Former Pacers forward Chase Budinger sets sights on professional beach volleyball career

Chase Budinger’s NBA career came to an end not long after leaving the Indiana Pacers, but he is now trying his hand at professional beach volleyball.

Hey, guys, did you know former Indiana Pacers forward Chase Budinger played volleyball?

Coming up with trivia for 82+ broadcasts isn’t easy, nor is it easy to have them ready for the handful of times a visiting team comes to play, but if you listened to Indiana Pacers games during the 2015-16 season, you heard ad nauseam that Chase Budinger played volleyball in high school.

WE GET IT, CHRIS DENARI, CHASE PLAYED VOLLEYBALL.

So why are we talking about a Pacer that only played 49 games with the team and only averaged 4.4 points and 2.5 rebounds?

One, because he is now trying to make a career in beach volleyball, which is actually kind of cool, and two, because it is the summer, and I still need to write things. We all have quotas.

After finishing out the 2016 season with the Phoenix Suns, Budinger played his last season of professional basketball with Baskonia in Spain. While it might be easy to say Budinger washed out of the NBA and basketball entirely, don’t forget he had a knee injury that he never fully bounced back from. That didn’t make his job any easier.

Volleyball wasn’t far from his mind either when he was in the NBA, as his first professional event came in 2011, thanks to the NBA lockout. Budinger isn’t a stranger to the sand or the world of competitive professional volleyball.

Budinger said he had offers to continue playing basketball, but they weren’t what he wanted, according to Ed Chan of VolleyballMag.com. Once Chase set his sights on a resuming his volleyball career, he partnered with Sean Rosenthal, who has played professionally since he was 16 years old.

"“This winter basketball offers were slim, they weren’t good offers, they weren’t in places I wanted to go play, so as weeks and months went on, this opportunity came up to play with Rosie,” Budinger said. “It took me a couple of weeks to really sit down and think about it, and we actually practiced a couple of times to see how I liked it, playing out there on the sand, and ultimately I made the decision to jump to beach volleyball with him.”"

However, their partnership isn’t a winning one just yet. The duo played in their first pro event together this weekend at the FIVB Huntington Beach Open. They didn’t get to play in their opening match thanks to a forfeit, so Budinger and Rosenthal faced the tournament’s seventh seed in their first match. They lost in straight sets and would do the same in their second match as well.

Despite the setback, Budinger knows he and Rosenthal are a work in progress. Just getting a tournament under their belt was the first step according to the L.A. Times’ Curtis Zupke.

"“Finally, to be able to start playing tournaments, it’s ultimately what I need to get experience and to build some chemistry with him,” Budinger said. “Hopefully, throughout this year, we’ll get better and better and be able to compete with these top teams.”"

While he is serious about making it as a professional beach volleyball player, that doesn’t mean he can’t have some fun along the way. A week before his recent match, he teamed up with former NBA’er Richard Jefferson and pro players Stafford Slick and Casey Patterson to take on Los Angeles Lakers coach Luke Walton the McKibbin brothers, Maddison and Riley, and his now partner, Rosenthal in an exhibition 4-on-4 match.

Looks like there might have been some cash on the line as well.

Looks like Budinger is having fun.

Next: Sounds like Thaddeus Young wants to stay in Indiana

Good luck to him and Rosenthal on the tour.