Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR), England’s elite league for women’s 15-a-side rugby union, is still semi-professional.

A large number of the players who will be representing England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Italy in the upcoming Women’s Six Nations hail from PWR teams.

What’s more, a lot of the other PWR athletes, the ones who do not play international rugby, have other jobs. There is no title sponsor for the league yet and there will be no prize money to offer the champions of this month’s PWR final.

But for the past three months, the league has boasted the superstar of world rugby.

Ilona Maher is the self-made megastar with more followers (8.4million) across Instagram and TikTok than any other rugby player in the world. The 28-year-old from Burlington, Vermont, gets millions of views on videos that show off her goofy personality as well as how she advocates body-positive messages for women and girls.

Since December, when it was announced she was joining Bristol Bears on a three-month deal, Maher, a rugby sevens bronze medallist from the Paris Olympics, has been proudly waving the PWR flag in the face of a captivated global audience she has built from being herself.

With Bristol’s 36-20 defeat to Gloucester-Hartpury on Sunday in the PWR semi-finals, where Maher scored her fifth try for Bristol, that spellbinding quarter-year adventure is over, though the impact of Maher’s time in England is going to be felt long into the future.

In her first game in early January, which also ended in defeat to the same West Country rivals, over 9,000 fans poured into Ashton Gate Stadium to catch a glimpse of Maher. In the process of doing so, the attendance record for a standalone PWR game was smashed.

“That was the dream (a record-attendance crowd) we’ve been trying to achieve for a while and to see that off the back of one person was just incredible,” Bristol Bears Women’s general manager Daisie Mayes tells . “That was a real ‘pinch-me’ moment.”

Fans travelled to Bristol from as far afield as North America, even though they knew Maher — making the switch from sevens, the smaller format of the game, to full-sized 15s, playing as a wing as she vies for a place in this summer’s Rugby World Cup — might not feature.

There was no guarantee of playing time for Maher as she got up to speed with her new team, but she promised fans she would be there no matter what and urged them to show up, too. They bought tickets in their droves, many watching women’s rugby or indeed women’s sport for the first time. Such was the demand, Bristol had to relocate the game to Ashton Gate (a 27,000-seater stadium that is home to the men’s team, plus both Bristol City men’s and women’s football teams) from Shaftesbury Park (a 2,000-capacity venue where they usually play).

This is what happens when a runner-up from season 33 of U.S. show Dancing With The Stars and someone named on the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 Sports list joins a semi-professional sports league. Luckily, she had a 20-minute runout and spent triple that time taking selfies and talking to fans who had stayed behind to meet her after the game.

In the four home games the Bears played during Maher’s eight-game stint, over 20,000 tickets were sold in total and three matches were moved to Ashton Gate to meet demand. To date, Bristol have sold 293 shirts with Maher’s name on the back which, for a semi-pro women’s rugby team in a developing league, is notable.

“It (sales of Bears merchandise) has gone through the roof,” Mayes added. “Especially during the first week of her announcement, we had hundreds of sales just from the U.S, so that was really exciting.”

The majority of Maher’s games were selected for broadcast and shown live on TNT Sports, and even when Bristol played Leicester and the game was not televised, a live stream attracted 26,000 viewers.

In Maher’s second game, she scored the first of four league tries in total with an impressive 70-yard solo run in an away win to Exeter Chiefs. The lung-busting run, performed wearing her signature Maybelline lipstick, confirmed her talent to a crowd who were already familiar with her personality.

England international Sarah Bern has become one of Maher’s “besties” in the past three months and has appeared in several social media videos alongside her.

“Ilona is such a lovely person,” Bern, 27, who plays as a prop, said. “She is just so kind, smart, funny. She is everything that you see on social media — that is her as a person.

“She’s also a phenomenal athlete. She’s strong and wants to work really hard to master her trade. She has been absolutely outstanding for us. She is a real strength on the field and off it.

“We are a growing sport and people can be relatively shy. Ilona is here to promote not just rugby, but women as a whole and to believe in ourselves — that we can achieve anything we want to achieve. That’s a really powerful legacy to leave behind here and also to inspire a whole rugby team and community in England to do the same is phenomenal.

“She has come in and our social media has just blown up. She has made us feel really confident in front of the camera and just being able to show our silly personalities. That is what is drawing fans to our games. You can meet players, you can interact with players, and they are exactly what you see on social media.”

In recent weeks, Bristol have put on brand workshops for players so they can learn more about how to build their individual brands and monetise their own social media in the same way Maher has expertly done.

“It is definitely something I want to build on a little bit more than I have in the past,” Millie David, Maher’s 19-year-old team-mate, says. “I think Ilona coming in and all this new media stuff has given me that bit more confidence to look at that side of the game, and not just the on-pitch stuff.”

Maher is used to breaking records but is less familiar with breaking bones, despite her 11 years in a sport she took up in her senior year of high school. It was a coming-together with a Leicester Tigers player in mid-January that gave Maher her first-ever broken nose. She still took part in a customary lap of honour after the game in a blood-stained shirt with a bag of ice in hand and bruises already starting to develop beneath both eyes.

Meet-and-greet laps of the pitch after every game have become a tradition that Maher has been more than happy to continue doing in between TV interviews, with her every move being filmed by a film crew collecting footage for Hello Sunshine, the production company founded by actor Reese Witherspoon, which is making a documentary about Maher.

