37-year-old Chase Budinger had been playing alongside Miles Evans since 2023. They collected a total of four Beach Pro Tour medals and made it to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. They started the 2026 season together and attended the Elite events in Joao Pessoa and Saquarema, taking ninth and fifth place, respectively. Budinger & Evans crowned their partnership with a second place at the iconic domestic AVP Tour event in Huntington Beach last week, but this week, Evans will compete at Nuvali with a different teammate, Trevor Crabb.
36-year-old Crabb is an experienced FIVB World Tour and Beach Pro Tour player. He has been competing internationally since 2014 and has picked up seven medals on the two tours combined, including five golds. However, he has not made it to a Beach Pro Tour podium since 2024 and will be aiming to change that with new partner Budinger. So far this season, Crabb played alongside Wyatt Harrison. They finished ninth in Joao Pessoa, but failed to get through the qualifiers at the Brasilia Elite in late April.
Budinger & Crabb are seeded second in the Nuvali main draw, in between all three of last week’s Xiamen Challenge medalists – winners Eylon Elazar & Kevin Cuzmiciov of Israel, who will hit the courts in Santa Rosa as bracket leaders, runners-up D'Artagnan Potts & Jack Pearse of Australia, who will be seeded third, and third-placed Kyan Vercauteren & Joppe Van Langendonck of Belgium, who will be seeded fourth. Elazar & Cuzmiciov have already medaled in Santa Rosa once, about a year ago, when they took silver at the Nuvali Futures.
The 2026 Nuvali Challenge will also be attended by 2025 Nuvali Challenge bronze medalists Alex Ranghieri & Manuel Alfieri of Italy, 2024 Nuvali Challenge silver medalist Lui Wust of Germany, who is returning with a different teammate - Maximilian Just, and 2023 Nuvali Challenge runner-up Thomas Hodges of Australia, who is now partnering with Ben Hood. Latvia’s Olivers Bulgacs & Markuss Graudins, who earned bronze at the Nuvali Futures in October, are also back, but will start from Wednesday’s qualifications at the Challenge tournament this week.
The men’s lineup in the Philippines this week stars a number of other Olympians, in addition to Budinger, Ranghieri and Hodges. That list continues with Austria’s Alexander Horst, Poland’s Piotr Kantor, Latvia’s Edgars Tocs, Switzerland’s Adrian Heidrich and Austria’s Julian Horl.
The Nuvali Challenge tournament will be conducted with a 32-team main draw in each gender. It starts on Wednesday with the qualification rounds with eight teams progressing to the main draw and joining the 24 directly seeded. The main draw begins on Thursday with modified pool play, with eight pools of four teams each, playing two pool semifinals, a losers’ match and a winners’ match to determine the final standings. The teams that finish third in the pools will take on the runners-up of other pools in the sixteenthfinal single elimination round, the winners of which will move to the eighthfinal round, where they will challenge the eight pool winners. Quarterfinals, semifinals and medal matches will follow to determine the final standings.
Men’s action in Santa Rosa will start with Wednesday’s qualification tournament, taking off at 11:20 local time (03:20 UTC).
