In their fifth game of the 2014 women’s rugby season, the Norwich University Cadets were playing the top-10-ranked Quinnipiac University Bobcats in Connecticut. The home team was eating away at Norwich’s big lead until a first-year Norwich player wearing a pink scrum hat began rampaging across the field, scattering defenders like duckpins.
On the sidelines, Quinnipiac’s veteran coach, Becky Carlson, looked on with amazement and envy. “Who is that kid? She’s ridiculous,” she marveled. Her assistant shrugged. “I’d give my right arm to have that kid in the pink scrum hat,” Carlson said.
Carlson kept her arm. She also got the kid, Ilona “Lo” Maher, who transferred to Quinnipiac the following year and led the team to three national championships.
Maher, who now lives in San Diego but was born and raised in Vermont, where her parents still reside, had taken up rugby with a local club as a senior at Burlington High School. The other school sports in which she excelled — field hockey, basketball, softball — did not offer the, shall we say, physicality of rugby. Maher’s rare combination of size, power and speed — and a disposition to go through and not around opposing players — has made her a force on the rugby pitch. At the end of July, barring injury — she’s recently recovered from a broken ankle suffered last year — Maher will suit up to join the Team USA Eagles at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, her second Olympic appearance.
“She’s gone from stiff-arming Dartmouth players to stiff-arming Russian and Chinese players.” Becky Carlson
Though Maher won’t be wearing a pink cap — the U.S. favors blue — casual fans tuning in to the games may still recognize the American center. In addition to her bone-rattling on-field exploits, Maher is a certified social media star. She gained most of her 1.1 million followers during the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, posting videos of her life at the games — what she ate, whom she met, the quirks of Japanese culture, her room and her experience as a first-time Olympian in a pandemic.
That year, the U.S. women’s team finished a disappointing sixth out of 12 countries. But Maher emerged from the fray as much more than a standout rugger: She became a social media celebrity, an influencer championing body positivity for women. Her enthusiasm in her posts is palpable, effervescent.
“Dear girl with the big shoulders,” one recent Instagram post begins, “You are not undesirable. You are not built like a linebacker. You are not manly … You are powerful. You are magnificent.” In a recent TikTok video captioned “Pullin-up 200lbs,” Maher’s own powerful shoulders are on display as she does ring pull-ups.
“It’s just being relatable,” Maher, 27, said, explaining her popularity in a phone interview. “I’ll do something that connects with people who feel the same. I’ll do TikToks on how much I love carbs and bread, and everyone’s like, Oh, my gosh, look at this Olympian loving bread.”
While they may enjoy watching Maher on their phones or tablets, it’s doubtful that many of her opponents relish seeing her across the pitch. Maher is built for rugby, and in particular for the version played at the Olympics. There are several variations of the sport, but Sevens has been the only Olympic discipline since the Rio games in 2016, the same year women’s rugby became an event.
Traditional rugby features 15 players on a side and two 40-minute halves sandwiched around a 20-minute break. The Olympic version is seven players on seven for two seven-minute periods, broken up by a short halftime of one or two minutes. Sevens is generally considered more physical. Carlson noted that Maher’s strength, speed and stamina make her a good fit for the sport.
“She’s gone from stiff-arming Dartmouth players to stiff-arming Russian and Chinese players,” she said. “When she gets into gear, she has this look … There’s no doubt Lo is going to beat the person in front of her.”
The coach learned this lesson firsthand doing wind sprints with Maher during an impromptu workout. Carlson said she threw up several times trying to catch Maher: “She was smoking me.”
It’s hard to believe there was a time when Maher didn’t fully embrace her gifts. Before her 2017 MA Sorensen Award as best women’s collegiate rugby player in the nation — and prior to her three All-American nods, the Tokyo Olympics and her TikTok fame — she was self-conscious about her size and those broad, muscular shoulders.
“I grew up in a big body like this that isn’t really thought of as feminine or … I guess, beautiful,” she said. Middle school at the now-closed St. Joseph’s School was a painful experience.
