Diving In: Kara Banagan Juggles Lacrosse, Diving and Cheering at Westfield State

On February 18, Westfield State junior Kara Banagan dove at the LEC Championships, three days after that, she cheered at the Westfield State basketball playoff games, and just seven days later, Banagan was scheduled to start the women's lacrosse season.

Banagan has been an all-region lacrosse goalkeeper, a conference champion on the 3-meter diving board, and a cheerleader for Owls football and basketball – perhaps one of the unlikeliest of three-sport pairings you will find at the collegiate level.

Recruited to play lacrosse at Westfield State, Banagan has truly used her time at Westfield to expand her horizons, using her effervescent nature, and a curious and intellectual mind to sample and excel at a variety of pursuits.

 "She's definitely dedicated to her athletics," said Jeff Pechulis, Banagan's head coach in women's lacrosse. "It's really measured in diving and lacrosse, and she puts in the time and gets results, and she's an excellent student as well."

"I was recruited for lacrosse, some girls from my hometown from Niskayuna were here, so it was really nice to have somewhere where there were already people I knew," said Banagan. "I met Coach P at a tournament over the summer and fell in love with him and the program and I felt like it was the right fit for me."

Banagan said she started playing lacrosse in the third grade.

"I was never really certain I wanted to play in college  . . . I was always on the fence but I always loved lacrosse.   Being a college athlete sounded like such a big deal, that will never be me . . . but it wasn't until I got into the recruiting process with coaches that wow, people are wanting me in their programs, and maybe I am better at this than I thought."

"She was a complete package as a recruit, she had the GPA, the athletic ability and the intellect," said Pechulis.  "She's at a different level in goal. She understands the angles, and where her opponent should shoot.   Just the other day Wheaton was maybe the hardest-shooting team we faced and she was 70 percent on saves."

CHEERING

"My plan was to play lacrosse," said Banagan. "My freshman year there was no cheer at all due to covid, but then on a whim I asked Coach P if I could try out for cheering and he said yes, so I tried out and I was hooked from there on the coaches and the team, and I loved it."

 "I cheered since eighth grade," she said. "As a kid, I was obsessed with tumbling, and I could never do any of it as a kid, and I had a crazy drive to teach myself how to do it, mats in the backyard and everything. I was always told I was too tall for gymnastics so my parents wouldn't put me in it, and the next best thing for me was cheering , so I tried out for that, and stuck with it because I wanted to tumble and jump around."

"At Westfield it's a whole other level of sense of family and we have so much fun," said Banagan. "Our coach Tori (Gauthier) has worked with me through a lot of different things.   Cheer is more of an outlet and a sense of community, where diving and lacrosse is a lot of hard work for me and a desire to be really good at this and push all the time, but cheer is more like a chance to have fun. We work hard, but at the end of the day it's about being with everyone and feeling supported with the team and fooling around and goofing whenever we can."

How did that translate to diving?

"As part of learning to tumble with cheer, I loved to dive and flip, and it was another way to practice – if I couldn't do something on the ground yet maybe I could do it in the water for a little bit of safety.  I would take videos to try to coach myself and figure things out.   I did for no other reason than it was fun, and something so different from lacrosse.  With lacrosse, you get better, but nothing ever changes, but with diving I'm learning new dives all the time and things change every day."

DIVING

It is rare to have a collegiate diver with no competitive experience.   Recently retired Westfield State swimming and diving coach Dave Laing said in his 40 years at Westfield, only once before did he have a diver – a former gymnast – who came in with no diving background.

Laing, an All-America diver himself in college who has coached three All-Americans at Westfield State, coached Banagan as a sophomore in his final season at the helm of the Owls program, and continued to volunteer to help Kara with her diving this season after Tom Avila took over the head coaching role at Westfield.

"I was in the DC [dining commons] with Coach P and I said that I always regretted never trying diving because it didn't match up with cheer season , and Coach P said maybe we can do something about that, and by chance coach Laing happened to be right there," said Banagan.  "And [Pechulis] went over and started showing the videos to Coach Laing.  It was utter chance that he was sitting there, and I was half-joking that I wanted to do it, I never thought in a million years I would dive in a college program as someone who nothing about it other than what I had done at home.  It's a whole other world."

