Miles Evans was working as a coach at the Jon Lee Beach Volleyball Camp for youth at East Beach during the summer as Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser trained on a nearby court for a run at a gold medal at the Olympic Games in 2008.
Rogers and Dalhausser won the beach volleyball gold in Beijing, China that year, while back in Santa Barbara an Olympic dream sprouted in the head of a teenager who was fanatical about playing the sport.
Sixteen years later, Evans has turned that dream into reality.
Across the Atlantic, in Ostrava, Czech Republic, Evans and his partner, former NBA player Chase Budinger, clinched a spot to compete in men’s beach volleyball at the Summer Olympic Games in Paris next month.
They and the duo of Miles Partain and Andy Benesh will represent Team USA in the 24-team competition from July 27-Aug. 10 at the Eiffel Tower Stadium on the Champ de Mars.
The 6-foot-4 Evans, an alum of Dos Pueblos High, Santa Barbara City College and UC Santa Barbara, becomes the fourth homegrown player, and the sixth with Santa Barbara ties, to make it to the Olympics in beach volleyball.
He joins Santa Barbara High’s Karch Kiraly (gold-medal winner in 1996) and San Marcos alums Dax Holdren (fifth place in 2004) and Rogers (gold in 2008 and ninth place in 2012) as players with local roots. The community also has been represented by UCSB’s Eric Fonoimoana, a gold medalist in 2000, and Rob Heidger, who finished ninth in those games.
Evans/Budinger finished ahead of two other American teams during an 18-month, globe-trotting Olympic qualifying process to claim the country’s second berth behind Benesh/Partain.
In the race for the second spot, Evans/Budinger overtook UCSB alum Theo Brunner and Trevor Crabb in the qualifying points standings last month and booked their ticket to Paris when Brunner/Crabb were eliminated in their first match at the last qualifying tournament in Ostrava on June 5.
Evans told Volleyball Magazine he “was more nervous watching that match than any match I’ve played. I could hardly keep it together. I hate watching other U.S. teams lose but, man, I was excited to see we made it in once that game of theirs was over.”
He described the moment as “one of the best feelings on the planet.”
Evans’ qualification extends the list of Olympic athletes coming out of Dos Pueblos to 10, the most of any school in the area.
That list includes four gold medalists: Doug Partie (men’s indoor volleyball, 1988) Kiley Neushul (women’s water polo, 2016), Sami Hill (women’s water polo, 2016) and Jamie Neushul (women’s water polo, 2020).
Ryann Neushul will join Evans in Paris as she vies for another gold in her family in women’s water polo. Chris Segesman (men’s water polo, 2004), Stamatia Scarvelis (women’s track & field for Greece, 2020), Nicholas Scarvelis (men’s track & field for Greece, 2016) and Victoria Alimonda (women’s golf for Brazil, 2016) round out the list of DP Olympians.
As he thinks back on his Olympic dream, Evans remembers being in awe of the intensity and drive Rogers and Dalhausser put into their conditioning and practices preparing for the Olympics.
“I was coaching Jon Lee Camp and I remember being like, ‘Wow,’” Evans recalled of the rigorous training sessions. “All my attention was taken from trying to coach and was focused on them all the time. That was all summer long.”
Evans, who moved to Hermosa Beach to train with other professional beach volleyball players that live in the area, devoted himself to putting in the hard work and making sacrifices to achieve his Olympic dream.
But there was a lot of the grinding work done at East Beach, where all the past beach volleyball Olympians from the community played the game.
Evans trained under Mike Maas, a beach volleyball coach at East Beach and an indoor volleyball All-American at UCSB in the early 1970s, early in the process of playing at an elite level.
Maas said Evans had the physical tools to play at a high level but lacked maturity.
“He needed to grow up,” said Maas, bluntly. “He really did. When he was young, in the 20s and stuff, he was very aimless in what he wanted to do. It could have gone really bad but it didn’t.
“He decided, ‘I’m going to do this.’ He put his whole heart and soul into it and the hard work paid off. I commend him. I’m very proud of him and wish him all the luck.”
Evans’ brashness as a younger man didn’t sit well with Melody Parker, who coached the men’s indoor volleyball team at Santa Barbara City College.
“The first year she actually cut me. Apparently, my ego was too big for the team,” he said.
Evans returned the following season and became a major impact player for the team.
“The second year I played for her I was the state leader in kills,” he said.
He completed his final two college seasons at UCSB and started as an outside hitter before turning his focus on becoming a professional beach volleyball player.
“I had a lot of good coaches along the way, for sure. Mike (Maas) was one of them,” said Evans, 34. “Ricardo do Monte, who was club director in Santa Barbara for a while, was one of my biggest motivators, if not one of the biggest mentors for me.
“These people were kind of fueling my fire to go all the way, saying, ‘Hey, you should go for this, you actually have the talent to do it. You just have to put in the work.’ And I didn’t believe that for a long time.
“I still put in the work, I was still trying my best. It took a long time to finally get to this point. I had people fueling that fire along the way.”
Chris Hughes, the former boys volleyball coach at Dos Pueblos, provided the spark to get Evans going in the sport of volleyball.
Evans was all about playing basketball when he had Hughes as a physical education teacher during his 8th-grade year at Goleta Valley Junior High.
“I remember saying, ‘Volleyball is lame, basketball is where it’s at,’” said Evans when Hughes was encouraging him to try the sport.
