Maddy Siegrist got engaged to her former Villanova coach’s son. Another coach made the surprise proposal happen.

Villanova basketball legend Maddy Siegrist arrived at the carriage house on campus for what she thought was a donor dinner. But women’s basketball coach Denise Dillon had a surprise up her sleeve — Siegrist’s boyfriend, Drexel assistant Stephen Perretta, was proposing.

“They really got me good,” Siegrist, Villanova women’s basketball’s all-time leading scorer, told The Inquirer.

Instead of a dinner for Villanova donors, it was an engagement celebration filled with Siegrist and Perretta’s friends and family, including Siegrist’s former coach, and Perretta’s father, Harry Perretta.

They knew each other back when Siegrist started at Villanova, since the younger Perretta often helped out as a practice player. But the two really started to bond the summer after the elder Perretta’s retirement in 2020, when they started taking communications classes together. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Siegrist and Perretta traveled to visit each other, with Siegrist in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Perretta in Philadelphia, and they officially started dating on a Perretta family vacation.

“We were at the beach, and someone asked him, ‘Oh, is this your girlfriend?’” Siegrist said. “I remember I was like, ‘No,’ and then [Stephen] was like, ‘What do you mean, no?’ I remember I was like, ‘Well, you never asked me!’”

Perretta asked her later that day, and the rest is history.

Siegrist was a bit nervous at first about dating her former coach’s son, but since Harry was retired, it made the situation much less stressful.

“[Harry] always used to make comments, like, ‘Oh, you guys are in class together, you guys should hang out,’ stuff like that, joking around, as dads do, which was always funny,” Siegrist said. “I don’t know if he was surprised [when they started dating], but he definitely didn’t act surprised.”

Perretta thought his father was more surprised than he let on.

“He’s pretty straight-faced, but he was like, ‘Wait, Maddy who? The one that played for me?’” Perretta said. “I said, ‘Yeah, the one that played for you.’”

Now after a few years traveling from Fairleigh Dickinson, Iona, and Dallas, Perretta and Siegrist are closer than they’ve been since college. Siegrist splits her time between the Philly area, thanks to her work with Villanova in the offseason, and Dallas, where she plays for the WNBA’s Wings. Perretta is in his first year as an assistant with Drexel’s women’s basketball team, which keeps him in the Philly area as well for the first time since his graduation from Villanova in 2021. With both of them back in the same city for at least half the year, Perretta said now was the “perfect time” for the engagement.

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Their lives being intertwined with basketball gives them a special understanding of each other’s schedules and travel.

“There’s an understanding there that you might not understand if you aren’t involved with athletics in any way, no matter what sport you’re playing,” Perretta said. “It’s nice that we have the same problems going on, basketball-related problems, athletics-related problems, so it’s easy to run stuff by each other. It’s easy to talk about it. I think that definitely was a big reason we started talking at the beginning.”

The proposal happened less than a week ago, so Siegrist and Perretta haven’t started planning the wedding too much yet, except for one thing — the ceremony needs to be at Villanova Chapel. Between the Drexel and Wings’ seasons and the availability at the church, the wedding date is basically going to be picked for them, Siegrist joked.