VILLANOVA, Pa. — Maddy Siegrist walks into the Villanova basketball offices toting a paper plate heaped with a shell-less taco concoction. She politely digs into her mobile dinner in between answering questions for an interview. Forty minutes later, her meal eaten if not digested, she greets a family outside the practice court. In December, they’d purchased a Siegrist jersey for their daughter for Christmas — or so they thought. Turns out the whole thing was a scam. No jersey ever materialized. A friend of a friend reached out to the athletic department to see if they could secure a real jersey; Villanova did them one better, supplying the shirt and the woman who wears it for a little meet and greet.
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The next day, Siegrist heads to Connecticut for the Big East tournament, where in the span of three days, she drops 85 points and leads the Wildcats to the Big East tournament final. After each game, with a security guard by her side to make sure she doesn’t want a break (she never does), she signs autographs and poses for pictures with a bevy of fans, most of whom are pint-sized future hoopsters who consider Siegrist their jump-shooting Taylor Swift.
This is the life of Maddy Siegrist, Villanova’s SuperNova, who has Jimmer-ed her way into her sport’s headlines, collecting fans and attention at nearly the same clip she gobbles up points. She is the nation’s leading scorer at 29.2 points per game, has recorded 12 games with 30 or more points, one with 41 and went for 50 against Seton Hall. In every game this year, she’s never scored fewer than 21 points, and she ranks as Villanova’s all-time leading scorer among men and women.
The scene following a Villanova win and 39-point performance for Poughkeepsie, New York native Maddy Siegrist on the road at St. John’s.
Women’s sports >>> 🥹🥹❤️❤️@novawbb @BIGEASTWBB @20sMaddy pic.twitter.com/MpAzDIM8io
— Kim Adams (@Kim_Adams1) February 16, 2023
Yet she is no soulless gunslinger. Siegrist hits 52 percent from the floor and 37 percent from the arc, and per CBB Analytics, not only ranks in the obvious 100th percent of scoring, she’s 86th in assists per game, 87th in steals, 90th in offensive rebounding, 90th in blocks and 97th in defensive rebounding. In other words, she does everything within the construct of the game, which is why Villanova is not just a one-hit wonder; the Wildcats are 10th, ranked for the first time since 2018, and head to the NCAA Tournament with a 28-6 record.
There is, however, an inherent challenge to becoming something more circus act than basketball player. Catch the ball anywhere near midcourt, and the crowd audibly inhales, expecting something fantastic. Drop 50 and people ask what’s wrong when you score “only” in the 20s. “I had 21 against UConn and people asked what the defense did to stop me,’’ she says with a laugh. “I was like, do you understand if you told me two years ago I’d drop 21 on UConn, I’d be the happiest kid alive?”
Maddy Siegrist is not, in fact, an actual supernova. She’s a 22-year-old self-described “reserved” woman who uses social media rarely and grudgingly, considers a fun night holing up watching a movie with her sister, Caroline, and counts a soon to be 100-year-old woman named Gert among her dearest friends. She’s maniacally competitive and yet easy going, an exemplary student and a Monopoly cheater, both the very definition of extraordinary and yet incredibly, happily ordinary.
Which, ironically, might just be why Maddy Siegrist is having the season she’s having.
Upon spying her eighth-grade daughter playing in a junior varsity basketball game, Ginna Siegrist immediately texted her sister. “She did the jump ball thing. You know the one in the beginning where they tip it off?” To which her sister replied: “So she’s starting.’’ Ginna, if it’s not clear, is not exactly a basketball savant. “The mom, therapist, spiritual guru, that’s my mom’s job,’’ says George Siegrist, Maddy’s younger brother. “Not basketball.’’ No, Ginna remains mystified at much of her daughter’s success. “Honestly, I’m impressed with people’s math skills,’’ she says. “They count how many shots she takes. Who does that?”
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If a child is the byproduct of her parents, Siegrist then is the very intersection of her mom Ginna and her dad George. He played basketball at Marist; she was a cheerleader. He schooled his daughter on her jump shot; she hung poster boards in the kitchen, reminding her four kids of the athletic consequences of inattention to academics. He’s a coach; she’s a school psychologist. He dissects. She cheers.
