three to four times a week in the past, and Chase is like, ‘Now we’re practicing five days a week,’” he said. “We’ve got a coach, we’ve got structure. We know exactly what plan we have, and I haven’t really had that with other partners. That is one of the key reasons why we got better quickly.”
Dodd says don’t mistake Budinger’s mellow demeanor as easygoing.
“The one word that comes to my mind is dogged,” he said. “He’s been dogged. I mean, it’s not easy. It’s humbling for anyone, when you’ve been away from this sport for so long, to come back. And look at what he has done.”
Evans said playing alongside Budinger is unlike anything he’s experienced. His eliteness is not just athletic, but attitudinal.
“He’s just super confident,” he said. “It’s almost like no one can touch him, you know? So I knew having that on my side was going to be very beneficial. I’ve always wanted to play with this guy, and I was stoked to get that text, and stoked to go on the Olympic run.”
When they train in Hermosa Beach, they prop up a photo of the venue at which they will be playing, a spectacular arena right next to the Eiffel Tower.
“When I was young, I always told my friends that I wanted to become a professional beach volleyball player,” Evans said in an Instagram interview with Tape.Media. “In high school and just through time, seeing all the Olympians, how good they were, how much respect that they get, I always wanted that for myself. I didn’t actually think that it was possible. But through hard work and time and having the right partner, it’s been an awesome grind.”
“Our journey for the past two years has been up and down, a lot of adversity,” Budinger said. “We had to battle through a lot of crazy tournaments to break through, to finally call ourselves Olympians.” ER