There's a moment during rehearsal — you can find it on Access Hollywood if you haven't seen it yet — where Ilona Maher trips over her own feet mid-spin and immediately bursts out laughing. Alan Bersten does too. They're doubled over, and it's not staged, not performed. It's just two people who apparently genuinely like each other trying to figure out how to make a rugby player do a tango without dislocating something.
That's the thing nobody expected about this partnership.
Maher arrived on Dancing with the Stars carrying all the usual athlete energy — the confidence, the competitive edge, the body that's been conditioned to absorb impact and keep moving forward. What nobody predicted was how quickly she'd figure out that ballroom dancing isn't about brute force. It's about intention. It's about letting your body follow a conversation it hasn't had before.
Alan Bersten, for his part, seems to understand exactly what he has in her. He's not trying to soften her or sand down her edges. He's building around her. Their Soul Train Night routine — the one everyone keep linking clips of — worked because it didn't ask Maher to become someone else. It asked her to move like herself, but in a language she was just learning to speak.
The push-up thing from her Instagram isn't really about fitness. Or rather, it is about fitness, but it's also about something else: a quiet middle finger to anyone who thought a rugby player couldn't be graceful. She's out there doing weighted push-ups in a string two-piece like it's nothing, because for her it is nothing. The dance floor is the hard part. The dance floor is where she's choosing to be uncomfortable.
What makes Maher watchable — and she is genuinely watchable, in a way that athletes on this show don't always manage — is that she doesn't seem to be performing confidence. She seems to actually feel it. There's a difference. Performances where someone is trying to convince you they belong read differently than performances where someone already knows they belong and is just figuring out the specifics.
The Boston Globe called her a "formidable competitor" last night and that's accurate, but it undersells it. Formidable is for someone you'd be nervous about. Maher is the person you're already rooting for before the music starts.
What's going to be interesting as the season moves forward is watching her fail at something and how she responds. Not if — when. Ballroom is humbling. The judges will find something. The question is whether she'll take it the way she took that trip during rehearsal: laugh, reset, try again. Based on everything out there, she will. That might be the most rugby thing about her.
But the real reason to keep watching isn't the competition. It's those moments where she and Bersten lock eyes mid-routine and something just clicks — where the athleticism and the artistry stop being two separate things and become one. That's the moment she came here for. It's starting to show up.