“I had him in class in junior high, he was a basketball kid,” said Hughes. “I finally got him to come out for volleyball his sophomore year (at DP) and had to kick him out of the gym every day since. He loves to play volleyball.”
“He got me to try out and I was so bad,” recalled Evans of that first year playing. “But I was tall and they kept me on the team, thankfully.”
Volleyball soon became his passion and he’s never looked back.
“Chris Hughes was one of the biggest leading motivators for having me even try volleyball. He’s been a big part of my life,” said Evans.
He got his first taste of international beach volleyball when he was chosen to play for the USA Volleyball Under-26 National Beach Team at the Pan American Games in 2015.
“That’s when I kind of realized I was good, actually decent and actually good enough for a chance to pursue beach volleyball beyond the AVP. That tournament enlightened me to go for it and try harder,” he said.
Evans played with a variety of partners over the years on the domestic AVP Tour and the FIVB World Beach Pro Tour. He’s been playing internationally for eight years and has traveled to 40 countries.
He and the 6-foot-7 Budinger hooked up for a run at the Olympics at the beginning of 2023, after Benesh declined Evans’ offer to become partners.
They experienced some success, winning the AVP Denver Open in 2022 and finishing second in a World Beach Pro Tour tournament in Thailand that year.
“I told Andy, ‘Let’s go on an Olympic run. That would be awesome,’” Evans said of the conversation with the 6-9 Benesh. “He thought about it and said, ‘I’m going to play with Miles (Partain).’ I said, Okay. Now I got to find someone else.’”
As he asked around to find his next partner, Evans got an unexpected text message from Budinger.
“Chase texted me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to go on an Olympic run?’”
Reading that message was like seeing you had the winning lottery numbers.
“I was so fired up to see that text. We met for coffee and went over each other’s goals on what we wanted and our goals aligned,” said Evans. “We wanted to go for the Olympics and we wanted to play in all the competitions we could up to do that. We made it happen. I’m real fortunate to get that text from Chase.”
Budinger, who played seven seasons in the NBA after a stellar collegiate career at Arizona, was a volleyball and basketball star in high school at La Costa Canyon in San Diego.
He was honored by Volleyball Magazine in 2006 as the National High School Volleyball Player of the Year. In that same year, he was named co-MVP of the McDonald’s All-American Basketball Game with Kevin Durant.
Budinger, 36, has been playing international beach volleyball since 2018. His first partner was two-time U.S. Olympian Sean Rosenthal.
Evans/Budinger have played in 30 tournaments together, with 23 coming on the international tour. They have seven podium finishes, with two titles in Haikou, China in 2023 and the Dominican Republic this past May.
The turning point of their Olympic run came in the U.S. qualifier for that NORCECA Continental Tour event in the Dominican Republic.
In that competition in Manhattan Beach, Evans/Budinger knocked off Olympic hopefuls Taylor Crabb/Taylor Sander and then beat Brunner/Trevor Crabb to earn the NORCECA Continental Final berth, which would be worth valuable qualifying points to bump Brunner/Crabb from the No. 2 spot.
“We knew how important that tournament was going to be,” said Evans of the qualifier. “We knew you basically have a free pass to win challenge points (toward the qualifying rankings).
“We were looking forward to playing them (Theo and Trevor Crabb), but we knew had to beat the Taylors (Crabb and Sander) first. That was a big match for us, we had lost to them a lot. We had to get over that hurdle and then we had to beat Trevor and Theo.”
They squeaked out a 15-13 win over Brunner/Crabb and celebrated like crazy.
“It was a really emotional moment for us. It was like we won the Manhattan Beach Open, because we knew how important that was for the Olympic race in points,” said Evans.
Evans/Budinger went on to win the event in the Dominican Republic, beating a team from Canada in the final. That catapulted them past Brunner/Crabb and into second position behind Benesh/Partain in the points standings.
“That tournament was the reason why we passed them,” said Evans.
They increased their lead over Brunner/Crabb with a pair of fifth-place finishes in World Beach Tour tournaments in Espinho, Portugal and Stare Jablonki, Poland, and clinched the Olympic berth in Ostrava, Czech Republic.
Asked about his parents’ reaction to him qualifying for the Olympics, Evans said his mom, Veronica, at first didn’t know a lot about the process, “and now she’s figuring out how big a deal it is, which is cool.”
He said his father, Patrick, is “super fired up. He’s ecstatic everyone at his work is giving him props and stuff, so that is rewarding.”
His dad’s brother, Brian, has followed his volleyball career more than anyone and is one of his biggest cheerleaders.
“I have a really nice support system. My dad is one of 11, so they all get together and cheer me on when I play locally, which is super awesome.”
He’s received messages via social media from high school friends and others.
“I’m getting a lot of messages on Instagram from former teammates at Dos Pueblos. It’s cool they’re reaching out nearly 20 years after I graduated.
“I hope to represent Santa Barbara well.”
As he prepares for one more Beach Volleyball World Tour event in Switzerland in early July before heading to Paris, Evans recalled a conversation he had with Rogers a few years ago about pursuing a shot at the Olympics.
“He sat down with me at breakfast and said, ‘Hey, look, if you want to go for the Olympics, you have to dedicate three solid years of giving your best. You got to find the right partner, you got to go for it. And, if you don’t see results in those next three years, maybe get out of volleyball. A lot of people stay in volleyball too long and delay moving on in life.’
“That really resonated with me,” he said. “It guided me, if you will, with some of his experiences. And then he told me how to approach it the right way. That was very helpful.”
He’s now ready to go all out for Olympic glory.
