It’s more than just a cliché to say that Kris Budden has been “diving in” to sports her whole life.
Born into a family of sports nuts, she doesn’t remember a time when sports wasn’t ingrained into her very existence. Both of her parents attended the University of Alabama, so collegiate sports holds a special place in the family.
When the Buddens moved from Atlanta to the Dallas area when Kris was 10, they spent the first few Thanksgivings at Texas Stadium watching the Dallas Cowboys feast on the opposition.
She still lives in the Metroplex, but she’s doing a lot more than just attending games. She’s a sideline reporter for ESPN’s college football and basketball coverage, as well as a studio host for the network. She’s also involved in ESPN’s tennis coverage.
She’s thriving in a male-dominated world partly because of her work ethic.
“I’ve always had that work-ethic,” she said. “But when you go to college and you want to do a job where there’s so few women involved, you almost have to know more than your male counterparts. When they walk into an arena, they don’t get questioned about their knowledge of sports.
“I remember walking into Neyland Stadium (at the University of Tennessee) and being asked if I knew what a ‘squib kick’ was. You would never ask a male reporter that question. If I screwed up a name on TV, the assumption was that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
“If my male colleague did that, he would get a pass. So that’s where some of the work-ethic comes from. How much does a woman know about football? Women don’t play football. How could she know football?”
Before we go any farther, to answer the awkward question, I’ve sat next to her on press row at games. She knows about sports, including football. And basketball. And tennis.
She knows from personal experience.
She was a Junior Olympic diver from age 5 to age 12. She was diagnosed with scoliosis at age 12 and had to have scoliosis surgery. She had rods placed in her back and had her spine fused. That put an end to her diving career. She took a couple of years off and then took up tennis.
She was a two-time state champion tennis player at Trinity Christian Academy before choosing to attend journalism school at the University of Missouri, where she graduated with honors. She wanted to be a news reporter.
That desire didn’t last long. Sports pulled her back in.
“I realized that I didn’t really want to stand outside of a fire or crime scene every day of my life,” she said. “I wanted to tell human-interest stories. Getting into sports would allow me to do that a lot more.”
She got a job as a weekend sports anchor in Charlottesville, Va., before moving to Knoxville to cover Tennessee football, and men’s and women’s basketball.
Interestingly, that job also gave her mornings off. It’s not an ideal schedule for a social life, but she benefitted greatly.
“I joined the racquet club and took a lesson from this guy named Mario,” she said. “We started out as friends for a long time. And then several years later, we got married.”
The couple has an 8-year-old son named Jace and a 5-year-old daughter named Landyn. She says the kids share a personalities with their parent of the same gender.
“My daughter is me to a scary fault when she’s walking around the house being bossy,” Budden said. “I apologize to my parents for the way she’s acting. My parents say, ‘What do you think you were like at 5-years old? What do you think strong, independent women are like when they’re 5-years old, pushovers?’”
Budden feels an obligation to “raise the ceiling” for Landyn and other little girls, and not just those who want to do something in sports. She believes we’ve come a long way as a society, but there’s still plenty of room to grow.
The hardest part of her job with the “worldwide leader in sports” is time management and keeping a good work/life balance. She doesn’t pretend to know what that means for anyone else, but she knows for herself when she’s home she has to be devoted 99 percent to her family. When she’s on the road, she’s devoted 99 percent to her job.
“There’s 1 percent of me that’s emailing ‘Don’t forget to move the Elf on the Shelf tonight’ or making a pediatrician call because one of my kids is sick. But to me, there’s got to be a time to shut off work.”
There’s a group of women at ESPN who have formed a bond of being females—most of whom also are mothers—in a still-predominantly male world. There’s an interesting dynamic that’s very similar to a veteran athlete who mentors a rookie who eventually might take his or her job.
“When they are so few jobs for women, there can become an attitude of ‘I have this job. I have to hold on to it and I’m not going to help that next generation because I didn’t want them to take it.’
“We don’t feel threatened by each other. We cheer on each other’s successes. ESPN is a hard place to work, because you’re always looking over your shoulder. But when you get to that place where you’re confident in what you’ve done, to be able to look at the other women not as your competition but as your friends, it’s valuable.
“After a certain amount of time, you realize, like, I should appreciate these friendships and not look at them as competition.”
While the peripheral stuff is the most challenging part of her job, Budden says the most fun is the relationships with coaches and the trust the athletes have to let her tell their stories. She’s a storyteller, and she doesn’t take for granted the fact that these people let her tell theirs.
“I was doing a Zoom call with former North Carolina football coach Mack Brown during COVID,” she said. “My son was 4 at the time. He had on a shirt that had a Jordan logo. Mack was on the other side of the screen and he said, ‘I’ve got that logo too.’ My son thought it was really cool.
“Mack sent a pair of shoes and T shirts, but he didn’t have any kid sizes. So a year ago, my son finally fit into those shoes. He went to school with North Carolina Air Jordan shoes, showing off to all of his friends.”
Not all of the stories are heart-warming. Sometimes they’re even tragic, like the story of Kansas basketball player KJ Adams, whose mother succumbed to cancer last November.
Prior to Kansas’ home game against Eastern Illinois, Budden got an exclusive interview with Adams, who shared his thoughts about his late mother.
“Being able to tell KJ’s story, and have him trust me with that interview, is why I got into this business,” Budden said.
She also enjoys taking fans where they can’t go unless they travel to the site and buy a ticket to the game. For example, when she does games at Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse, where I first met her, she might take a camera crew to the museum that holds the original “Rules of Basket Ball.”
Budden describes Allen Fieldhouse as “kind of my home away from home in basketball season.” She loves the atmosphere and the history of the building.
Wait. She’s a graduate of Kansas’ arch-rival Missouri.
“I get tweets or texts from people I graduated with—or complete strangers—every time I’m there. They say, ‘How can you sit there and talk about how cool that place is?’
“I can appreciate that team. I can appreciate what Bill Self has done for that program and I can appreciate the building. Anyone should be able to appreciate that building. UConn assistants walked in there (prior to a game against Kansas last season) and asked me ‘Where are the rules? They wanted to see the rules.’ It’s a museum. It’s a great atmosphere. It’s awesome.”
The future is bright for this sports junkie. She really doesn’t want to do play-by-play. She has done more studio hosting and more surrounding the tennis majors. But she’d be comfortable staying right where she is.
“I am a reporter and journalist at heart,” she said. “That’s what I want to continue doing. Maybe I could tell more longer-form features. We don’t do that as much nowadays, other than maybe on College GameDay. But telling human-interest stories is still on that bucket list.
“I already have my dream job.”