“Missin that nook” – Ilona Maher expresses pleasure forward of her look at Rugby World Cup

Ilona Maher shared a heartwarming image together with her teammates as she expressed lacking taking part in forward of the 2025 World Cup, slated for August 22 – September 27, 2025. Maher got here contemporary off receiving a serious ESPY honor and anchoring the US girls’s workforce to a win towards Fiji of their remaining house match of the season in Washington, DC.

Ilona Maher competed on the 2024 Paris Olympics with the US Rugby Sevens squad and earned bronze, the primary podium for girls’s rugby in US historical past. Following that, she signed a three-month contract with the PWR workforce, Bristol Bears, and performed by way of March 2025, earlier than rejoining the US workforce forward of essentially the most anticipated Rugby World Cup.

Maher and her workforce performed their remaining house match towards Fiji in entrance of a report viewers at Audi Area on July 19, 2025. She posted a thunderous deal with to hinder the final Fijian assault and introduced the win house 31-24. Now, because the 28-year-old and her workforce head to the 2025 Rugby World Cup, she posted an image with Georgie Lilly-Perris-Reding, Charli Jacoby, and Gab, making her emotions identified about lacking taking part in.

“Missin that nook,” her caption learn.

The US Rugby introduced the ladies’s rugby roster for the World Cup on July 18, 2025, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of US Rugby in Washington DC. 330,000 tickets have already been bought – far more than the earlier girls’s World Cup complete.

Ilona Maher received the ESPY Finest Breakthrough Athlete within the 2025 version

Ilona Maher has not solely made strides together with her aptitude on the sector, but additionally together with her physique positivity advocacy. Her efforts in selling girls’s rugby the previous yr and contriibuting to her workforce’s historic efficiency on the Paris Video games was acknowledged by the ESPYs this yr. After successful the award, she thanked her teammates for his or her love and help to assist her obtain nice success.

“I did it. I did it the old school approach. Wrote on a bit of paper, loser. Um, okay, I am so honored. Thanks a lot. It is taken me seven years into Olympics, however I lastly broke by way of. Wonderful stuff. Um, I do know it is simply, simply me up right here, however I am a workforce sport athlete by way of and thru, and my teammates are the explanation I’m the way in which I’m. Um, I really like them a lot. Um, they really are the explanation I’m up on this stage,” Maher mentioned after successful the award.

Probably the most-followed rugby participant on social media, Ilona Maher, represented the USA on the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, three years after debuting within the Nationwide workforce in 2018.