Ilona Maher Is USA Rugby’s Breakout Olympics 2024 Star: How to Watch US Women’s Rugby on TV and Livestream

The 2024 Paris Olympics are already in full swing and it seems like they are gearing up to be one of the most exciting Olympics ever. Sports fans and non-sports fans alike come together for these two weeks of exhilarating games, matches, and races. Also, in addition to the sports themselves, there will be many specific athletes that viewers at home will have their eyes on. In fact, American women’s rugby star Ilona Maher has been grabbing people’s attention for the past few years. Specifically, a lot of that attention has come from the athlete’s top-notch online presence that has led to her having millions of fans. Here are all of the facts about Ilona Maher and everything you need to know about how to watch her and her team compete at this year’s Olympics.

Maher was born on August 12, 1996 and comes from Burlington, Vermont. She was the middle child with two sisters and she always had a love of sports. After attending Burlington High School, Maher became a student at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, where she graduated with a degree in nursing After graduating from Quinnipiac, she got her masters in business administration from DeVry University. In addition to playing rugby, Maher is also the co-founder of the skincare brand Medalist, which is what she works on and promotes when she is not on the pitch.

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Maher played many sports when she was a child, but it was not until she was seventeen that she began playing rugby. She first joined the South Burlington School Rugby Football Club due to encouragement from her father, who was a college rugby player himself. She began playing rugby in college at Norwich College. She left the school after a year when she was recruited by Quinnipiac to play for their team. With her new school, Maher helped her team win three National Intercollegiate Rugby Association championships. She received the MA Sorensen Award in 2017, which is given annually to the top women’s college rugby player.

While in college, she was playing rugby sevens, which is a competition where rugby teams have seven people each, at Scion Rugby Academy. That led to her being recruited for the United States  national rugby sevens team. She made her professional debut in Paris’s Women’s SVNS tournament. She made her Olympics debut in 2020 in Tokyo, where she played for Team USA’s rugby sevens team, who then went on to make the quarter-finals. Since then, she has represented her country at the 2022 Rugby World Cup Sevens in Cape Town, where her team got fourth place. Now, she is back in the Olympics for the rugby sevens team and everyone is taking notice.

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While there is no doubt that Maher has terrific rugby skills, it is her presence off of the pitch that people are noticing. In the past few years, the athlete has built up quite a social media following, with 1.5 million followers on Instagram and 1.6 million followers on TikTok (@ilonamaher on both platforms).While she has been working on this following for years, it has seen a lot of growth since the beginning of this year’s Olympics. Her content is a combination of body positivity, encouraging women to love themselves, and fun comedy videos. The comedy videos have involved promoting the sport of rugby, as well as other aspects of her life, like relatable friendship moments and dating tips. Since arriving at the Olympic village, Maher has been doing videos with other athletes, such as tennis star Coco Gauff and football player Jason Kelce , who is not competing but still had to check out the action. Maher is using her fantastic social media skills to give people an inside look at the Olympics and to help fans understand what it is like to be a rugby player.

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Fans can watch the social media star play rugby on NBC and Peacock , with Peacock having a wider access to all of the sports, meaning it will be the best place to catch up on the rugby excitement. (Not a Peacock subscriber ? Sign up for as little as $7.99/month below!)

Team USA has already had a decent showing in the Olympics, winning two out of their three early games. Their next game will be in the Women’s Rugby Sevens quarterfinals, which means the stakes are higher. They will be playing Great Britain, which is the team that they lost to in the quarter-finals at the last Olympics. This highly-anticipated match up will occur on July 29th at 3:30 p.m. EST, the second quarterfinal of the day.

The rest of the matches for Team USA’s women’s sevens rugby team will be determined by how they do in the quarter-finals. If they win, they would play the winner of New Zealand vs. China in the semi-finals on July 30th at 9:30 a.m. EST. If they won their semi-final match, they would play the finals that same day at 1:45 p.m.. If they lost their semi-final match, they would play the bronze medal match at 1 p.m.. If Team USA loses the quarter-finals, they would play the loser of New Zealand vs. China in the Women’s Placing #5-8 on July 30th at 8:30 a.m.. If they won the placing match, they would play the Women’s Placing #5-6 on that same day at 12:30 p.m.. If they lost their original placing match, they would play the Women’s Placing #7-8 the same day at 12 p.m.. There are a lot of possible scenarios for Team USA but whatever happens, there will certainly be a lot of rugby action for people to see and enjoy.

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