Maher’s feeling is that the more time she gives, the more the sport grows and the more likely a fan is to return. She is a self-professed “superstar of rugby” and knows what her time means to others, but she is also desperate for the spotlight to shine on other players.

Her commitment to the craft of growing the sport was visible in the game after she broke her nose. Set to miss the match, Maher could have taken the weekend off and enjoyed another trip to the nearby Cotswolds. Instead, she showed up on the away trip to west London-based Trailfinders to support her team and make sure nobody in the crowd was left feeling shortchanged by her absence.

The interest in Maher’s time in Bristol has been off the scale. It is best measured in the dozens of interview requests that the Bears have fielded from the likes of the local parish magazine to BBC antiques game show Bargain Hunt, who wanted her on as a guest.

The Bears met with Maher’s sister and manager Olivia and agent Rheann Engelke, where it was decided an individual press conference was the best way forward. That January media session, held at the club’s High Performance Centre, was a masterclass just shy of 50 minutes on how to be not just a world-famous athlete, but an extremely likeable one.

Maher talked about wanting to visit Oxford, which she later did with her parents and two sisters after the final league game of the season away to Harlequins. She kept the entire room entertained and uplifted in equal measure, with topics ranging from the difficulty of driving on the wrong side of the road, trying a roast dinner — a staple British meal — for the first time and why it’s OK for women to wear make-up when working out, all covered.

Maher proved to all those in attendance she is as captivating up close as she is when popping up on your TikTok timeline. Pat Lam, director of rugby for the Bears’ men’s team, was all smiles when he entered the shared canteen to see the buzz Maher had brought with her.

It is perhaps unusual for a club to allow media requests to be controlled solely by an athlete’s team, but in this case, it made sense for Bristol to relinquish control given the mountain of requests, along with Maher’s various endorsement deals.

The Bears added a social media manager to their team to ensure they capitalised on this period of increased visibility. They wanted to tap into Maher-mania, as well as spotlight her team-mates. Since the American signed, the club’s Instagram following has grown from 22,000 to 102,000, meaning they now have more followers on the platform than the other eight teams in the league and have outgrown the PWR’s following. The PWR account’s followers have risen from 28,000 to 43,000 in that time.

It is clear Maher’s arrival has encouraged a healthy and never-before-seen level of growth across the league.

“A rising tide lifts all boats,” is how broadcaster Stella Mills, who covers the PWR, puts it. “The investment into clubs’ social media and online presence has been massively undervalued in the past. She arrived and pushed that to the front and centre. It is no longer being undervalued because other clubs are seeing what she’s doing and they want a bit. It has catapulted women’s rugby into the 21st century.”

More teams are now tapping into the power of social media through athlete-focused storytelling and streaming games online for fans has become a much more readily done thing than in the past. It is not every day a superstar like Maher walks through the door and the Bears have tried to make the most of the opportunity after working so hard to ensure Maher did indeed arrive in England.

Initially, Maher’s application for a Governing Body Endorsement (GBE), which she needed to be granted a visa to enter the United Kingdom and gain international clearance to play, was denied. But Bristol successfully appealed against the original decision and got it overturned. Maher stayed loyal to the Bears because of this, even with a number of teams circling for her signature.

Two players from the Bristol squad who travelled to Twickenham to face Harlequins in their final regular-season game on February 14 had to take time off from their day jobs to be available to play in front of a crowd of almost 7,000, which included special guest Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who attended her first rugby match after being inspired by Maher.

The league is made up of a mix of centrally-contracted international rugby union players — contracted England internationals are paid a wage by the Rugby Football Union (RFU) — and then part-time players. Genevieve Shore, the league’s executive chair, is among those working towards making the PWR fully professional.

“That’s the next step, really — to move all of these brilliant women into being full-time professional athletes,” Shore, a World Cup winner with England in 1994, says. “That is our biggest challenge now: how do we turn this into a fully sustainable league that actually generates enough revenue for our clubs and then into our athletes?”

Maher has been transformative.

“Isn’t it brilliant to have a woman superstar like that who is just cutting across every sport, across all boundaries, breaking records,” Shore adds. “It just shows if you shine a light on female athletes, they will go rocketing to the moon and back.

“She is really generous with her time and with her experiences and knowledge and she’s one of those incredible people who wants to lift people with her. It’s particularly sort of humbling and refreshing to see somebody who wants to lift a whole sport with her.”

And though Maher will not be playing at the StoneX Stadium on March 16 when Gloucester take on Harlequins/Saracens, her impact on the sport will be felt. It was her image which was prominently used to promote early-bird ticket sales for the final; 4,000 were sold heading into semi-finals weekend.

While Maher will leave the country to return home to the U.S, where more endorsement deals, magazine covers, talk shows and celebrity events no doubt await her, she will be hoping to be back in England this summer as part of the USA Eagles squad for the World Cup, which takes place here.

In doing so, she will return to a country with more women and girls playing and watching rugby than ever before in what is already tipped to be a blockbuster year of growth for the sport. There will be a large number of girls and women who have been inspired by Maher to take up rugby as a fan or player or both.

Whether she returns for a full season of PWR in the future or not, her impact on the English game is already that of legend and will be felt for years to come.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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