STILLWATER, Okla. ? Kurt Budke believed in Oklahoma State when no one else did, and he wasn't afraid to show it.
Less than two years after his Cowgirls failed to win any of their 16 conference games, Budke led them up against powerhouse Oklahoma and reigning national player of the year Courtney Paris. He supported his upstart team with a fashion statement: the brightest orange blazer he could find.
Behind a scintillating 45-point game from Andrea Riley, the Cowgirls upset the sixth-ranked Sooners for the first time in nine years.
Wherever Budke went, he won.
The charismatic coach who turned the Cowgirls into an NCAA tournament regular was killed along with assistant coach Miranda Serna and two other people in a plane crash in Arkansas late Thursday. The two coaches, who had worked together for more than a decade, had been on a recruiting trip.
Budke frequently offered his players encouragement from the sidelines, but he also could be firm, raising his deep voice. And on more than one occasion, he grabbed a microphone to speak to the Gallagher-Iba Arena crowd after a win.
"Coach Budke was a ball coach. What he did to turn this program around was unbelievable but that's not important right now," said Jim Littell, Budke's assistant who will replace him on an interim basis.
"What's important is he was a father figure for these kids. He had a tremendous knack of taking kids that maybe were struggling in some part of their life and making it better for them. That was his strongest trait."
Serna, 36, was one of his top helpers along the way. She played on one of his four teams that won the junior-college national title at Trinity Valley (Texas) and was his assistant at Louisiana Tech for three straight trips to the NCAA tournament.
The Guadalupita, N.M., native was his recruiting coordinator at Oklahoma State, which has been to the postseason the past five years.
When he took over the program, the Cowgirls had finished with a losing record in five of their previous seven seasons and never finished more than a game over .500 during that span.
The Cowgirls went 0-16 in Big 12 play in his first season, then secured their first bid to the NCAA tournament in 11 years. The next year brought a trip to the round of 16.
"You learn how to lose, and that's a bad habit," he once said of those early struggles. "Sometimes, it's easier to lose than to fight back, so we had to change habits and expectations."
Budke had little to sell but a dream, but it was enough to convince the WNBA-bound Riley to come make her mark. She left as the program's career scoring leader.
"I came to this league because I wanted to coach against the best, night in and night out," he once said. "These players that want to come play for us want to play against the best. That's how we go out and recruit."
A Salina, Kan., native, Budke was a married father of three, including a daughter currently at Oklahoma State.
"I looked at him almost as a mentor," Oklahoma State men's basketball coach Travis Ford said. "I can't tell you how many times I would pick up the phone and ask him how he ran his zone offense. He'd come down to the office or I'd go up to his and we would sit and talk.
"Just somebody who I had the utmost respect for as a person and a husband and father and obviously as a coach. In this profession, the way it gets crazy at times, he had everything in perspective."
Budke played basketball for Barton County (Kan.) Junior College and graduated from Washburn in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in physical education. After some early small-college jobs, he built the JUCO powerhouse at Trinity Valley before hooking up with Louisiana Tech, once one of the top programs in the women's game.
"It just hits home with all of us in this profession that truly we just coach a game," said Kim Mulkey, a former Louisiana Tech player and now the head coach for top-ranked Baylor.
"There's a bigger picture out there and it's not a basketball game, it puts life in perspective. I feel for the Oklahoma State community, how many more tragedies can they endure?"
The crash is the second major tragedy for the sports program in about a decade. In January 2001, 10 men affiliated with the university's men's basketball team died in a Colorado plane crash.
Sherri Coale, the coach at rival Oklahoma, was devastated.
"Kurt was a fantastic basketball coach and he was a tremendous competitor. More importantly, though, he was a devoted father and husband, and a humble but courageous leader of young people," she said.
Texas A&M coach Gary Blair called Serna a rising star and said he talked regularly with Budke. He said the two were going to miss each other, with the Aggies moving to the Southeastern Conference after this season.
"He was a devout family man and the conversation never stopped without us talking about our own kids, not just the players we coached," he said. "Life is precious. We must enjoy it and we must respect it because it can be taken away at any time. I hope the basketball world and the sports world will honor coach Budke and Miranda in the right way and help the rest of us realize how special our families and the extended families of our teams are."
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Basketball Writer Doug Feinberg in New York contributed to this report.
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