By the third quarter of a game against Merrimack in November, Mackenzie Egger suspected she was having a special rebounding night. “I just feel like I’m just grabbing all of these,” the Yale senior forward thought to herself. It was as if her hands were magnetic, steering the ball toward her.
After the final buzzer, Egger found out she’d gotten 20 rebounds, which remains the highest total for an Ivy League player this season. She also scored a game-high 18 points on 8-for-13 shooting in the Bulldogs’ 50-45 loss.
The next morning, her body felt all those rebounds again. But she’s kept going ever since.
The 6’ Egger leads the Ivy League in rebounding with 9.3 per game. She also ranks fourth in scoring (15.7 points per game), third in minutes (33.9) and fourth in steals (1.8). She has a real chance to be a first-team All-Ivy selection — and become the first Bulldog ever to lead the league in rebounding.
Most players who reach those kinds of heights do so incrementally, carving out big roles as underclassmen and steadily improving to become elite. Egger has done it differently. She wasn’t counted on to score earlier in her career, and even last season, she didn’t completely have the green light. But the jump she’s made in scoring this season is one of the largest year-to-year increases for any Ivy League player since 2009-10, and the same is true of her rebounding.
“I am so happy for her,” Yale head coach Dalila Eshe told The Next, “that she has found the easy button, let’s call it, her senior year where she’s just flowing and clicking, and she gets to finish out her senior year really feeling like she got to the peak of her potential.”
Growing up in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, it wasn’t a sure thing that Egger would choose basketball as her sport in college. She was the smallest player on her youth teams until a middle-school growth spurt. For a while, she thought her best sport might be track, based on her times in the 800 meters and various relays. And she was good at volleyball, too, helping her high school team advance to the state quarterfinals.
Egger started getting recruited in basketball as a sophomore, after she’d joined the Michigan Mystics AAU team. Yale, under then-head coach Allison Guth, was the first program to contact her.
“We went to recruit her, and she found a way … to draw a charge on one end of the floor and make it to the other end of the floor, after drawing a charge, for the score,” Guth told The Next. “… I was like, ‘Who is this kid?’ [I liked] the way she worked on the offensive glass [and] her motor in general.”
Egger felt an immediate connection with Guth and then-assistant coach Emma Golen, and going to a top academic school was important to her. She then played well at Yale’s elite camp that summer and fell in love with the campus. After the summer AAU season, Egger got an offer from Yale, and she committed three days later, not wanting to waste anyone’s time.
Though Egger saw the court early on at Yale, she was a role player for her first three seasons, averaging 3.9 points and 2.4 rebounds in 16.2 minutes per game. As a first-year, she was excited to get any minutes on a team that eventually finished third in the Ivy League and made the conference tournament. Her dad helped reinforce her role as a rebounder and defender by pointing to an older Princeton player, then-sophomore Ellie Mitchell, as a model. (Mitchell would go on to break Princeton’s all-time rebounding record and win Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year three times.)
After Egger’s first season, Guth left to become the head coach at Loyola Chicago, and Eshe — a Princeton assistant who’d coached Mitchell — replaced her. Egger started 22 of 27 games as a sophomore, but her role was still largely confined to rebounding and defending.
Entering her junior year, Egger had a great preseason, and she figured her breakout season had arrived.
“I couldn’t miss in practice. And there were days I would just take over the gym,” she told The Next. “And then when the season arrived, all that just seemed to disappear, unfortunately.
“And my role on the team just seemed to get smaller and smaller and smaller, and it turned … back to the rebounding and defense role. … I love this role, but it also is nice to put points on the board and have trust from people [offensively].”
“What everybody is seeing right now, we saw in a lot of different clips, in different segments,” Eshe said. “But it’s like she couldn’t put it all together when it came game time.”
Eshe and her staff decided to simplify Egger’s role, including having her stop shooting 3-pointers, in hopes that it would help her in games. But Egger averaged only 3.7 points per game that season, largely off the bench, and the Bulldogs went just 8-19. She was disappointed with both results, and it was a tough year for her mentally after it’d started so well in preseason and then spiraled out.
To Egger’s credit, her work ethic never wavered. “She never showed up to practice different,” Eshe said.
In postseason meetings and workouts, Eshe and her staff focused on fixing some mechanical issues with Egger’s shot.
“You should’ve seen all of the random equipment [we bought],” Eshe said. “We just Google searched and … [asked], ‘What kind of random gadgets can we get to help?’”
Egger diligently worked on her mechanics over the summer — and she transformed her confidence and mental approach to the sport, too.
At times earlier in her career, basketball had been a stressor, Egger said. But that summer, when she had a challenging financial services internship, basketball became her stress relief after a long work day. She found a YMCA near where she was living in Central Massachusetts and often played pickup against men when she wasn’t getting shots up.