 "Jeff showed me a video of her diving, and of course it was off a home diving board, but you could see that Kara had body control and I thought that it might work out," said Laing. "And then since Covid hit we didn't even get in the pool her freshman year.  But then during the summer she e-mailed me about coming out as a sophomore, and she had started working with a U.S. diving coach, and I told her she needed to come in with a few dives, and each week she'd send a video of a new one."

Laing said that Banagan has improved "A lot!   She has a full list of dives on both boards (1- and 3-meter). Her high board can get a little stronger."

"By the time I got to Dave, he wanted to change everything I had learned anyway," said Banagan. "It was not a flawless transition from cheerleading to diving, but it was so much fun for me I just looked forward so much to coming to practice every day."

"It was almost intimidating with how much [coach Laing] knows about diving, and he's always coaching us, he has something to say about every dive – and we are beyond lucky for that. It's never 'that was good' - it's 'that was almost good, but this and this and that need to change.'  He sees everything.   But I loved every second of that and I absolutely wanted to do that."

In 2022, she won the Little East Conference 3-meter diving title and was named the league's Rookie Diver of the Year – in her first-ever season of competitive diving.

"It was kind of all thrown together," said Banagan.  "I only started diving 1 meter, and I had only had one or two meets on the 3-meter, because you have to have a score to qualify.  We had thrown together six dives and it was all over the place crazy, but – technically – dives (she laughed).   At Championships it's more dives, you do 11, then six of your last 11 again, I was so frazzled, a couple I didn't know if they would work."

"Kara was coming off an injury, and we had about four weeks to put it all together for her to dive at the Little East meet," said Laing. "If we had had more time I don't think it's a stretch that she could have won on both boards."

"I got to warmups in Wellesley, it just kind of all clicked, and I said to myself, even if I don't win I will still get points for the team, so there was no pressure," said Banagan.  "I decided the worst that could happen was that I would make a fool of myself and we'd still earn points as a team. I warmed up and started having fun. It wasn't perfect but it was kind of silly fun, and everything just lined up the right way, and I remember getting out of the pool and looking up at Dave and could tell he was so happy with how well I was doing and that I was having fun and the dives were working. Coming up from the water and seeing him excited kept me going forward."  

"I didn't realize they were announcing winners and I had all these rubber hair ties in and everyone was trying to frantically get them out and I didn't even realize that I had won," she said.  "The biggest win for me that day was going there and having fun . . . that was a bigger deal than winning. I've won a lot of games (in lacrosse), but to not even stress about the outcome and to do it for the team, and for Dave, who had worked really hard with me, that was the biggest deal to me, that we had such a positive experience there and a chance to enjoy the moment."

Banagan will continue to work on her diving entering her senior year, with the NCAA Diving Regional meet on her radar. 

"That is my absolute biggest goal for next year, that I want to qualify," said Banagan. "I would love to win at least one board (at LEC) next year.    The difference from last year to this year in my scores were pretty big, the amount that I had improved the score was more that you might expect, so I want to try to continute that trend in an upward direction."

"She could do it," said Laing, who works with Banagan along with coaches Karen Summers and Joe Bercier. "It's a little bit of a reach from where she started but it's up to her and what she wants to really commit to.  She has good talent for someone who has done it almost part time."

"I want to 'feel like a diver,'" said Banagan. "And at the end of this year I started to feel it, another level of body awareness, and willingness to go for new dives, and listening to the coaches when they are calling you out on something.  I had a huge jump in that at the end of the season.  To identify as a good college diver, and not just someone who's winging it."

"In both diving and lacrosse she uses her intelligence to figure out what works best for her and the team," said Pechulis.  "It's a mind game warming her up, because she will give me space to shoot and bait me into one shot, and then on the next she'll give the same look but not move because she knows I'll shoot to the body instead of the space."

