True Blu: Kim Wudi

Only Wudi’s heart was in coaching, not medicine, and what her players shared swayed her.

“They said, ‘You do make a difference, as a coach, as a teacher.’ No one had ever really said that to me before,” Wudi recalls. “I went back to the front of the bus and cried my way home from Oshkosh.”

A few months later, before her deposit for medical school was due, Wudi decided to stay on a path of coaching and teaching. A year later, she was selected to lead the Blugolds when her mentor and former head coach, Lisa Herb, retired after 22 seasons.

Today, Wudi has no regrets about her journey. The decorated former team captain now coaches one of NCAA Division III’s elite programs with 13 NCAA tournament appearances since 2007 and a breakthrough national championship in 2021.

Within the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, Wudi is a four-time WIAC Coach of the Year recipient and currently ranks seventh on the all-time conference wins list. Her teams have captured five regular season conference titles and three WIAC tournament titles.

The program’s championship culture extends to the classroom, the UW-Eau Claire campus and greater Chippewa Valley community. Wudi directs Blugold Volleyball Camps and Clinics, which welcomes close to 1,000 students across grades K-12 each year. The volleyball program also hosts tournaments for local and regional youth teams during the winter.

“It’s been so much fun, and yet it’s been also sad. It’s been tumultuous at times, scary at times,” Wudi says. “I think there’s a lot of responsibility that I feel leading a program that I was a part of, but also that I think means so much to so many people, including myself.”

Driven by excellence and the ever-changing nature of collegiate athletics, Wudi continues to search for ways to make her program better. She feels she has made a difference through hard work but has more to give to the university that has had such an impact on her life.

“The lessons I’ve learned as a student and as an alum and as an employee, it’s shaped who I am as a person and who my family is,” Wudi says.

It’s why relationships are so meaningful to Wudi and within the program. She refers to former players as sisters-turned-children and stays in touch with them to learn what impact they’re making on the world. A recent example involves national champion and All-American Arianna Barrett, who now works as a speech pathologist and met Wudi for dinner in Hudson earlier this month.

“She hasn’t been in the gym now for four years, but we can pick up and talk like we were together yesterday,” Wudi says. “I think it’s really cool to be able to have those connections and those relationships that sustain over time.”

A natural progression to UW-Eau Claire

Wudi, then Kim Arndt, was the valedictorian of her class at Phillips High School and had hopes of playing volleyball at a state university to take advantage of scholarship opportunities. She chose UW-Green Bay in part to avoid UW-Eau Claire, where many of her classmates were enrolled.

It became apparent that making UW-Green Bay’s team without any club volleyball experience was going to be difficult, so Wudi capitalized on a chance to connect with Herb, who had established the Blugolds as a championship-winning program.

“I didn’t know what I really wanted to do with a career, but I knew that I wanted to stay involved in sport in some way and coaching,” Wudi recalls. “So teaching was really what I settled on.”

Transferring to UW-Eau Claire was a natural progression because of its education program and the ability to play volleyball, though that proved to be an emotional experience.

“We had to try out, so I didn’t know if I would even make the team,” Wudi says. “We had an All-American setter who was Rhonda (Endres) Reis. She just was inducted into the Hall of Fame last year.”

Wudi made the short walk from Towers Hall to McPhee Physical Education Center to check the list of roster names on the door and was ecstatic to see hers included. She went on to earn Rookie of the Year honors and three all-conference selections as the Blugolds won 101 matches during her three seasons on the court.

“I’ve always had a heart for transfers in that it’s a tough thing to do,” Wudi says.

Wudi graduated summa cum laude in 2000 with a bachelor of science degree in biology education and went on to teach and coach at Durand High School and Eau Claire Memorial High School. After she returned to UW-Eau Claire, she earned her master of education in professional development degree in 2009.

While this is not the path she thought she’d walk 20 years ago, Wudi has no plans to leave UW-Eau Claire anytime soon.

“I’m really happy that it turned out the way it did,” Wudi says. “I don’t feel it’s been minimized, that I’ve coached for my career or that I was a teacher. I haven’t felt that I needed to go get those last letters after my name.”

True Blu is a monthly series that spotlights UW-Eau Claire alumni.