“I was a socially awkward kid in a graduating class of nine,” she said. “I would get these comments about being masculine or manly … I did not find them funny. My saving grace was sports.”
The rule in the Mahers’ New North End household was that outside of school you had to do some activity. Lo and older sibling Olivia were gifted athletes, while Adrianna, the youngest, gravitated to volunteer work. The extracurricular mandate applied to parents, too. When she wasn’t delivering babies or working the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center, mom Mieneke ran a cooking club, which may explain her middle daughter’s foodie bent online.
Their dad, Mike, was a rugby standout at Saint Michael’s College and the family coach. When the two older girls enrolled in Little League softball, he studied the sport as if researching a doctorate. He taught them windmill-style pitching and when to release the ball so it went toward home plate and not over the backstop.
One day, Olivia and Lo both had Little League games at Leddy Park. Olivia’s game finished first, and as she started walking toward her sister’s game, “there was some kind of commotion at the other field,” she recalled. A parent from the opposing team was loudly objecting to Lo’s pitching.
“Lo was zinging it in there, and this guy was yelling, ‘Tell her to slow it down; no one can hit anything!'” Olivia recalled. “Then my dad spoke up.”
Mike looked over at the protesting father. “No way, dude!” he yelled. “Not going to do that.”
“I know what Ilona took from that,” Olivia said: “Never tone yourself down.”
That lesson has served Maher as well on the pitch as it has off it. It helped unlock her self-esteem and allowed her to appreciate her physical gifts. And her budding social media fame has not only brought attention to her sport but also raised her own commercial profile.
“I consider social media my second job,” she said. “I’m a rugby player first, but the social aspect is such a big part of me.”
In fact, Maher is a brand. Teaming up with public relations executive Ann Ragan Kearns, a former swimming star at Penn State, she has founded Medalist, which makes skin-care products for female athletes. Maher managed to squeeze in a master’s degree in business administration, so she envisions branded products, public speaking and possibly broadcasting after her final stiff-arm. No surprise there, her childhood friend Helena Marcotte said: “Lo has always been ahead, ready for the next thing.”
Right now, that’s the Paris Olympics and playing the sport she loves at the highest level.
Maher admitted that she never liked softball. And though she excelled in field hockey and basketball, it was running with an oval ball cradled in her arms at, and often over, her opponents that ticked all of her physical and emotional boxes. Rugby, she said, “gave me a new outlook on life.”
“It was truly rugby that made me feel good, because it combined all these attributes from every sport I was good at, whether it was the physicality of basketball or the vision from field hockey,” Maher said. “Not just as a sport on the field but also just the person I was in real life. Feeling how powerful I can be.”
Being named to the 2020 U.S. Olympic women’s rugby team was a mammoth high for Maher. But the low was just as dramatic. Finishing without a medal triggered the “post-Olympic blues,” as she put it. “You train your whole life for one moment, one quarterfinal match, and you miss a tackle and something happens, and you lose.”
Maher expects to be able to take what comes in Paris and handle the outcome differently. Social media will again be part of her experience as she prepares for her post-athletic future.
“It’s kind of weird because I want us to win a medal so badly, but the Olympics is also a great time to get our team out there and win in other ways,” she said. “I did so much in Tokyo without winning a medal. I’m excited to see what this does for our sport.”
So is coach Carlson.
“People come up to me all the time, knowing what I do,” Carlson said. “And they say, ‘Gee, I saw this woman rugby player on TikTok. She’s incredible. She’s everywhere.’ And then they pause: ‘Wait, didn’t you coach someone like that?'”
The 2024 Summer Olympic Games begin on Friday, July 26, in Paris. Follow Ilona Maher on TikTok and Instagram.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Blaster of Paris | Burlington-born rugby player and social media influencer Ilona Maher is headed back to the Olympics”
This article appears in May 29 – Jun 4, 2024.
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