Maggie Dixon
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Margaret Mary "Maggie" Dixon (May 9, 1977 – April 6, 2006) was an American collegiate women's basketball coach.
Maggie Dixon was born in North Hollywood, California, and played basketball at Notre Dame High School. Dixon graduated in 1999 with a bachelor's degree in history from the University of San Diego, where she played for the women's basketball team. After an unsuccessful try out for the WNBA Los Angeles Sparks, she took up coaching, at the urging of her older brother. She became an assistant coach at DePaul University from 2001-2005.
In 2005, she was hired as the women's basketball coach of the United States Military Academy. In her first year, they surprised the college basketball world by going 20-11 and winning the Patriot League conference tournament; she took them to 2006 NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Tournament as a 15 seed, where they lost to the University of Tennessee, 102-54. It was the first March Madness tournament appearance for any Army basketball team.
Her brother is Jamie Dixon, the head men's basketball coach of the University of Pittsburgh. In 2006, the Dixons became the first brother-sister pair to take teams to the NCAA basketball tournaments the same year, as Jamie's Pittsburgh Panthers also made the 2006 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament.
[edit] Death
Just weeks after her appearance in the tournament, on April 5, 2006, Dixon was hospitalized at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York, after collapsing and suffering what her brother described as an "arrhythmic episode to her heart."
Dixon died the next night at the age of 28, a little over a month shy of her 29th birthday. An autopsy revealed that Dixon had an enlarged heart and had a problem with a heart valve. She was buried at the West Point cemetery, an honor usually reserved only for high ranking officials.
