Sam Budnyk coached football, softball, basketball, golf, and track at Cardinal Newman High School for 46 years. He won 954 games. He sent more than 150 kids to Division I on scholarship and four to the NFL. He did all of it at one school in West Palm Beach, starting the week he walked through the door in August 1961, and he did it without a spreadsheet, a branding consultant, or a single load-management day in his life.
Budnyk died Friday, July 17. He was 92.
A former U.S. Marine and a 1955 Notre Dame graduate, Budnyk was hired at Cardinal Newman as athletic director, football coach, and boys basketball coach. He later added softball, golf, and track and field to his plate — because apparently one or two sports wasn’t enough to keep him busy. His football teams won 278 games, nine district titles, five conference championships, and 12 West Palm Beach city titles. His softball program, which he ran from 1976 to 1993, racked up 437 wins, three state championships, eight regional titles, 14 district crowns, and 16 conference titles. Cardinal Newman dedicated its softball field in his name in 2016. More than 150 former players showed up for the ceremony.
The numbers alone would get him a plaque on any wall in Florida. The Palm Beach County Sports Hall of Fame put him in during 1983. The FHSAA Hall of Fame followed in 1993. His native Indiana — Hammond, specifically — inducted him into its sports hall in 2009, praising him for having “blazed an extraordinary high school coaching and sports administrative trail in Palm Beach County, Florida.”
But the stat sheet doesn’t tell you what kind of man he was. In 1965, Budnyk hired the first African American assistant football coach at a private school in Florida. Two years later, he scheduled a game against John F. Kennedy High School — the first football game between an all-white school and an all-Black school in Palm Beach County. In 1973, he let the first girl in the county compete in varsity track and field, a move that drew recognition from the National Organization for Women.
This was the 1960s and ’70s in the South. None of those decisions came with a safety net. Budnyk made them anyway, because the kid who could play deserved to play, and the rest of the politics could go hang.
His overall coaching record: 954 victories and a .702 winning percentage. He won 41 games and two conference titles in basketball, 90 games and three conference titles in golf, and four conference championships in track. The man coached five sports and won in all five. Try finding that in the era of specialists who need a staff of twelve to run a 7-on-7 camp.
Budnyk is survived by his wife, Maurita Ross; children Frances Farris, Rita Domenech, Samuel A. Budnyk, Mike Budnyk, and Laura Arnold; and 13 grandchildren. A funeral Mass is scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday, July 25, at St. Clare Catholic Church in North Palm Beach, with a reception to follow in the parish hall.
Forty-six years, 954 wins, five sports, one school. They don’t make them like that anymore — and the ones who think they do are usually lying.
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