'I'll just coach': How an Oklahoma State student went from HS cheerleader to NFL intern
Scott Wright
Oklahoman
STILLWATER — Isabel Diaz awoke one Saturday morning last April to her phone ringing.
The 21-year-old Oklahoma State student cleared her head quickly enough to realize the call was coming from the man who had recently hired her for a summer internship.
But the internship wasn’t supposed to begin for another month. What could he possibly want?
Knowledge.
The man calling was Ron Rivera, head coach of the NFL’s Washington Commanders.
It was the final day of the NFL Draft, and Rivera needed some intel on a few OSU players, so he reached out to someone he knew had seen them up close.
Diaz, a 21-year-old senior-to-be at Oklahoma State, had just finished her third year with the Cowboy football program, and her first as a student assistant after previously working in the video department.
“That was one of the coolest moments,” Diaz said recently, speaking from an office at the Commanders’ training facility. “It just took me a minute, but I went back to as if I was talking to one of our coaches at OSU, just about the players and who they are from my perspective.
“That was my first experience seeing how Coach Rivera values so much hearing different viewpoints. That’s why I’m here, so I can see a different viewpoint.
“I’m honestly honored that he even thought to call me and ask my opinion on it.”
Rivera researched the OSU players through his scouts and front-office team as well, and all of Diaz’s input checked out with the rest of their analysis. Later that day, Washington drafted Cowboy cornerback Christian Holmes, with whom Diaz had worked closely in the defensive backs’ room last season.
On Thursday, Diaz concluded the first portion of her internship through the Bill Walsh Coaching Diversity Fellowship. One of the youngest coaches in the fellowship, Diaz worked with the Commanders through offseason programs and mini-camps.
She’ll return in late July to be part of preseason training camp before heading back to Stillwater in August to rejoin the Cowboys for her senior year.
“The real cool thing about watching Isabel as she works is just how professional she already is,” Rivera said. “She understands the game. She’s got a great grasp of the X’s and O’s.
“She’s adapted very quickly to the way we do things. It’s been a pleasure watching her. She’s helping us, and at the same time, she’s learning and growing and developing as a coach.”
It seems like a meteoric rise for a woman who in the fall of 2018 was a cheerleader for football games at Hebron High School in Carrollton, Texas.
And in many ways, it is.
But that is only a piece of Diaz’s journey in her pursuit of becoming a football coach.
The beginning
Ray Hopkins did the same thing every Sunday morning during football season.With some doughnuts, coffee and a newspaper, he’d read through the stats and standings to prepare for the day’s NFL games.
Diaz regularly spent weekends with her grandparents while her mother, Tracy Hopkins, worked as a flight attendant. From the age of 6, Diaz was captivated by her grandfather’s weekly ritual, and soon began to join in.
“I sat down and started getting to know the teams and their mascots,” Diaz said. “The next thing you know, we’d be sitting on the couch watching Fox NFL Sunday with Jimmy Johnson and Michael Strahan and all those guys. And then it got to the point that we were watching games every Sunday. The whole day.
“I would be begging my grandma to let me stay up later to watch the games with him.”
Then she started asking her mother to let her watch Monday and Thursday night games.
“The questions she would ask at such a young age were just amazing to me,” Tracy Hopkins said. “And the questions were based on what she read in the newspaper. She had a connection with it at a very young age. I saw it. Her grandfather saw it. And we just fed it.”
Hopkins was nervous about the idea of her daughter playing football, but Diaz’s love for the game was unrelenting.
“I was like, ‘If you’re not gonna let me play, I’ll just coach,’” Diaz said. “It was truly just a fan love of football that proceeded to, ‘Why not make this a career?’
“I love it so much. Every time I would learn something new about the game, I wanted to continue to learn more.”
Before she got to high school, Diaz had already decided on coaching as her future path.
“I’m a planner and an organizer,” Diaz said. “I love to plan ahead and get the ball rolling. And I’m driven and I’m determined.
“Eighth grade year came around and I was like, if I’m gonna do something about this, I gotta start now.”
So Diaz reached out to Hebron High School head coach Brian Brazil, letting him know of her desire to one day be a coach. She also got in contact with other Hebron coaches, like Jeff Hill, who is now the head coach at S&S Consolidated in Southmayd, Texas, but at the time was Hebron’s passing game coordinator and video coordinator.
The coaches were drawn to Diaz’s passion for being involved and Hill quickly put her to work on the video staff.
“We got her set up working on video,” Hill said. “Then she started talking to me a little bit more about her interest in becoming a coach, and she wanted to see if she could sit in on meetings and things like that.
“Her junior year, she was still cheering on Friday nights, but she started coming up on Saturdays. She’d watch video. She’d listen to our terminology. She’d take diligent notes. She was just inundated with it.”
As a senior, Diaz was ready for the next step.
Brazil connected her with the coaches at one of Hebron’s feeder schools, Killian Middle School, and she began working as a volunteer assistant throughout the week, which still left her free to cheer on Friday nights and spend Saturdays with the Hebron staff.
“She just had such a passion to work on this,” Brazil said. “She went down to Killian and would help the coaches coach, just getting her feet wet. There was a lot more she could do, as far as being involved at that point. She was learning. She was a student of the game.”
For such a young girl to be making claims of her desire to be a football coach, Brazil and Hill had their early moments of skepticism, but Diaz quickly put those to rest.
“Sure, at first you’re like, ‘OK, I got a cheerleader that wants to be a coach, alright,’” Brazil said. “But she showed her commitment almost instantaneously.
“It wasn’t for show. It wasn’t some gimmick. That’s what she wanted to do. She was passionate about learning it. We were all just really impressed with her from the start.”
