After 10 years in LA, former Rams becoming entrenched in community

LOS ANGELES — One night early in his tenure with the Rams, Andrew Whitworth was driving his daughter home from school. They had just relocated to Los Angeles after 11 years with the Cincinnati Bengals, and the experience of uprooting their lives had been a traumatic one for all four of his children.

“I’ll never forget,” Whitworth said, “her being like, ‘Daddy can this be where we stay? I don’t want to move again.’ I was like, ‘You know what baby, we will put in roots and we will figure that out.’”

Monday marks 10 years since the Rams first announced they were moving back to Los Angeles after 21 seasons in St. Louis. And after a decade in Southern California, the Rams have a growing group of former players from this decade who are becoming entrenched in the community.

For Aaron Donald, it was a similar draw as Whitworth to stay in L.A. when he retired following the 2023 season. A Pittsburgh native through and through, you would be forgiven if you thought that was where Donald would return after his playing days were over.

But he met his wife, Erica, when she worked with the Rams. And they’ve since built their family in L.A.

“If you would have asked me this seven years from now, I’d be like, I’ll probably move back to Pittsburgh when I’m all said and done,” Donald said. “But when you’ve built a family here and you’ve built a home here with not just me, my wife and my kids, it’s hard to leave that. I’m comfortable here, I love it here.”

Donald was known for being withdrawn during his playing career. But since he’s retired, he has stayed around the Rams. He was featured in the team’s pregame hype video at SoFi Stadium this season, and has attended several games, most notably his bobblehead night in November. Whenever Donald has been shown on the infinity screen, he’s been eager to wave his arms in an effort to energize the crowd.

Donald’s presence at games is part of a concerted effort by the Rams as an organization to engage this newest generation of former players with the franchise.

When Leesa Rockhold was hired as a manager for what the Rams call their “Legends Community” in 2023, she wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. She had filled a similar role with the Kansas City Chiefs, an organization rooted in one community. But she knew the Rams had been splintered into eras — the initial group that played in L.A. until the mid-1990s, then the St. Louis faction, then the new Los Angeles contingent.

“I thought a lot of my work would be into people who maybe hadn’t had a connection to Los Angeles yet,” Rockhold said. “There have been so many people who have retired in the past two years that I didn’t even think about would be people I would be having an immediate impact on.”

Players like Donald, yes, but also Michael Brockers and Tavon Austin and Rodger Saffold, players who began their careers with the Rams and were part of the transition from St. Louis to Los Angeles.

Going through that sudden change in their lives made for a tight-knit group that still communicates via group chat, one that navigated a new community together, even for players like Whitworth who signed with the Rams in 2017, one year after the move.

“It’s kind of like an away game that you stay at,” Whitworth said. “So you form these bonds and kind of all get to know the city together. So you kind of learn it all together – where to go eat, where to hang out and what to do, and telling each other about it – and so I think we’ve all kind of grown up here in L.A. together.”

For some of these players, their careers did not end with the Rams. Personnel decisions by the team led to them signing elsewhere in free agency prior to the end of their playing careers.

So when they do retire, Rockhold leans on other members of the football affairs team, such as Casey Africano and LaDarius Wile,y to help with introductions as she tries to bring them back into the fold with the team. Sometimes this also requires some reengagement from the coaching staff after players left due to the business of football.

“Maybe there’s animosity. They’ve done a really great job of welcoming them back with open arms and having conversations,” Rockhold said. “That has meant a lot to me to have that support from them, of them understanding, they genuinely want to build that relationship back with them, too.”

The Rams try to offer more than just meet-and-greets on game days. They let players know they can be resources for whatever they need in their post-football life, providing connections to mental health professionals or children’s counseling, among other examples.

That’s how the Rams try to bring players back into the fold, but many are still living in Los Angeles and creating their own bonds within their community.

When Donald retired, his AD99 Foundation’s efforts were focused entirely in Pittsburgh. But in the last two years, the organization — led by both Aaron and Erica Donald — has expanded into Los Angeles with youth camps and initiatives aimed at expanding inner-city access to educational, arts and athletic opportunities.

“Los Angeles, they adopted me. I always say that. And this is something I’ve been trying to do for a while now,” Donald said. “I want to show them the traits that they need just for life, period. Because football’s a small window, you get so much time to play it. So to really set these kids up in a way to be successful and have success, I’m blessed and honored to have the opportunity to do that.”

Donald, Whitworth and former Rams running back Todd Gurley also were active at this time last year in the aftermath of the wildfires that ravaged the county. They made donations and participated at distribution events to support both firefighters and those who lost their homes in the disaster.

These kinds of impacts are not new for Whitworth, who won the NFL’s Walter Payton Man of the Year Award following the 2021 season in part due to his work alongside Jared Goff with the L.A. Regional Food Bank during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Just further proof of the roots that he and his family put down in Los Angeles after a drive home from school.

“We really invested ourselves in the community in a lot of ways and that’s why I think for us this does feel like home and it feels like a place that we’re here and we want to make it even better,” Whitworth said. “We’re all pulling in the same direction.”