One Saturday in September 2014, the women’s rugby team from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut travelled to Norwich, Vermont. On the home team, a powerful 18-year-old prop scored three tries in a convincing win.
Quinnipiac coach Becky Carlson turned to her assistant. “Oh man,” she remembered saying. “Who’s the kid in the pink scrum cap? I’d give my right arm to have her.
“And then that same fall, I had a voicemail. I saved it. And she sounds like a little kid. ‘Hello, Coach Carlson, this is Ilona Maher. I just wanted to call and tell you I want to transfer from Norwich to Quinnipiac. I’m a nursing student. I would like for you to call me back.’
“And I was like: ‘I didn’t have to give my right arm.’”
A decade later, many would give their right arm for time with Ilona Maher. Ahead of a World Cup in England set to take the women’s game to new audiences, the 5ft 10in US center is a global star. Followed by millions on social media, a reality TV contestant and swimsuit model broadcasting a message of body positivity, the kid in the pink scrum cap has become a phenomenon – easily rugby’s biggest breakout star in the 30 years since the All Blacks wing Jonah Lomu stormed the .
Maher was born in Burlington, Vermont, in August 1996, a year after Lomu lit up his World Cup in South Africa. Michael and Mieneke Maher had three daughters, all athletic. In high school, in her dad’s words, Ilona became “a multi-sport star: starting pitcher for the softball team, state all-star, state all-star for field hockey, state all-star for basketball.
“But when she got to senior spring, she didn’t like the way the softball program was … in terms of the lack of exercise. She would say: ‘Dad, they kept us for two-and-a-quarter hours, they didn’t ever sweat it once. I’m not going to do it.’”
The Mahers had a rule: you’ve got to play something. Ilona considered lacrosse or track but there was rugby too. Michael Maher found the game at college and stayed with it, propping for Mad River RFC, a club outside Stowe. While Michael played and refereed, Ilona spent a lot of time on the sidelines.
“There was a rugby programme at the other high school in Burlington that allowed people from different high schools to come to it and was coached by friends of mine,” Michael Maher said. “Ilona decided to try that. Phone calls started right away.”
US college sports are serious business, coaches competing to recruit the best of the best. Ilona chose Norwich, an hour south of home, once a military school. Her first year brought success on the field but the culture wasn’t a fit. And so she placed that fateful call to Quinnipiac, a small college in Hamden, CT.
Quinnipiac women’s rugby had varsity status, bringing funding and focus. Most importantly to Maher, the program was led by Carlson, a coach widely known for her dedication to success on the field and equality with the men’s game off it. As Maher described it to the Guardian in July, before a US national team game against Fiji in Washington: “Having a force like that behind you, who believes in you, believes that as a program we deserve more funding, as women we deserve more, that has kind of carried over.”
Carlson switched Maher from prop to center, her size and speed propelling the Bobcats to three national titles and herself to the MA Sorensen award for best women’s collegiate player. Maher got her nursing degree, top of the class, alongside an intense rugby schooling. As Carlson described it, for three years, Maher and her teammates “got up at five in the morning to lift. You have breakfast, you have training … two sessions a day. You’re still talking about going through rigorous courses with nursing and all the pre-science they take. You’re doing strength and conditioning, you’re doing agility, you’re going to practice. You’re watching game film. All of it.”
Maher graduated in 2018. There was no professional 15-a-side option for women but sevens had Olympic status. As her father tells it: “She said: ‘You know, Dad, I’m not done. I want to keep going, I think I can make the Eagles Sevens.’ Which to me seemed a little funny, because I think of that as a skinny person’s game. But boy, she just worked at it. She stayed so fit and she did it, big time.”
In 2018, Maher made her US debut in Paris. Covid intervened in 2020 but at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Maher made an impact, her play and her social media posts attracting a growing following. In 2024, at the Paris Games, the Eagles took bronze with a thrilling win over Australia, Maher’s muscular contribution celebrated alongside widely shared TikTok videos from the athletes’ village complete with her personal hashtag: #BeastBeautyBrains.
Back home came lift-off: competing on Dancing with the Stars, posing for Sports Illustrated, endorsing Kamala Harris, launching her own line of cosmetics. Wanting to play 15s at the 2025 World Cup, she signed a short‑term contract with Bristol in England where she attracted record Premiership crowds before flying home.
In July, at an awards ceremony in Los Angeles, ESPN named Maher Best Breakthrough Athlete. From the podium, she told fans: “Strong is beautiful. Strong is powerful. And I hope more girls can feel how I feel … Take up space. Pitch it faster. Run harder. Put another plate on the bar and never tone it down.” A few days later, in DC, more than 15,000 paid to see Maher and the Eagles face Fiji — the Ilona effect clearly moving from the digital realm to the real world.
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“I don’t know if anybody could quantify it,” Bill Goren, USA Rugby CEO, says of her influence. “She has made a massive impact on our community, especially our young women who are engaging in a game they probably never would have otherwise.” Similarly, Sally Horrox, director of women’s rugby for World Rugby, saluted how Maher had “come out of the rugby bubble” and entered the American sporting consciousnessto become “the eighth-most marketable sports property globally”.
Amid pomp and circumstance in DC, pressing flesh as cameras flashed, Maher sometimes seemed slightly uneasy, at least with her press. Frustrated by the Eagles’ stuttering play, or her own performance, or just the questions thrown her way, her fierce edge was on display.
From afar, Carlson looked on. She has experienced frustrations of her own amid 15 years at the sharp end. When Maher was there with her, she felt similar pressures.
“We would go from these really big peaks to these really deep chasms,” Carlson said. “It was like: ‘Yes, this is something I can do, this is what I want to do, no, I can’t do this.’ I’m sure this is the story of a lot of high-profile athletes that we never see, because social media is what it is – it’s beautiful, everybody was birthed perfect, there were never any hard decisions, never any hard conversations.”
In reality, she says, Maher’s path to stardom has been “really hard”. Seeking to help her athlete, Carlson “had a long conversation with one of my really good friends, Becky Burleigh, who coached [record-setting USA striker] Abby Wambach at Florida. I would be, like: ‘How did you coach Abby through this?’ Because Abby was very similar to Lo in stature, in the way she played, but also in this other sinking feeling of self doubt that never projected anywhere else. That’s not something that’s usually part of Ilona’s story.”
Nor, sometimes, is Maher’s status as just another player. Before the Fiji game, at a gala dinner near the White House, Maher was in demand but stayed close to her fellow Eagles, dressed in uniform track jacket, jeans and sneakers, blending in when all were called onstage. She and sisters Olivia and Adrianna – co-hosts of a podcast, House of Maher – regularly speak of the need to stay grounded. Michael and Meineke Maher are certainly so, radiating positivity.
At the World Cup, the American women face a stern test. Samoa should be beaten but Pool A also includes Australia and England, overwhelming favorites to lift the trophy. Next Friday, the Eagles will kick off against the Red Roses in Sunderland, at the Stadium of Light. Fortunately for the US, their star is well used to fame’s bright glare.
At the DC gala dinner, at the Maher family table, Michael Maher looked back again to his daughter’s days at college, in the program that made her.
“Ilona came in, led Quinnipiac in tries for three years,” he said. “But more important, she led in assists for three years too. Ilona loves being a playmaker.
“All these people that were pooh-poohing her for wanting to play 15s, saying she doesn’t know what she’s doing? They should see her college record. She’s the complete package.”
