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Maggie Doogan<\/p>\n
By Jay Sorgi \u2022 Posted July 2, 2025 <\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to find God in victories. It\u2019s not as readily apparent in setbacks.<\/p>\n
Broomall\u2019s Maggie Doogan may not have made the USA Basketball AmeriCup Team after four days of trials against some of the best players in women\u2019s college basketball.<\/p>\n
Yet, the Cardinal O\u2019Hara High School graduate and University of Richmond senior is seeing blessings from simply getting the chance to compete for a slot on Team USA in the 2025 FIBA AmeriCup tournament in Santiago, Chile.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s regarded as the international women\u2019s basketball championship of the Western hemisphere and a major pre-Olympic tournament.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a really cool thing to be able to say that I was a part of,\u201d Doogan said of her four-day tryout from June 16-19 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, home of the United States Olympic Training Center.<\/p>\n
\u201cI definitely learned a lot from everybody who was there. They\u2019re all incredible players, so it was a really cool experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Six of the 12 team members were named Associated Press First-Team, Second-Team, or Third-Team All-Americans in college basketball this past season.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were all super nice, helped me out to get acclimated to the Team USA culture because a lot of them had already been there before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Doogan earned the 2025 Atlantic 10 Conference Player of the Year at Richmond.<\/p>\n
Prior to her collegiate success she was named a PIAA 5A First-Team All-State and two-time All-Catholic First-Team standout at Cardinal O\u2019Hara High School in Springfield. She led the Lions to two PIAA 5A state championships and the 2022 PCL title.<\/p>\n
Doogan showed that she had a place amidst players well on their way to the WNBA.<\/p>\n
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Maggie Doogan shares a proud moment on the court with her mom, Chrissie Doogan\u2014head coach and athletic director at Cardinal O\u2019Hara\u2014during Maggie\u2019s playing days with the Lions. (Cardinal O\u2019Hara)<\/p>\n
\u201cMaggie was the only mid-major player there, not playing in an NCAA Power Four conference. For her name to just be out there and the respect she earned, it\u2019s totally deserved. We still shake our heads a little bit about it, but it\u2019s very cool,\u201d said Chrissie Doogan, Maggie\u2019s mom who is also the head coach and athletic director at Cardinal O\u2019Hara.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a testament to her work ethic. That work ethic certainly had to have been on display at these tryouts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maggie\u2019s work ethic and game also showcased themselves in front of the head coach of the gold medal-winning 2024 USA Olympic Women\u2019s Basketball Team, Duke head coach Kara Lawson.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s very inspirational, very passionate about the game, and she wants us to get better,\u201d said Maggie.<\/p>\n
\u201cHer main goal throughout these trials was obviously to get the team ready for Chile, but I think she just wanted all of us, even if we didn\u2019t make the team, to soak up as much knowledge as we possibly could.\u201d<\/p>\n
Doogan said she learned what she needs to improve upon, such as becoming \u201cstronger, quicker, continue to work on ball handling, things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The experience also taught her to \u201csoak up every opportunity,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Might she get the chance to make the team in the future?<\/p>\n
\u201cNever say never, but honestly, this is like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me, and just to be able to say that I was there and trained with some of the best athletes in the world,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Dreams like these seemed far away from when she first simply wanted to play for her mom\u2019s alma mater.
The woman who coached Maggie at O\u2019Hara could not help being what she\u2019s always been, Maggie\u2019s \u201cbiggest fan,\u201d as they exchanged messages during those four days of the trials.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was getting the updates in between the sessions, and we just kept telling her to go prove that you belong, take whatever experience you can get out of this, and see what you can learn from it,\u201d Chrissie Doogan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaving the experience of coaching Maggie all through her high school career, it was hard not for her to become my best friend. My siblings make fun of me all the time. They\u2019re like, \u2018You\u2019re so sad when Maggie\u2019s away.\u2019 If Richmond played 35 games last year, she probably had fans at maybe 30 of them between me, my parents, my mother-in-law, my sisters, you know. When you watch Maggie play, I feel like you get the sense that she loves what she\u2019s doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
It hasn\u2019t been hard for Maggie to find blessing amidst the disappointment of not making the team, with the faith her family and Cardinal O\u2019Hara infused within her.<\/p>\n
She admits she would tear up sometimes during school Masses because of \u201chow much I loved it, how much I felt at home in that auditorium,\u201d she said. \u201cIt really just opened my eyes to how much better my faith could be. I\u2019ve tried to carry that through with me throughout college.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m extremely blessed to have a good relationship with God, and for him to keep guiding not only my career, but just my life in general. And I am eternally grateful for just having genuine people who love me in my corner.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles or the 2032 games in Brisbane, Australia could be around the corner for Maggie, but she knows who\u2019ll be there the whole way.<\/p>\n
\u201cGod is good,\u201d she said, \u201cand God is the reason why we\u2019re all here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Maggie Doogan By Jay Sorgi \u2022 Posted July 2, 2025 It\u2019s easy to find God in victories. It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":33237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[27765,27766,1339,27767,1317,1337,1338,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-33236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-aop-athletics","9":"tag-aops","10":"tag-basketball","11":"tag-cardinal-o","12":"tag-ncaa","13":"tag-ncaa-basketball","14":"tag-ncaabasketball","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114785023878112268","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}