The Oklahoma State women’s basketball coach and an assistant coach were killed Thursday night when the small plane that carried them on a recruiting trip crashed in Arkansas, the university said. The deaths of Kurt Budke, the head coach, and Miranda Serna, an assistant, came a decade after two Oklahoma State men’s basketball players and eight others died in a plane crash near Denver while returning from a game at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
The pilot, Olin Branstetter, 82, a former Oklahoma state senator, and his wife, Paula, also died in Thursday’s crash. They were aboard a single-engine Piper about 45 miles west of Little Rock, Oklahoma State officials said.
The cause of the crash, which happened in clear weather, was not immediately known. The National Transportation Safety Board told The Associated Press that it was sending investigators to the site, near Perryville, and that it could take several months to determine the cause of the crash.
Budke, 50, had just begun his seventh season at Oklahoma State and had a 112-83 record there. He had transformed women’s basketball at O.S.U. from an afterthought in the powerful Big 12 Conference into a program that had reached the N.C.A.A. tournament in three of the past five years.
In 2009-10, the Cowgirls won 24 games, including six against top-25 teams, and achieved a top-10 ranking for the first time in team history. The star player on that team, point guard Andrea Riley, finished her career with 2,835 points, a conference record.
“The Oklahoma State family is devastated by this tragedy,” Burns Hargis, the Oklahoma State president, said in a statement. “Kurt was an exemplary leader and a man of character who had a profound impact on his student-athletes. He was an outstanding coach and a wonderful person. Coach Budke elevated our women’s basketball program to new levels of success. He and his staff raised our profile in the nation’s toughest conference.”
Serna, who was 36, was in her seventh season as an assistant coach at Oklahoma State and was the team’s recruiting coordinator. As a player, she had led Trinity Valley Community College of Texas to the national junior college title in 1996. In 1999, as an assistant coach at Trinity Valley, where Budke was the head coach, she helped guide the college to another national junior college title. Both Budke and Serna had then coached at Louisiana Tech before being hired at Oklahoma State.
Serna was “an up-and-coming coach and an outstanding role model for our young ladies,” Hargis said.
Oklahoma State, which was 1-0 this season, canceled games it had scheduled for Saturday and Sunday.
Budke, a native of Salina, Kan., is survived by his wife, Shelley; a daughter, Sara, who attends Oklahoma State; and two sons, Alex and Brett. Serna, a native of Guadalupita, N.M., is survived by her mother, Nettie Herrera, and a sister, Cassandra Herrera.
On Jan. 27, 2001, a Beechcraft King Air 200, donated by a booster, crashed while carrying players from Oklahoma State’s men’s basketball team home from Colorado on a snowy day.
An N.T.S.B. report cited a loss of power and disorientation by the pilot, according to The A.P., and led to more rigorous checks on borrowed planes used by Oklahoma State’s sports teams.source
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