Maggie Dixon Classic is back in Fort Worth. This year features marquee doubleheader.
Jamie Dixon knows his sister would be proud of how the Maggie Dixon Classic has evolved over the years.
It’s all about women’s basketball. It’s all about heart health.
“She loved women’s basketball,” Dixon said. “I never thought she’d get into coaching, and she shocked me when she did. She loved the life. She loved the people that she touched and she met on both sides [men’s and women’s].
“I think she’d just be excited to see the growth of it and wanting it to get bigger and more people excited about it.”
Nobody gets more excited for the event than Dixon and TCU women’s coach Raegan Pebley. The 14th edition is set for Sunday at Schollmaier Arena.
It returns to being a double-header showcase, as it had been in its first nine years before going to a single-game format the past three years.
TCU, which is off to a 5-0 start, and Boise State kick it off at 5 p.m. followed by a marquee matchup between No. 6 Texas A&M and No. 12 Florida State at 7:30 p.m.
This marks the second year for Fort Worth to host the event. New York City hosted the event at Madison Square Garden for 10 years followed by one-year stints in Queens, N.Y. (2016) and College Station (2017).
But Fort Worth made sense as the new home with Dixon being at TCU’s helm.
“It was the premier event in the country and it’s certainly become that again,” Dixon said.
Added Pebley: “It’s really important to us that we continue the legacy of Maggie. She had a passion for serving student athletes and I share that passion with her.”
Dixon and Pebley also have a shared passion of turning Fort Worth into a bigger basketball city. Hosting big-time events such as this only helps generate and grow the fan base.
“We’d love to make it more of a basketball town,” Pebley said. “We know that it’s a football town. It’s a baseball town. It’s a TCU town. We want to spread the word that Fort Worth is fired up about basketball as well.”
Outside of the games, this event is as much about raising awareness for heart health. Maggie, weeks after leading Army’s women’s team to its first NCAA Tournament appearance, died suddenly of a heart arrhythmia at age 28 in April 2006.
TCU and UNT Health Science Center School of Medicine is partnering with the Maggie Dixon Foundation to host a Heart Health Fair during the games. Activities will include a “Kids Heart Challenge” jump-rope booth, blood pressure checks, automated external defibrillator training and other heart-healthy stations.
“In between games, kids can interact and it gets them talking about heart health and preventative measures like diet and exercise,” Dixon said.
This story was originally published November 29, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
