Pro Beach
July 24, 2024
HERMOSA BEACH, California — Chase Budinger and Miles Evans have embraced their story.
They’re underdogs of a distinctly American variety: confident enough in themselves to seek an Olympic bid despite the vast majority of the beach volleyball world saying it wasn’t going to happen — and then, despite what may have appeared to be a classic case of delusional American overconfidence, making it happen.
Knew it the moment they agreed to partner with one another throughout this Paris Olympic quad. Knew it when the first event of the Olympic qualifying period was met with stiff resistance, a 17-21, 13-21 thwacking in the second round of the Itapema Challenge qualifier to Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander, the team whom many expected to claim one of the two American berths into Paris.
Most beach volleyball fans agreed. When a poll was put out at the beginning of the qualifying period, asking who the two USA teams would be, Budinger and Evans — listed as “other” — received just one percent of the vote.
“We’re the underdogs,” Budinger said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “We were perceived as the fifth American team to start the season.”
He likes that role, Budinger. He enjoyed coming from behind, surpassing first Bourne and Chaim Schalk, then Trevor Crabb and Theo Brunner, shocking most anybody outside of their own team.
It’s possible they even shocked themselves. In their first 10 events of 2023, they posted just three finishes they would use in their Olympic ranking: a silver medal at the Saqaurema Challenge, ninth at the Montreal Elite16, and a 17th at the World Championships, an event they were able to compete in because Gambia couldn’t attain a visa into Mexico. Ninths or below in Challenges and qualifier exits in Elite16s, results they collected seven times in those first 10 tournaments, wouldn’t put them anywhere near Paris. Budinger, who is as sharp as he is explosive, knew as much.
He had chatted with Brunner at the beginning of the qualifying period, determining “what the baseline would be for points,” Budinger said. “Is it a fifth in a Challenge or ninth in an Elite? That was always in my head, trying to figure out what the bare minimum of points needed to be. Let’s get a minimum of 600 points for 12 events, that is our goal for this two year period.
“The first year we were struggling, we weren’t getting those wins we needed to get over the hump, we kept losing those ninth-place matches.”
And yet there was Evans, coming off what he describes as a “terrible tournament” in Goa, India, last October, in which they finished, once again, in ninth, putting his money where his mouth was, betting Schalk that two weeks later, in Haikou, China, he’d medal.
Where on Heaven and Earth did he find that confidence to finish better than ninth — much less medal — after going 3-6 in their previous three tournaments? The same place he found the confidence to make this run to begin with.
After that poor showing in India, he trained, he said, “super hard leading up to China. I was a little bit more prepared mentally.”
Breakthrough.
They won all five matches they played in Haikou, including a pair of sweeps in the semifinals and finals over Bourne and Schalk (21-15, 21-19) and Crabb and Brunner (21-14, 23-21), respectively. It was the first gold medal for Budinger, and the first for Evans at a Challenge level or higher (he had previously won a one-star in Nijmegen, Netherlands with Troy Field in 2021).
When they arrived back at the hotel, Budinger heard a “ding” on Evans’ phone. It was Schalk, making good on his end of the bet: $100 Venmo to Evans.
Mentally, it may as well have been worth $1 million.
“That was a huge breakthrough of ‘We can compete with some of the best teams in the world and we actually have a shot to go to the Olympics,’ ” Evans said. “Before that we were teetering and we pushed through in that moment.”
China is the first example of a peculiar theme for Evans and Budinger: Losses often paved the way not to slumps but to their biggest successes. India, to Evans, directly led to the gold in China, just as three straight losses to begin the 2024 season at the Doha Elite16 led to a run of sustained success no American duo — not even Miles Partain and Andy Benesh — had been able to have throughout the two-year qualifying period.
In Doha, after closing out a critical qualifying victory over Bourne and Schalk, Budinger and Evans lost in three to Poland’s Bartosz Losiak and Michal Bryl, Qatar’s Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan, and pushed Italy’s Sam Cottafava to 19-21, 19-21. All three of those teams had won Elite16s, and among that group, only Cottafava had not yet been to the Olympics (he and Nicolai are now the 12 seed in Paris).
“We were super close to beating them. We didn’t end up beating anybody, we were 0-3, but we were right there,” Evans said. “For me, I was like ‘Wow we can play with the best in the world.’ That gave me confidence.”
What came next was the perfect blend of intangibles meeting the tangible. The confidence Evans felt in Doha melded with a nailing of a high-risk, high-reward system that requires exceptional platform control from Evans and precise option play from Budinger. Plays they would miss on somewhat regular occasion, Evans either passing too far to Budinger’s sideline or too tight to the net, became minimized. Budinger became one of the most lethal on-two threats in the world, to the point that teams often resorted to simply serving him out of necessity: If they couldn’t stop him on two, they may as well try him on three.
