Women's Volleyball WCC Columnist Jeff Faraudo

WCC Hall Of Honor: Brittanie Budinger

Brittanie Budinger’s decorated volleyball career at the University of San Francisco has its origins in backyard athletic battles with her two younger brothers at their family’s home in Southern California.

They were competitive. They were intense. They were, at times, almost out of control.

But those experiences served Budinger well, fueling the fire that helped her lead the Dons out of volleyball darkness to the program’s first-ever NCAA Tournament bid in 2003 and subsequently prompted the school to retire her uniform No. 7 — the only USF volleyball player and just the ninth athlete in any sport to receive that recognition.

Now, at 41, she has been named USF’s entry into the West Coast Conference Hall of Honor, joining nine other women in the 50th anniversary year of Title IX who will be celebrated March 4 in Las Vegas during the University Credit Union WCC Basketball Tournament.

“Wow, that’s kind of a big deal,” Budinger remembers thinking when she got the news. “The WCC has established a lot of great athletes in all the different sports. At USF we have Bill Russell and Bill Cartwright. It’s pretty big. I’m really excited to go.”

Budinger (pronounced BUD-in-grr) is included in a 2005 publication, “Legends of the Hilltop,” which chronicled the greatest athletes in USF history. In 2012, she was inducted into the school’s athletic Hall of Fame.

These days Brittanie Budinger-Howard works for a financial firm that represents athletes and entertainers, and lives in Manhattan Beach with husband Mark Howard and their two children, Isabella, 7, and Eli, 4. 

Years before she became a ferocious outside hitter for the Dons, twice earning All-WCC first-team honors and eventually playing professionally in Finland and Spain, Budinger honed her competitive juices against her siblings.

“If we were playing card games or in the backyard, there was always some sort of competitive thing,” Budinger recalled. “We would play barefoot basketball in the backyard and people would be shoved into walls. My parents had to put a stop to it.”

Duncan Budinger, who is 2 1/2 years younger than Brittanie, went on to play volleyball collegiately and as a pro. Chase Budinger, six years Brittanie’s junior, played basketball at Arizona and for seven years in the NBA before flipping to a career in pro beach volleyball.

Chase confirms his sister’s recollections, noting that just passing a volleyball back and forth inevitably became something else. “All of a sudden my sister would rip one at me and hit me in the chest. She even hit in even hit me in the face a couple times.

“It would always happen the same way,” he said. “Our parents would almost all the time come out and tell us to calm down. One time my Dad even took the basketball and kicked it over the fence.”

In 2003, when Jeff Nelson arrived at USF to coach the team for Budinger’s senior season, he saw the same ferocity on the court, and he recognized how it could benefit the Dons.

“That is not a joke. She would be like, `Right now, this has to happen.’ There was no nonsense,” he said, recalling her assertiveness on the court on game nights. “A couple times she got a little bit too much and I pulled her out. She regrouped and went right back in. That’s what a great athlete does.”

Budinger had her choice of lots of colleges across the country coming out of high school. She fell in love with the idea of living in San Francisco and felt a connection to the other four freshmen in her recruiting class — Teresa Russell, April Scoggin, Carolina Skacel, Liz MacAusland. 

Everything clicked except winning. The Dons had enjoyed just two winning seasons in program history when Budinger arrived, and that didn’t change her first three seasons. She became the first USF player with more than 500 kills in a season her junior year, and still the Dons were 6-25, their 15th consecutive losing season.

The Dons made a coaching change after 2002 and Budinger said the five soon-to-be seniors were invited to be part of the interview process.

Nelson had coached at Texas Tech for eight seasons, guiding the Red Raiders to the NCAA Tournament five times. “Jeff Nelson just kind of got it. He got what we needed to do and came in knowing he had this group that was really hungry,” Budinger said “He was able to work with our talent and give us the confidence we needed to just start playing at a higher level.”

“The group I inherited was pretty disjointed, but they did have some very good volleyball players,” Nelson recalled. “The pieces were there to put the puzzle together and have some success. Fortunately for us, it happened right away.”

The Dons started the season with 15 consecutive victories, including a championship at the Cougar Classic, where they beat host Washington State, an NCAA final eight team the year before. 

“A lot of it was Brittanie,” Nelson said. “She was five kills a game, three or four digs a game. She passed the ball, she was a really complete player. She’s not real big (5-foot-9), but she’s super fast and she jumps real high. Brittanie is a great athlete.”

Chase Budinger, still in middle school at the time, was in awe of how dominant a player his big sister was.

“She was phenomenal,” he said. “Had all the skills, athletic ability. One of the coolest things is how she approached the ball. She was able to jump and hang in the air, legs bent and arm just cocked all the way back, ready to hammer the ball. At times she would just float in the air and find the right spot to hit the ball.”

The Dons became a thing on campus, with crowds of students beginning to attend matches. They beat Saint Mary’s in the regular-season finale to reach 23-7, and waited to see if they’d get an NCAA bid.

"Then we got in,” Budinger said, “and we just were ecstatic.”

“Our athletic directors cried,” Nelson recalled. “It was crazy. We went from what they had been to 23 wins. It was so cool. The girls did all of it. The whole thing these kids created was unreal. It was so fun to be a part of.”

The Dons lost to Pacific in the opening round of the NCAA tournament at Stanford, but the five seniors remain friends 20 years later. “Being part of a team sport, l know this is an individual honor,” Budinger said, “but I wouldn’t been able to do this without those girls. It was a good fit.”