Young Rams equipment intern catches one-handed passes, banana punts and respect

IRVINE, Calif. — Kyra Bishop doesn’t walk — not anywhere.

The 18-year-old equipment intern for the Rams takes the field at a full-on sprint each day, about an hour before practice starts and about 30 minutes before the special teams players trickle out of the locker room for their separate installation period. Bishop, who will only hold this position through training camp, knows every extra second she can spend out on that field is valuable.

After helping get the special teams gear set up each day, Bishop herself warms up, too. She wears finger tape on one hand, and a wide receiver glove on the other, and throws for a few minutes with Tim Lee, another equipment assistant. One morning, defensive tackle Marquise Copeland saw Bishop running routes on air (with tennis shoes on instead of cleats) and stretching for one-handed catches. He and the special teams players started chattering.

“(Copeland) thought I could beat another intern in a one-on-one,” she said, “so people were talking about it a little bit.”

The players wanted to see the matchup. So Bishop scouted out Rams punter Riley Dixon, because she knew he could throw.

“Pretty flattered, she’s like, ‘Hey, I need a quarterback, will you throw for me? I’m like, ‘Of course!'” said Dixon, smiling. On a practice day earlier this month, and before the special teams installation began, Bishop got a play from Dixon and punt returner Brandon Powell and lined up at the end zone opposite the intern the players chose. A crowd of defensive linemen — who had heard from Copeland about the young female equipment assistant who made one-handed catches — started to gather to the side.

Dixon mimicked the snap and dropped back as Bishop shimmied into the end zone, twisting her route mid-step as she caught her much taller opponent leaning just slightly the other direction. The defensive linemen shrieked as Bishop, nothing but air around her, pulled in the catch.

“She can catch a football like any other boy out here,” Powell said. “She can catch it with one hand, like, it’s crazy to see the stuff she can do … with sneakers on!”

Working on an NFL team’s equipment crew is a grueling, often unglamorous — yet absolutely crucial — job. During training camp, they facilitate the entirety of a 90-player practice and the thousands of tasks and details that requires. Bishop is at the facilities with her colleagues by 8:15 a.m. ahead of the early-afternoon practices, and they set up positional equipment before attending to laundry and jersey maintenance. After that, Bishop pulls on her single glove (she used to wear two, but found she couldn’t throw as compact a spiral with a glove on her right hand) and heads out to the fields. According to her smartwatch, she takes anywhere from 22,000 to 25,000 steps in a single day of work (like many of the equipment staffers), but because Bishop, a rugby player, is preparing for her first rugby season as a freshman at Bowdoin College in Maine this fall, she also trains with weights or cardio during the week.

“She works so hard, and she’s not afraid of anybody,” Dixon said. “Something I took for granted, I think my first couple of years in the NFL — you realize the people you’re around is what it’s all about. You get to work with these people and we’re playing a kids’ game, for fun. To keep that part of the game alive and well is why we do it.”

One morning, Dixon was working on a technique called a “banana punt”, in which the punter is able to bend the ball and make it near-impossible to catch, and a nightmare to track (former veteran punter Johnny Hekker went viral for executing one of these in a game back in 2017). Bishop popped up in the returner position — and started catching Dixon’s punts and throwing them back to him.

“It’s crazy, that punt — a lot of returners you hit it to, our guys are pretty good with it, but a lot of returners don’t like catching that because it spins funny, moves all over the place,” said Dixon. “I hit a couple to her and she just settles under it, makes it look easy.”

Special teams coordinator Joe DeCamillis usually walks a few laps around the practice fields in the hour before practices start — when the punters warm up — and saw Bishop and Dixon working on the punts. DeCamillis doesn’t impress easy, but Bishop made him pause.

“She’s out here the first day and we watch her start catching punts, and I’m like, ‘holy moly, who is that?'” he said. DeCamillis — a tough, no-nonsense veteran coach with a signature growling drawl that belies his genuine kindness — marched up to Bishop and started chatting with her about what she was seeing and her rugby background. Soon, she had a nickname from DeCamillis: “Maine”. He coaches her just like he coaches his players — like it’s nothing unusual in his mind to have a line of punt returners in full helmets and pads running reps, and then Bishop collecting extra footballs and bounce-away punts and maybe sneaking in a rep of her own, her ponytail sticking out from under her hat.

“I say, ‘Hey, Maine, show up over here,'” DeCamillis said. “And she did everything we asked her to do. The cool thing about it is, on Saturday nights I show rugby clips every single week, men and women. I’m telling you, by far the best tacklers … You watch it every week, then you watch her runnin’ around and you get it.

“It’s natural. It’s a really cool thing for her. I know she’s gonna look on it fondly and I know these other guys will, too. Got a lot of respect for her, I can tell you that. Pullin’ for her.”

Powell said that DeCamillis actually includes Bishop’s reps when showing the special teams players practice film of the punters’ warm-ups.

“You’ll see her in the drill, she’s running full speed,” said Powell. “She’s out there catching the punts like it’s nothing … Might have to make a spot for her, because that’s crazy to be able to catch punts like that.”

Powell, who was a journeyman receiver and return specialist before joining the Rams midway through the 2021 season, has an extra appreciation for Bishop’s clear love for football.

“She’ll come up to us and ask questions and it makes you want to help,” he said. “She’s cool … She wants to learn about football, and that’s good because in camp, we have to learn a lot. So being able to teach somebody else the little things that we do, it’s good for us.

“Football is for everybody … Just the fact that she’s out here with us asking us questions makes you want to work harder because you’re like, ‘I just taught you that and now I gotta go show you.'”

Bishop, who was initially directed toward a less hands-on internship but asked if she could take on an active role, is blown away by how naturally she’s been welcomed into the fold by players, coaches and her fellow equipment staffers.

“I knew I would be interacting with the coaches and players, but I didn’t think they’d be so openly supportive of my athletic endeavors, as an equipment intern,” she said. “It’s been so much fun … I just feel really lucky.”

Bishop isn’t sure if she wants to pursue a long-term career in football, but she loves it dearly. She doesn’t know specifically why, or how she got so enamored with the sport.

But I do. I see it in her as she takes the field at a sprint every day, fingers taped on one hand, glove on the other, grinning from ear to ear under her team-issued bucket hat. Football is a mixture of fearlessness and joy. So is Bishop.

(Photo: Los Angeles Rams)