Player carted off the field on a stretcher at 49ers training camp

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SANTA CLARA -- The first serious injury of 49ers training camp happened on Sunday.
The third-string defense was facing the third-string offense in an 11-on-11 team drills. Rookie running back Jordan James carried the ball and ran through a hole on the left side of the offensive line, where tackle Isaac Alarcon had pancaked defensive lineman Tarron Jackson.
When Jackson went down, some of his teammates cheered for Alarcon because his block was so good. But, Jackson stayed on the ground, and Alarcon quickly realized that he was injured. So he whistled for the trainers to come over.
Defensive lineman Tarron Jackson suffers scary injury
Soon, every player on the 49ers was kneeling silently as the trainers worked on Jackson's neck. John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan stood right next to him and seemed to offer him words of encouragement. Then, the trainers carefully lifted Jackson onto a stretcher and carted him off the field.
Here's what Shanahan said about Jackson after practice.
"Always scary when someone gets taken off on a stretcher. But just letting you guys know, he is conscious, inside communicating with us, can feel all his extremities, and they're taking him down to Stanford now just for further testing. So hopefully, we cleared the real scary stuff, and hopefully we'll get some good news on his neck.”
What was Shanahan's message to the team?
“I mean, it’s always hard like that and especially when guys watch that," Shanahan said. "We were close to him, so we could hear him talking, we could see everything moving, so I just told the guys that, which I think eases them up a little bit for the biggest fears and asked them if they're okay to continue to go. They all yelled ‘yes,’ and then we finished our last period and a half.”
Was Jackson conscious when he was on the ground?
"Yeah, which was good," Shanahan said. "I mean, that made it easier for the players, just to hear that part.”
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Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.
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