LACROSSE

"Lacrosse for me - coming off of swim and cheer - is a big transition," said Banagan.  "This is what I know, this is what I'm good at right now, this is what I came here to do.  I feel more confident and comfortable.  I really love being out there and there's something about lacrosse that is really special. It feels more like what I'm meant to be doing.  Everything else I choose to do, and I love it and I try my best, but lacrosse comes a lot more naturally to me.  I've been lucky to have a lot of success, and I do work really hard at it. And it's kind of a perfectionistic drive to be the best to be as great as I can possibly be.  And especially coming off our loss to Bridgewater last year has motivated more than coming off any MASCAC title ever could have."

"That loss was not the worst thing in the world for me.  I took a lot of responsibility for it personally, and a close loss like that on a goalie is a really tough. That has been a huge motivator for me and the team in general, and we are so excited to get in conference play and show what we can do, because we feel like late year isn't a reflection of what we can do."

Westfield will travel to face Bridgewater State, the team that knocked the Owls out of the MASCAC tournament in 2022, on Saturday.

"She handles tight losses great," said Pechulis. "She'll focus on her performance and the outcomes. Goalies carry an extra burden in those tight games, but she's not one to hang her head, she will rise to the occasion."

Banagan earned all-region honors between the pipes as a freshman in 2021, when she posted a 8.87 GAA and .532 save percentage in the Covid-shortened season, while helping lead the Owls to a MASCAC Championship and an NCAA tournament bid.

Banagan's goals against average has increased slightly this year, but her save percentage has also increased, stopping better than 56 percent of her opponent's shots.

"Her last few games have been amazing," said Pechulis. Banagan has had 14 or more saves in each of the last four games.

JUGGLING IT ALL

Banagan's multiple pursuits don't come without their own complications as she juggles the busy schedule.

"Everyone asks me about how do I do it – for me it's just when I thrive – when I am running from practice to practice, or doing schoolwork  late at night, or getting up early to go to my internship – it's not a bother to me, it's where I feel like I'm comfortable – with the busy-ness and the running around," she said. "To have three teams that are all ok with that,  and willing to accept that that's what I'm doing, that's what I want to do, and that's what's been best for me and what I love and what I need here.  I'm so lucky to have coaches and teams that are willing to work with me on that and willing to sacrifice and put in the extra mile with me to work out schedules and negotiate things, I would say that is my favorite part about Westfield.  I would be hard-pressed to find another group of coaches that would be so willing to sacrifice some of their time with me to let me go somewhere else in season."

"She's dedicated and determined and organized, and strives for excellence," said swim and dive teammate and roommate Nicole Pechulis [who happens to be the niece of the Owls head lacrosse coach].  "She'd schedule separate practices just for diving when she needed to, and she's very organized and keep her coaches in the loop."

"Jeff has worked beautifully with the schedule," said Laing of his coaching counterpart.

"She's a perfectionist in how she dives," said Nicole Pechulis. "When she was away for the diving championships you know she is thinking about the other sports, but locks in on diving in the moment."

"All of my coaches have made sacrifices with their time with me, said Banagan. "I've been blessed with the coaches we do have, they are all super understanding and willing that sometimes I'll be late or have to leave early, and sometimes I have to choose one over the other."

All three of the teams typically spend a week in Florida training and competing, but so far, she's just made one of the trips – with cheering this winter.

"Swim didn't have a training trip this year, but that's a huge thing to think about, three trips to Florida at different times, and it's very expensive and a lot to handle in general," said Banagan. "This was my first trip with any of the teams so far, and dealing with the stress and packing, and it was a lot of fun and we obviously bonded a lot as a team and had great times."

"Kara has the benefit of having a teammate who's another really good goalie in Syd(ney Smith)," said Coach Pechulis.  "They both know, and the team knows that if there's ever an injury, situation where one can't play, or the game flow dictates that we are lucky to have both goalies."

A psychology major, Banagan said "Right now I'm just focusing on undergrad psych stuff, but my plans for now, are to stick around here for a couple years and do grad school in applied behavior analysis, which is what I am super passionate about.  I have an internship at a developmental school for kids with autism and general development delays, working with kids and helping them out and studying behaviors has always been interesting to me.   At some point I'll probably get into some type of clinical counseling type pathway.  I don't have it all figured out, but I'm on a good track."