Meet the 49ers’ new do-everything coordinator, Nick Sorensen: 'Our players love him' (2024)

When Nick Sorensen was 10 years old, he wrote a list of goals and taped it to the desk in his bedroom. Among the items:

• One thousand sit-ups a day

• One thousand push-ups a day

• Dunk a basketball by sophom*ore year of high school

His mom was stunned — not so much that Nick, the youngest of her four kids, had such an ambitious routine but that no one ever knew about it. Kathleen Sorensen didn’t discover the list until after Nick had gone off to college.

“He must have done them in the bedroom,” she said of the push-ups and sit-ups. “I said to my husband, ‘Did you know this was on his desk?’ He didn’t know, either.”

The story starts to get to the heart of the person the San Francisco 49ers hired to be their next defensive coordinator. Fiery news conferences? Chest bumps with his players? Chewing out officials on the sideline? No, no and definitely not. Sorensen never has been a look-at-me kind of guy.

The 49ers players, in fact, often are surprised to learn the laid-back assistant played in the NFL. He seems more surfer than safety. And they’re floored when he tells them he spent 10 years in the league, mainly as a core special teams player. Sorensen’s strengths as a player: speed, smarts and an incredible calm.

“Nick was a leader, but he led because he had a calmness about him,” said longtime special teams coordinator Brad Seely, who coached Sorensen — as well as noted special teams wild men Blake Costanzo and Bubba Ventrone — for the Cleveland Browns.

“Those guys, they were very high-strung,” Seely recalled. “They were the guys that were going to lead the attack. But (Nick) was the guy who was gonna plan it correctly and finish the job for you. You could just leave it in his hands and you knew it was gonna get done right, which as a coach you really appreciate.”

Officially, the 49ers interviewed five candidates to be their next defensive coordinator, although they also looked into two decidedly more high-profile coordinators, Steve Spagnuolo, who ultimately signed a new contract with the Kansas City Chiefs, and Jeff Ulbrich, who wasn’t let out of his contract with the New York Jets.

Kyle Shanahan ended up tapping Sorensen for two main reasons. The first is that he’s the opposite of outgoing coordinator Steve Wilks, who had no background in San Francisco’s beloved defensive system when he arrived a year ago and who proved to be a difficult fit throughout the season. Shanahan fired Wilks three days after the 49ers’ Super Bowl loss to the Chiefs.

Sorensen already is well-versed in what the 49ers do. He’s worked with everyone from the linebackers to the safeties to the nickelbacks over the last two seasons and he’s run the 49ers’ weekly, team-wide meeting, “The Ball,” which emphasizes creating takeaways and avoiding turnovers.

“His time in the building really prepared him for this,” Shanahan said this week. “Our players love him.”

Sorensen also spent eight years in Seattle, first as a special teams assistant and later helping to run the same Pete Carroll-style defensive system the 49ers have used the last seven seasons. Carroll, in fact, predicted Sorensen’s current job title as far back as 2017.

“I foresee with Nick Sorensen that he’s going to be a coordinator in this league,” he said. “He already could be on special teams. Now he’s going to develop his defensive stuff, and I see him moving up.”

The other reason is that, like Shanahan, Sorensen has been a football junkie since he was a little boy.

One of the family stories involves an urgent call from the elementary school principal’s office. Back in the 1980s, the Sorensens lived in the town of Dundee, Fla., in what’s considered the state’s bible belt. At the time, Kathleen said, there were 700 residents and seven churches. So when the school called to say that Nick and older brother, Derek, were swearing in school, it was a big deal. Mother and father were summoned to the school.

“I said, ‘Uh, that’s not possible. They don’t curse,’” Kathleen said.

The explanation involved their father, Dick, who’d been a linebacker at the University of Miami in the late 1960s. He’d taken the boys to a game that Saturday and had invariably referred to the Hurricanes’ longtime rival, the University of Florida, as the “damn Gators.” He said it so much that’s what the boys thought the team in orange and blue was called.

“So the boys went to school that Monday after watching the football game and started talking about the damn Gators,” Kathleen said. “They had no idea it was a curse word.”

Nick was tall, lean and faster — much faster — than all the other kids in any sport he took up. He was winning 50-meter freestyle races as soon as he hit the water. He achieved his dunk-a-basketball goal well before his sophom*ore year. And for a time, the Sorensens figured that if Nick ever played professionally it would be on a baseball field.

