Steffi Sorensen stood at the free-throw line.
Swish.
Took another shot.
Drained it.
She sank shot after shot, oblivious to the crowd around her, until she was 10 for 10.
“I was pretending I was out shooting hoops with my brother,” the UF senior said. “I could probably write a book on the 500 things you think before you go to the line. I wish I could go 10 for 10 now, gosh.”
As a fifth-grade student, Sorensen wasn’t eligible to win a trophy at her older brother’s middle school’s free-throw shooting competition, but she was compensated with a dwarfing North Carolina Antawn Jamison jersey.
“It was huge on me then, but I still have it,” she said.
For the Jacksonville native, who grew up with three sporting loves — tennis, golf and basketball — missing out on the trophy was a typical snub for a player who took a beating as a self-described thin girl playing with boys. She came out of high school as an unheralded player and had a nomadic career spanning three schools.
Making Boys Cry
Sorensen’s love for her brother, Eric, almost proved fatal once. As an infant, Sorensen once witnessed her brother jump in the pool.
“He jumped in, he could swim,” her mother, Kirsten Sorensen, recalled. “I guess she thought she could too. She went right after him and jumped in, and I had to jump in and pull her out.”
It didn’t end in the deep end of the pool either. Big brother started playing basketball, and she started around 4 years old at a hometown basketball camp.
Founded as the Switzerland Point Basketball Camp in the summer of 1995 with 18 kids, it has since turned into the Steve Melgard Camp, with turnouts of up to 300 campers in recent years.
“It’s a competitive camp, and that’s what I tell them at the beginning: ‘Not everybody gets a trophy,’” Melgard said.
But Sorensen wasn’t everybody — she received trophies. There were times she’d come home with more awards than her taller — now 6-foot-4 — more physically gifted brother.
And it wasn’t just her older brother she was beating; it was the whole camp.
Players are sorted into different leagues based on age — NBA, Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference teams.
“She always wanted to be on Florida’s team,” said Melgard.
Within their age divisions, the kids played and worked at different stations to develop fundamentals, and Sorensen soon was playing with the older, upper-division boys and beating them.
“A lot of times she made the boys cry,” he said, partly because of the notion of getting upended by a meager girl who Melgard described as “ruthless.”
But the kids Sorensen was beating weren’t the only ones with waterworks.
The Sorensens look back on it now and laugh, but more than once Steffi would come home crying because Eric held her to such a high standard as a teammate, and she couldn’t bear to disappoint him.
The two siblings were a basketball tandem. When they were teammates, Eric — the taller post player — would go for a rebound and chuck it to his smaller sister down the court for an easy bucket.
“She felt like her brother was counting on her to make the basket,” Kirsten said. “If she got it and she threw it to him in the post, she expected him to make it too.”
That toughness is echoed by anyone close to Sorensen.
‘Take it Back’
During a sixth-grade basketball game, Sorensen leapt for a rebound and was shoved to the ground. She landed awkwardly and sprained her right wrist.
The injury was a devastating and eventual career-ending blow to the then-promising tennis player named after legend Steffi Graf.
“I wanted to be a tennis player, that’s what I wanted to do,” said Sorensen, even though she believes she would have followed basketball sooner or later. “I got hurt, and I couldn’t really do that anymore.”
For the avid tennis player and golfer, who lettered in both in addition to basketball in high school despite the injury, it caused irreparable damage, and Sorensen still hasn’t regained full strength in her right wrist.
During her stint at Santa Fe College, she reinjured it and was sidelined for two-and-a-half weeks, during which she tried to teach herself how to shoot left-handed.
The left-handed shooting didn’t work out, but the flick of her right wrist did. She has become a prolific, right-handed, three-point shooter — she has led her teams in three-point shooting at each of her stops: Florida Golf Coast, Santa Fe and two years at UF. According to Melgard, she became a “great” shooter in her high-school days, when she saw a shooting coach in Orlando.
“That’s the first question I got when she started to get successful, is ‘Can she beat you?’” said Eric, who played at Santa Fe. “That, at a younger age, is kind of offending. She’s a girl, blah, blah, blah. Now, it’s humbling for them to even ask.”
It seemed the only unconquerable opponent Sorensen faced was off the court, from the cynical recruiting world. Ironically, all her accolades on the hardwood couldn’t salvage her in high school.
She hit a growth spurt in eighth grade, and while the height came — the physique never followed.
She heard college coaches’ advice to put on 20 pounds. She did weight training, played in weighed-down vests, took boxing lessons in the summer and attended the High Intensity Training Center in Jacksonville.
“Even with weight training, she’s just not ever going to be a big girl,” Kirsten said.
Despite her lack of size, she became the all-time leading scorer in St. Johns County with 2,147 points and starred at Bartram Trail High School, making the varsity team as a freshman. She was ultimately named the 2006 Class 5A Player of the Year with her senior-year statline of 19 points, 10 boards, five assists, six steals and three blocks per game.
But people weren’t blinded by the glamour of her prizes. Rather, critics raised their eyebrows at the slender Sorensen and challenged how she could be this dominant looking so contrastingly delicate. In her senior year of high school, she was 5 foot 10 and measured 135 pounds.
“People didn’t see that I had skill, not saying that I do,” Sorensen said. “But I mean, I’m here now and I’ve had to work for it.”
Even the swish of a net or the buzzing of a shot clock couldn’t drown out the scathing reviews.
“I wasn’t the best player in the state, which I didn’t think I was, but I won the award,” said Sorensen of her feelings about winning Miss Florida Basketball in 2006. “It was almost like, ‘take it back, I don’t even want it.’ To hear all this criticism saying that I didn’t deserve it — look, I didn’t vote myself.”
No Sour Grapes
When Sorensen decided on Florida Gulf Coast after her illustrious high school career, it was in its last year of being a Division-II school.
Some were surprised her high-school career didn’t translate into a more prestigious school.
“Her jersey’s retired at high school. Would you call if you were a recruiter?” Steffi’s dad, Chris Sorensen asked. “Maybe just inquire or look. I don’t know why, and it doesn’t really matter why. But it’s not a sour grape.”
Sorensen was pivotal in a tantalizing year where the No. 1 Eagles went undefeated until the D-II national championship game, when they lost to Southern Connecticut State. She hit the shot that sent the team to the championship.
Citing a desire to be closer to home, along with an adamant refusal to sit out a year per NCAA transferring rules — Sorensen transferred to Santa Fe, once again following in her brother’s footsteps. Playing at SFC gave her more of a Gainesville audience, which made it easier to walk on at UF for her junior year.
This season, her senior year, she has been more relied upon as an offensive source with fewer assists than last year, but just playing a minute more (31.2). A year after becoming an established three-point threat, Sorensen has taken more shots and ended up with lower field-goal and three-point percentages.
She has upped her rebounds to 6.3 boards per game and has been a constant with 9.6 points per game — good for the team leader this year.
Once again, her effort and work paid off, and although her senior season didn’t materialize the way she envisioned, Sorensen doesn’t hold any grudges over her brother, critics or competitors.
“Other sports didn’t keep me entertained like basketball did,” Sorensen said. “I have a short attention span, so something that could hold my attention was a good thing. Eighteen years later, I guess it’s holding my attention fairly well.”
It’s certainly been more attention-grabbing for her than the crowd watching a fifth grader shoot freebies.