They did not know they had a basketball savant on their hands. Though their daughter was always on the move — “she’s the only one of my kids who needed the seven-point harness in the car seat,’’ Ginna says — she did not necessarily follow directly in her father’s hightops. She played soccer, skied, did gymnastics and even tried ballet. “Tallest ballerina you’ve ever seen,’’ the now 6-1 Siegrist deadpans. She summered at Rockaway Beach and performed in the theater there. That’s where she met Gert Hendry, a community legend who pens a youth newsletter. By the time she was 12, Siegrist would visit Gert for cookies, the two sharing conspiratorial whispers about everything and nothing over the years, but rarely basketball. It was the sort of easy, happy childhood that brews a quiet confidence that comes with the simple certainty of being loved. “Madison was just a happy girl,’’ says Ginna, the only one allowed to use her daughter’s birth name.
In seventh grade, Siegrist was not so happy. She made her CYO B team and came home ticked that she didn’t make the A squad. “I mean I’d have four fouls in the first quarter and clank layups off the backboard because I was going a million miles an hour,’’ she says. “But still. I wanted to be on the A team.’’ Her father explained that if she wanted it, she’d have to work at it, unknowingly unleashing a beast he failed to realize lived in his little girl. She is naturally competitive — upon spying the rope climb on her first day of middle school, she vowed to add her name to the wall reserved for only those who reached the top (she did). Some might argue, in fact she’s too competitive. Siegrist admits to distracting her brother during heated games of Monopoly and swiping a few bills, and her parents eventually outlawed driveway games between the two, after they invariably ended in tears. “Oh yeah, she’ll sabotage a game if she’s losing,’’ says Villanova coach Denise Dillon. “Like knock it over.’’
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But when she channeled that ferocity into basketball, it unlocked something special. Maddy became the girl who woke up early and readied herself for school while her siblings rubbed sleep out of their eyes. While they ate breakfast, she was already outside shooting, shoveling an arc on their Poughkeepsie, N.Y., drive if necessary. She carried sheets of looseleaf paper around with her, charting her shots as she took them. She begged to join a grassroots program in Scarsdale, even though it meant a 70-minute commute each way, and often signed herself up online for showcase tourneys, explaining only after the fact that Ginna now had to somehow get her daughter to Maryland. When she broke her wrist in middle school, she went to practice every day anyway, going off by herself to work on her left-handed layup. “People ask me all the time, ‘How did you make her so good?’” Ginna says. “Trust me. I had nothing to do with it.’’
Siegrist tipped off that varsity game in eighth grade and never looked back. By her senior year at Our Lady of Lourdes, she averaged 32.7 points and 13.1 rebounds per game. Still, Villanova was the only power program to come calling. A faithful Catholic who loved wandering around churches and looking at the statues, she was more than happy with the Augustinian school and in retrospect thinks that easing into her college career prepared her for the incubator she’s now in. Absent the red-hot glare reserved for coveted recruits, she had the gift of time, and figured out just how good she could be. No one was setting the bar unreasonably high, not even her coach.
A horse-racing aficionado, Harry Perretta likes to handicap his recruits, imagining what they might become in their Villanova tenure. He targeted Siegrist, whose passing, dribbling and shooting skills were tailor-made for his motion offense, as a likely 1,000-, maybe 1,500-point career scorer. Instead, she dropped 41 in a game against La Salle at the end of her redshirt freshman season and scored her 1,000th in her 50th game. “I was like, whoa, I think she’s going to be pretty good,’’ says Perretta, who retired in 2020. “Shows you what I know.’’
Part of the burgeoning Siegrist tall tale is that she took a grand total of 12 3-pointers in the entirety of her high school career, finding her way to her outside stroke only after breaking her foot her freshman year at Villanova. It’s all true. She did stand around in a boot some days and just shoot, and she went from a player who only shot if she was wide open to one who needs a hair’s breadth to launch. Except those stories don’t dig into the crux of it.