“They’d put him in center field and they didn’t need a right or left fielder,” Dick said. “That’s how fast he was.”

Football, however, was the sport that took hold and never let go. As a little boy, Nick spent Saturdays and Sundays in the fall watching football with his dad and older brother, and his obsession with studying games only intensified with time.

Mike Skinner, who coached Nick at Marshall High in Northern Virginia, said Nick would play a game on a Friday night and already would be up to speed on the next opponent when he met with coaches the next day. He was a master at finding the opponent’s “tells.” Maybe the wide receiver lined up with one foot farther back than the other whenever he was about to run a fade pattern. Or perhaps the left guard got lazy and came out of his stance a bit whenever it was a pass play.

“We’d get to school on Monday and he’d come running down to the weight room: ‘I got him! I got him! I got him!’ I’d say, ‘OK, who is it?’ ‘No. 74 — he’s the guy we’ve gotta watch,’” Skinner recalled. “And that made a big difference back in the day — all the stuff you could find out on film. The film was a big deal.”

Being able to handle a variety of roles — often on the spot — has been a theme for Sorensen, including in high school. By his senior season, he was the team’s quarterback, safety, field goal kicker and punter. And before he took over as punter, he was the long snapper.

Skinner, who coached defense, was sure Sorensen’s future would be at safety. Virginia Tech, however, liked him as an athletic, running quarterback.

At least for a little while.

He spent his first two seasons in Blacksburg at quarterback and was named the team’s MVP in its 1998 Gator Bowl loss to North Carolina. A few days later, however, head coach Frank Beamer asked Sorensen to switch to safety. It was no coincidence that a hotshot quarterback from Newport News, Va., Michael Vick, picked Virginia Tech over Syracuse two weeks after that.

Sorensen spent his final two college seasons at safety and linebacker, and the Miami Dolphins signed him as an undrafted rookie in 2001. Though he lasted only a few months there, it’s where he got the nickname that stayed with him during his decade-long career.

Sorensen worried that no one in the NFL would see him as a safety or special teams demon. With his close-cropped hair, he still looked like a quarterback. He wanted a more menacing appearance, so he grew his hair out. As soon as he stepped into the Dolphins facility, defensive end Jason Taylor called him “Sunshine” after a character from the movie “Remember the Titans.” Sorensen had the character’s easygoing demeanor, too, and as long as he kept his hair long, the nickname stuck.

Sorensen was picked up by the St. Louis Rams later that season and began carving out a role in practices. He lined up at safety, cornerback and wide receiver for the scout team. Before a game against the Atlanta Falcons, the Rams had him play quarterback to emulate his former Virginia Tech teammate, Vick.

He truly stood out on special teams and recovered a fumble in the Rams’ conference championship win over the Philadelphia Eagles that season. That caught the eye of Seely, who was with the Rams’ Super Bowl opponent, the New England Patriots, at the time.

“First, he was absolutely a good athlete,” Seely said. “He could really run. He was a fast player. And he was one of those guys who — he didn’t make errors. You could tell when you watched the tape on guys like that — OK, he’s pretty cerebral. He understands the game and he knows what’s happening.”

Sorensen’s coaching career began in Seattle in 2013. Three years later, he moved to defense. Though he was on track to become a defensive coordinator, a more immediate opportunity presented itself in May of 2021 when Jacksonville Jaguars’ special teams coordinator Brian Schneider, who now has the same role with the 49ers, abruptly left the team for personal reasons.

Jaguars general manager Trent Baalke consulted with Seely, who recommended Sorensen for the job. It didn’t last long. That was Urban Meyer’s lone, tumultuous, scandal-laden season as head coach in Jacksonville. He was fired in December and most of the staff, including Sorensen, wasn’t retained.

Shanahan and the 49ers scooped him up that offseason and he quickly took on the capable, jack-of-all-trades role for which he’s become known. He helped coach the linebackers in 2022 when position coach Johnny Holland was out dealing with cancer treatment. Last season, he was the team’s passing game specialist and worked with the nickelbacks.

“Our players are used to him,” Shanahan said. “I’ve been with him for the last two years. I think he was close last year to being ready (to run the defense). I think he’s even more ready now.”

(Top photos of Nick Sorensen: Kyle Terada / USA Today and George Gojkovich / Getty Images)