SANTA CLARA — Before he broke out his first dance moves, long before he became the spiritual leader of the 49ers’ Super Bowl-bound receiving corps, Kendrick Bourne had rhythm.

Bourne has always had the energy he exudes on the field. It almost forced him to give up football.

Talk to anyone on the 49ers, especially veteran receiver Emmanuel Sanders, and they’ll tell you Bourne, a third-year receiver who went undrafted out of Eastern Washington, is like a fountain of youth. Grace his presence and become revitalized.

Head coach Kyle Shanahan has compared Bourne to his 10-year-old son. (“I didn’t mean that as an insult,” he clarified.)

“The locker room is just so loose,” Sanders said. “I feel we’ve got a great core of guys. And obviously young guys. Just look at Kendrick Bourne … how he was even acting after getting a catch — smiling, having a good time.”

Bourne has always been that way — but he had to learn how to channel it on the field.

***

The moment of realization for Bourne came on a fall day in his junior year of high school in Portland, Ore. He had finally begun to fall in love with football and was thriving at Benson Polytechnic High under coach Donald Johnson. (“I wasn’t too infatuated with it” at first, he said.)

But Kendrick always had a propensity for teenage shenanigans. His mom, Luisa, was constantly on the receiving end of calls home from school administrators. So much so that she took away his cell phone and didn’t give it back until his senior year. All the way back to elementary school, she would request his teachers sit him at the front of class.

“Because if he sat in the middle of class with other students, he just had the class unfocused,” Luisa said.

Five games into the season, he was caught in possession of marijuana and suspended from the team for the rest of the year.

Now, this wasn’t out of character for Kendrick then. By his third year at Benson, he was struggling to keep a 2.0 GPA and, in his words, “I was just dumb.”

He needed a savior, and he got one.

When he was questioning everything — his passion for football, his future in this world — in stepped Coach Johnson. They met when Kendrick was a junior, and he recruited him to a new football program at a suburban charter school 20 minutes away, Milwaukie Academy of the Arts, the next season.

At the time, Kendrick didn’t have a single college scholarship offer, and his grades would have likely kept him out of most schools any other way.

Johnson wasn’t just a coach; he became a second father to Kendrick. He helped him raise his grades, get recruited and come out of his shell on the field. And yes, that means his first in-game dance moves.

“I call him my blessing in disguise,” Kendrick said. “I feel like God sent him to me to see if I was going to make the choice of listening to him or not. ‘Not’ is what I usually do, what I was doing as a teenager.”

At the same time, Luisa was trying to rein in the youngest of her three sons. She saw him running with the wrong crowd.

You can’t keep doing this, she would tell him.

“We went through some serious conversations in the car,” she said. “He saw me cry a lot.”

It was personal for Luisa not just because it was her son, but because she had been there before herself. Kendrick joked that he inherited being “young and dumb” from his mom.

When Kendrick was 2, Luisa spent two confusing weeks inside the King County Correctional Facility for overpayment of food stamps. It’s where she found religion.

She prayed one night, God, if you let me out of this situation tonight, I promise you I will change my life.

“Before I could put my head down on that bed,” she said, “the guard came and knocked on that door — three times — and said, ‘Louisa Bourne, pack your stuff up, you’re out of here tonight.’”

She and her husband, Eric, raised four kids in a two-bedroom home in Portland. Kendrick and his siblings all shared one room. Before he even picked up a football, Eric instilled a work ethic in him that is evident to this day. Kendrick watched his dad work as a landscaper and would try to help out, even taking on leaf-blowing duties as early as 8 years old.

From left to right: Evans Bourne (brother), Kendrick Bourne, Luisa Turner (mom), Andrew Bourne (brother) after an All-Star game Kendrick played in. (Courtesy of the Bourne Family)

Kendrick and his mom Luisa during his senior season at Milwaukie. (Courtesy of the Bourne Family)

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Kendrick didn’t play football for the first time until signing up for Pop Warner in the sixth grade after informing his mom about it. It wasn’t until high school that he began to fall in love with the game.

