By james art 
Philanthropist Michelle Kang (left) and rugby star Ilona Maher. Photo courtesy of Ilona Maher.
An Olympic bronze medal, a $4 million donation and a star-turned-celebrity have lifted the prospects of women’s rugby across the country since the championship in Colorado.
Glendale-based USA Rugby wooed women’s professional soccer team owner Michelle Kang to the Paris Games in July by inviting her to watch her first rugby game — one in which Team USA won its first medal at this year’s Games.
On the field was USA Rugby board member Steve Argeris, who represented Kang in building her women’s professional soccer organization (with teams in Washington, D.C., London and Lyon, France). Argeris, a broker at the law firm of Hogan Lovells, represented the Walton-Penner family when it bought the Broncos for $4.65 billion in 2022, then the highest paid for a professional sports team.
The $1 million-a-year pledge from Kang, who also owns a stake in the Baltimore Orioles, will help the U.S. women’s team train full-time for the Olympic podium in 2028. The U.S. women are doing better internationally than the men, who compete against nations where rugby is the dominant sport: Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and Wales. But without pay, many “professional” women only train two days a week while working during the day.
Kang has pledged $50 million to start research into women’s athletic performance “so we can stop training women like they’re just little men.” She also offered the women’s rugby team her global experts from her organization Kynisca, named for the first female Olympic champion.
Bill Goren, who became USA Rugby’s CEO in February, called the gift “transformational” for women’s rugby. It could also allow for a greater focus on women in the 15-member federation, which reported revenue of $16 million in 2023. It spent more than twice as much on training men than women that year.
The federation governs the Olympic team and the men’s and women’s national teams that compete internationally, as well as an 11-team professional men’s league, Premier Rugby League, as well as college, youth and high school leagues.
In the USA Rugby announcement, Kang is pictured alongside Ilona Maher, whose cheeky social media posts promoted her team’s games at the 2021 Tokyo Games when COVID-19 restrictions left stadiums empty. Maher, who helped Quinnipiac University in Connecticut to three national championships, also created a platform for herself to win sponsorships from Google, Maybelline and Secret. Her TikToks showing life in the Olympic Village went viral when Maher compared the dating opportunities in the Olympic “villa”, with its cardboard beds, to Love Island.
The 200-pound, 5-foot-10 athlete said rugby empowers women, with different roles for all body sizes. In September, Maher showed off her shoulder muscles at the Emmys, on Late Night with Seth Meyers and on Dancing with the Stars, where she and her much younger co-star turned on each other. In Sports Illustrated Digital’s September swimsuit issue, she kissed the bronze medal under her tagline: “Beast. beauty. brains.
With more than 6 million followers on social media, she has brought a lot of attention to the sport, especially among girls and women. “Ilona has had potentially the biggest impact on rugby we’ve seen in a generation, on and off the field,” said USA Rugby’s Goren.
The publicity surrounding the Olympic victory is attracting more young women to try rugby. The all-male Colorado School of the Golden Mines now has a roster of 54 for its Division III women’s club team, up from 32 last year, according to women’s head coach Dan Roeder. The US did not have a single full-time college coach until Vassar College hired one in 1995. The college teams are divided among three leagues.
USA Rugby will have to ride out the current hype to find new sponsorships and broadcast deals to fund a bigger push to the top. These are difficult to achieve when companies sign deals with individuals rather than teams. For now, it’s up to women like Maher to create their own scene.
“The traditional role of women is to light the fire, but the community has to throw gas on it,” said Becky Carlson, Quinnipiac head women’s rugby coach. “If the organization that represents the sport doesn’t come up with a structure, then it’s a candle in the wind.”