None of it worked.
They finished in the top-five in seven of their next nine tournaments, racking up those finishes that had eluded them in 2023.
“Miles is a really good passer, so any easy serve that comes to him, I’m drooling,” Budinger said. “And then evolving into a fast offense, and Miles has never done that, and he’s been able to adapt and go to this fast offense and be really successful with it.
“We had that laser focus of knowing where our job needed to be. We were robots. Get to a city, get a recovery in, get a lift in, get a rest in, get our feet up, game plan. This is how we’re going to do this. Off to the next one. Same thing.”
They knew, however, that many of their finishes on the Beach Pro Tour would be rendered moot if they didn’t show up to Manhattan Beach on an otherwise dreary and insignificant spring morning, where few in the beach world even knew there was a critical event and even fewer — a few dozen tops — were in attendance for a NORECECA qualifier.
When USA Volleyball was notified that NORCECA would be pushing up its Continental Championships so the points — equivalent to a Challenge on the Beach Pro Tour — would be used in the Olympic race, USA Volleyball Beach National Teams Director Sean Scott had some scrambling to do. The priority was to hold the qualifier for the event, held in the Dominican Republic May 12-14, on a date when the four teams in the race could compete. But with the Beach Pro Tour scheduled to have virtually no breaks until June, it made for a tight window, the only feasible date being crammed between a two-week swing in Brazil and a Challenge in Guadalajara, Mexico.
It might have seemed a bit ridiculous, to the unassuming viewer, the celebration that followed Budinger and Evans beating Crabb and Brunner, 15-13, in the third to clinch the bid into the Dominican Republic. Storming the court. Bellowing as if they had won the actual gold in Paris. Evans and Budinger knew the paramount importance of that win.
“I told my family that this was going to be what decides who goes to the Olympics,” Evans said.
In the end, while there is no single deciding factor in what became the tightest men’s race in the world, Evans is likely correct in that the NORCECA win is likely the biggest. Budinger and Evans would go on to win gold in the Dominican and the 800 points that came with it. Those points would also be used to boost their entry points, which pushed them into main draws and a higher seed in the qualifiers they were in. They made good on the increased standing, finishing fifth in back-to-back Elite16s in Brasilia and Espinho, then taking another fifth at a Challenge in Stare Jablonki, Poland.
“Our biggest tournament was the NORCECA,” Budinger said. “That was by far the biggest. It became the biggest tournament and the biggest match.”
Indeed, while Budinger and Evans used that win as rocket fuel, improving one week after the next, it kicked off an ugly slide for Brunner and Crabb. They finished the final five tournaments of the qualifying period with an average finish of 16.6, losing seven of 10 matches. Not that it made it easier on the nerves for Budinger and Evans. Even though Brunner and Crabb needed to make the finals of the Ostrava Elite16 to surpass them in the final event, something Brunner and Crabb had never done in an Elite, Evans was a fitful mess in the Czech Republic.
“I was sick,” Evans said. “I was making myself sick.
“We’re on the warmup court and he’s shanking balls and I’m getting so pissed, he didn’t let me know how stressed out he was,” Budinger said, able to laugh about it now. “That’s all he was thinking about, what was going on with their match.”
When the final ball landed in that match, and Lukas Pfretzschner and Sven Winter closed out Brunner and Crabb, 15-12 in the third, Budinger felt “excitement through the roof and then also a big sigh of relief that this journey is finally done and we did it,” he said. “Both of those two emotions just collide into each other and it’s just an epic feeling of knowing what we’ve been through and we broke through and we made it and we can call ourselves Olympians. That was the coolest thing.”
***
Six days after his team qualified for Paris, head coach Dan Waineraich was walking with his son on the Hermosa Beach Strand. Was his team alas able to relax a bit, now that qualifying was over? Absolutely not, he said.
“I told them this is like a business,” Waineraich said. “Opening the business is the easy part. Now we have to keep the lights on. That’s the hard part.”
The focus that sustained their run has only intensified in the month and a half since qualifying ended. The media frenzy has been unlike anything even Budinger, a former NBA player of seven years who is no stranger to media attention, has experienced. Yet there they’ve been, five days a week, pounding out the reps at 29th Street with Waineraich and assistant coach Ed Keller. Only now there have been cameras from every media outlet imaginable capturing their journey — the journey of the American underdog.
“It’s been cool to tell our story and just to keep getting this story out because it is a unique story and something new and promoting beach volleyball,” Budinger said. “This tournament is unlike any other, one in the fact that we actually know who we play. So we can study and gameplan, practice our gameplan, do all this stuff beforehand knowing who we’re going to be facing. That’s my background, knowing who we’re going to be playing and mentally preparing for that going into the match. It’s been nice having these practices just to tune up to these teams we’re going to be facing.”