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Siegrist had innate talent; you don’t average 37 in high school and not know your way around a gym. She had good technique and a high release — the byproduct of all of those years playing with her younger, but eventually taller, brother. It’s not that she couldn’t shoot in high school; she didn’t need to. Most games, she was taller and better than everyone else around her. But much like she did in middle school, Siegrist made herself a supernova. “I wish younger players could understand it,’’ Dillon says. “I know that’s what’s helped our team the last two years. The younger players see what she does and they’re like, oh I get it now.’’
The twist, however, is that Siegrist got better when she learned to do less. “She over-practiced,’’ Perretta says. Desperate to max out her skills, she mistook quantity for quality, convinced that the more time she spent in the gym, the better she’d get. Some days she’d spend three hours on the gun, counting 500 makes from various spots like she was playing an old-school around-the-horn game.
Perretta insisted she slow down. She’d call him to shoot. He’d say no. They played the game for a little while until the coach invariably won, and Siegrist learned to work smarter. Her 500-repetition shooting evolved into taking 10 shots from varying points, step backs, dribble pull ups, simulating what she needs in an actual game instead of rote spot-up shooting. “It’s about what you’re doing, but also why you’re doing it,’’ she says.
It’s worth noting that, while Siegrist is very good from the arc, she does not live there. She’s nearly as good a 2-point shooter (83rd percentile) as she is 3 (87th), and while she leads the nation in scoring, she’s not even in the top 50 in 3-point attempts. By comparison, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark has taken 285 3s to Siegrist’s 130.
This is what happens when you drop 50 points in a game:
“As soon as she’s done, just hang it up.” 👏
Jalen Brunson with high praise for Villanova standout Maddy Siegrist! pic.twitter.com/GyLUAJYQ4e
— NBA (@NBA) February 14, 2023
Jalen Brunson, a national player of the year and two-time national champion at Villanova and a man who went for 38 in the NBA on the same night you score 50, starts talking about you — about retiring your jersey immediately. NBA Twitter picks it up, and all of a sudden, 724,000 are viewing a video of the New York Knicks press conference about you.
It’s not like she didn’t have attention before. Siegrist is currently pursuing a master’s degree in education, and during her student teaching assignment at Cardinal O’Hara High School near Philly, students routinely ask her about games (she’ll answer), for a selfie (not during class) and to follow them on social media (hard pass). But things got a little bigger after that Seton Hall game, a lot noisier for sure. She shot poorly in three of her next four games — 8 of 22, 9 of 27 and 8 of 26, understandably garnering even more attention than the typical double teams she draws. Dillon talked with her about it, as did Perretta, both reminding her that she was no mere flash in the pan, that the work she put in earned her the attention.
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Her brother, sensing her tension, tried to ease it as only a little brother can. During home games, George, now a junior at Penn, made sure to arrive early and work his way to the court for warmups. Waiting for just the right break of silence, he’d yell, “I LOVE YOU MADDY,’’ as loud as he could, cracking up her teammates who knew who he was and bewildering the fans who did not. “She’d just give me the death glare,’’ he says. “That’s my job. She’s serious. I try to lighten the mood.’’
Not the emotional type, Siegrist sat with it all, tried to reconcile perceived “bad nights” versus real ones. She has never been one to track statistics and is blissfully unaware of the numbers everyone else salivates over. Not only will she be unaware how many points she scored unless she glances at the scoreboard, when a teammate mentioned the other day that Villanova was 10th in the country, she had no idea what they were talking about. “I thought they meant in the NET,’’ she says. “I didn’t know we were ranked that high.’’
In those games where she “struggled,’’ her team finished 2-1 and she scored 21, 28 and 23. “I tried to give myself some grace,’’ she says now. “Honestly, no matter what the other team is doing, no matter how I start the game, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen that defense before. I’ve started 0 for 10. There’s nothing I’m not prepared for.’’
Perhaps, and perhaps not. Nothing is quite as intense as the March spotlight. The Wildcats have not made it out of the NCAA Tournament first weekend in 20 years, losing last year to Michigan in the second round by 15. Though they don’t necessarily talk their aspirations into existence, there is no shying away from what’s within reach. Villanova should earn a high seed, positioning the Wildcats for a shot at a longer stay.
It is the perfect setup for star-making, for a supernova to burn bright.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photo of Maddy Siegrist: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)