“It was my time for myself,” Egger said. “… Finding my love of basketball [again] came from just playing and competing.”
Egger also realized there is more to her identity than playing basketball, which made the ups and downs of long basketball seasons feel less existential.
When Egger returned to Yale this fall, the changes were obvious to those around her.
“Me and my whole staff, we looked at each other and we’re like, ‘Mac’s figured it out!’” Eshe said. “It was actually one of the best things in preseason this year.”
But Egger, with what happened her junior season in the back of her mind, didn’t quite believe yet that her strong play would last. Then she sprained both ankles at separate times, which kept her out until just before the season started.
With one ankle still nagging at her, Egger started and played 39 minutes in the Bulldogs’ season-opening win over Monmouth. She finished with a then-career-high 25 points on 11-for-19 shooting — including 3-for-4 from 3-point range — and added nine rebounds and two steals.
“That’s when I knew,” Egger said. “I was like, ‘OK, [I] got this. It’s gonna be OK.’”
Egger continued to put up big numbers throughout nonconference play, even as Yale endured a 15-game losing streak. In particular, she had a white-hot four-game stretch that began with her 18-point, 20-rebound game against Merrimack on Nov. 19. It continued with 21 points and 13 rebounds against Pacific; a career-high 28 points, eight rebounds and four steals at Marist; and 21 points and seven rebounds at Bryant.
Egger even had a chance to win the Marist game with a long 3-pointer at the buzzer, but it came up short.
“She was heartbroken at the end of it,” Eshe said. “But … having the guts and the will to be the player that wants to take it, it’s awesome. We’ll give it to you every single game if you’re going to play that hard and you have the will to take the shot.”
On Dec. 29, Egger also stuffed the stat sheet with 25 points, 11 rebounds, five steals and four blocks against Boston University — a game she remembers fondly despite another loss. “It was such a fun game,” Egger said. “… Rebounding and blocks and steals, they make basketball fun to me. And taking charges.”
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By conference play, the secret was out on how well Egger was playing. Despite that, and despite no other Yale player averaging even 7 points per game to draw defenders away from her, she has continued to produce. She has adjusted to defenses giving her the star treatment, which she hadn’t faced earlier in her college career, by learning when to go to her countermoves and what to look for when help defenders swarm her.
When Yale first faced archrival Harvard on Jan. 4, Harvard assistant coach Ali Sanders had the scout, and she reintroduced her players to Egger by comparing Egger to Mitchell. Mitchell averaged 10.2 rebounds per game last season as a senior, just above what Egger is averaging now, and the Crimson were particularly worried about preventing Egger from getting offensive rebounds.
“What [Egger has] been able to do on the glass and consistently offensively … and [her] grittiness is really kind of setting her apart from a lot of other players in our league,” Harvard head coach Carrie Moore told reporters on Jan. 3. “So we’ve got to be ready. … We’ve got to make sure we turn and push her back consistently for 40 minutes.”
Though Egger struggled with her shot in both games against Harvard’s elite defense this season, she had five total offensive rebounds — right around her average of 2.6 per game. She has similarly thrived against almost everyone else. That includes putting up 16 points on 6-for-12 shooting, 12 rebounds and four steals on Jan. 31 against a Princeton program that is known for shutting down the opponent’s top player, night in and night out.
Egger succeeded against Princeton in part by getting out of the post, to mitigate her four-inch height disadvantage against Tigers forwards Parker Hill and Tabitha Amanze. In previous years, she wasn’t as much of a three-level scorer, but this time around, that was her ticket to success.
“I was able to play very composed against them, and that’s something sometimes I struggle with,” Egger said. “… I was able to get to the shots I wanted to get to during that game. … It was just a fun game to play in, and it was just, I was able to get to my flow.”
“She just has such a beautiful confidence about her this year,” Yale senior forward Grace Thybulle told reporters after Egger had 22 points and 11 rebounds against Penn on Feb. 14. “And she’s really come into herself, been able to trust herself and really knows who she is on the court. And I think it’s translated to a lot of parts of her life.”
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Despite the consistent production from Egger all season, wins have been hard to come by for the Bulldogs. They are just 2-21 overall and 1-9 in conference play. Much like how Egger kept working even when she was struggling in previous seasons, Eshe said Egger is working as hard as ever and leading her teammates even as the losses mount.
Rather than focusing on the scores, Egger is trying to hold on to each moment, knowing that she probably won’t continue playing after college. The mindset she adopted this summer has helped her find joy in the season still — and end her career on such a high note individually.
“I still love my team. I still love playing for Yale women’s basketball,” Egger said. “… I’m still glad I made that decision in sophomore year [of high school]. …
“I don’t want to hang my head too much on [our record], and I still want to have fun. And I think that’s what keeps me going.”
