Binghamton University basketball star Kai Moon ’20 finds success on and off the court

During her time at Binghamton University, Kai Moon ’20 earned plenty of accolades as part of the Bearcats women’s basketball team.

Before the 2019-20 season prematurely ended because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Moon led her teammates to a 22-win season, the Bearcats’ biggest success since joining Division I in 2001. As a guard, she also had the best-scoring season of her career, averaging 19.6 points per game — the highest in the America East. It’s no wonder the conference named her Player of the Year.

Off the court, Moon also found success as a marketing major at the School of Management (SOM) — a path inspired by her experience as a top-tier athlete.

“I saw the ways in which they were marketing me and other players on the team, especially once I started to become the face of the program,” she says. “I wanted to understand how they were using me or players on other sports teams to drive attendance and increase awareness.”

Moon grew up in Michigan and Chicago, but her father is a Queens native. So when schools recruited her for a basketball scholarship and Binghamton University was among them, she had some familiarity with “the Ivy of the SUNYs.”

Online research and a campus visit cemented her decision to become a Bearcat, with SOM’s reputation helping to tip the scales.

“A lot of the schools that recruited me had really good academics and didn’t have a great athletics program, or their business school was subpar and their athletics were pretty good,” she says. “I thought Binghamton gave me the best of both worlds.”

She followed advice from her mother, too, who also studied marketing in college and told her “a business degree could take me a bunch of different places.”

Moon admits that she underestimated the workload of both classwork and Division I basketball, so she struggled to find the right balance during her first year at Binghamton. The schedule for one or the other is hectic, but doing them together meant “my mind was literally in two different worlds constantly.”

Rather than switch her major to something less demanding, though, she met the challenge head on. She often sacrificed both sleep and social time with friends to make sure she could excel.

“I had to bet on myself a little bit. I knew that I could become a better student,” she says. “It just took me understanding that the work that everybody else might have to put into their classes is different than the work that I’d have to put into my classes.”

Moon found a solid support system at SOM, with classmates and faculty willing to offer extra help as needed. She appreciates all the notes from lectures missed because of game schedules, as well as the time that her professors made for her during their office hours.

Her favorite courses at SOM was Business Law, which allowed students “to talk through different legal scenarios to think through the decisions the way that we thought logically they should be made.” She also learned about the business models for success in her Information Systems class, and she loved Managerial Accounting.

One of Moon’s biggest regrets about her time at Binghamton — apart from not winning an America East championship — is that leaving campus due to the pandemic curtailed her chance to be a “regular” student at the end of her final semester. With a slightly lighter course load and free from her basketball obligations, she had hoped to enjoy her final weeks without worrying about keeping in shape for the next season.

During President Harvey Stenger’s virtual champagne sendoff for the class of 2020, Moon joined a who’s who of notable Binghamton alumni, faculty and students. Her encouraging message — which reminded graduates that “while the coronavirus was not a part of our plans, it is now a part of our story” — was slotted between singer/songwriter Ingrid Michaelson ’01 and film director Marc Lawrence ’81, LittD ’16. The video has since received tens of thousands of views on YouTube and Facebook.

“I’ve never thought of myself as a person who gave speeches,” she says, “but I thought it was really cool to be able to speak to the graduating class as well as their families.”

Moon has returned to Chicago to work as an analyst for a startup venture capital firm — a connection she made through a SOM alumna who met with her when games against Notre Dame and Marquette took her to the Midwest.

In her heart, Moon knows she’ll always be a Bearcat: “Binghamton was my first monumental decision as a young adult, not knowing how it was going to work out really far from home. I created another family with my teammates and the community.”