The Seahawks added a familiar name to their coaching staff this offseason when they hired DeShawn Shead as their assistant defensive backs coach.
Shead played 54 games and won a Super Bowl while playing for the Seahawks from 2012 to 2017 before wrapping up his playing career with the Lions in 2018. Head coach Pete Carroll saw Shead in 2019 and began talking to him about joining the coaching staff because Shead is “hard working, dedicated smart, creative, [and] tough.”
“We brought into this program just an extraordinary competitor, a guy with character and integrity and toughness and smarts and all that, and you can’t get enough guys like that around the program,” Carroll said, via the team’s website. “Interestingly, he’s carried over our football and he has retained it and maintains a really good command of what we did, and the techniques of the cornerback position in particular, as well as the safety spot -- he played all over for us, big time special teams player for us. So he just has a lot to offer. A lot of guys can play and they don’t take that stuff with them; he did. And he’s very sharp. So I expect really big things from him, and I think he’s going do a great job immediately, but down the road, we’re going to see DeShawn Shead do some great stuff. He’s really talented.”
The Seahawks saw secondary coach Nick Sorensen leave to become the special teams coordinator with the Jaguars, which leaves Shead to take over some of those responsibilities along with defensive passing game coordinator Andre Curtis. That will give him a larger than expected chance to prove Carroll’s instincts about his coaching acumen correct.