When he told her about the opportunity to join Johnson’s program at Milwaukie, she was elated at the chance for a fresh start at a smaller school. But her first question was, how will you get there? She worked odd hours for FedEx and couldn’t guarantee she’d be able to drive him each morning.

OK, mom, I’ll do it. I can do it, he told her.

“It was something where he had decided to make a change,” Luisa said.

Soon, the scholarship offers began to trickle in. Kendrick settled on Eastern Washington, where he would play alongside fellow future NFL receivers, Cooper Kupp and Samson Ebukam, and earned All-American honors his senior season.

***

Luisa remembers the first time she saw Kendrick play on television. She remembers the first time she saw him in his college uniform.

As the size of the crowds grew, Kendrick only began to feed off it more.

“Each level was just a higher dose of excitement,” Luisa said. “Every time he catches the ball, he just looks for those cheers, the excitement of what people get from it.”

In some aspect, that’s what inspires his spontaneous moves. At the Super Bowl, on the largest stage of all, who knows what to expect. (He says he mostly looks up dance videos on YouTube to imitate.)

But in reality, it goes back further than that.

Kendrick isn’t just dancing during the game. He’s grooving with teammates before and after games … at practice … in the locker room. If there’s a beat, he’s moving.

It’s all in the Bourne family name.

Luisa’s mom — Kendrick’s grandmother — was an island dancer for a resort in American Samoa, where she lived and where Luisa was born. That was passed onto Luisa, and Luisa onto her children. Family get-togethers? More like dance competitions.

“Somebody starts dancing and everything starts,” Luisa said. “It comes from that atmosphere of understanding dancing brings celebration and excitement and shows how much you’re loving this moment right now. You’re loving this moment right now and you just want to express it.”

Kendrick sang in the church choir — he gets his singing voice from his dad — and played the drums. At Christmas, he’d do dance skits for the family.

When she watched Kendrick at Eastern Washington, Luisa prayed for one more thing: to see that name on the back of a jersey someday.

While Luisa took her husband’s last name, Turner, Kendrick and her other two sons kept the Bourne surname. Luisa’s father was just 43 when he died, and she has tried to honor him ever since. But, with no brothers who will have kids, there was only one way to pass the name to the next generation.

***

Talking in front of his locker last week, Bourne made an apt comparison.

“Running routes is almost like dancing,” Bourne said. “You’ve got to be choreographed right. You’ve got to be in-sync with the quarterback. Everything has got to be choreographed right for the play to work.”

Just as much his dance moves relate to his game, so does the attitude behind them.

When Shanahan likened Bourne to his son, Bourne didn’t take offense to it. That’s exactly the mindset with which he approaches the game — and life.

“I’m enjoying it. I’m legit happy about it,” he said. “There’s nothing fake. It’s what makes me happy.”

And it’s contagious. The entire receiver group is pulsating with energy. Sanders will approach Bourne and start dancing, and vice versa. Deebo Samuel almost has the moves to match Bourne. Richie James Jr. punctuates every win with a backflip in the victory formation.

They have fun, but nobody in the receiver room holds them to higher standards than themselves.

When they’re watching tape, expect to get called out.

“We’ve got a serious side, too,” James said. “If you’re getting strapped up … dealing with the Richard Sherman treatment … we’re going to say it.”

It’s also infectious. The 49ers locker room is among the loosest in the NFL. No group embodies that better than the wide receivers, and no single person more so than Bourne.

Sunday night, Bourne will bring that energy to the game’s biggest stage. When he takes the field at Hard Rock Stadium for the first time, roughly two hours before kickoff, he’ll find each of his fellow receivers for a custom, intricately coordinated handshake with each.

It’s all a part of what makes Kendrick Bourne who he is, and what has helped fuel the 49ers’ Super Bowl run.

“We all be wilding out. We’re just so unique, man,” Bourne said. “I feel like there’s no other place like it.”