97's Journey

Jackson grew up skating on a rink his family shoveled out of the back yard on Lake Vermont in Miltona, dragging out portable lights when the sun went down. He played for Alexandria High as a freshman and sophomore, and in August 2024 moved more than a thousand miles to the Coeur d'Alene Hockey Academy in Idaho for his junior year, carrying a 3.9 GPA and chasing a college scholarship. He is the oldest of four, close with his three younger sisters, Raegan, Audrey and Katherine, and through the Fellowship of Christian Athletes he volunteered at hockey camps and prayed with teammates and opponents alike.

On January 24, 2025, during a game in Burnaby, British Columbia, he went into the boards head first. He did not breathe for eight minutes. A team trainer and an off-duty firefighter at the game performed CPR and brought him back. Surgeons at Vancouver General fused his C1 and C2 vertebrae and reattached his head to his spine. They told Erica and Jason he was lucky to be alive, and that he would never breathe on his own again or feel or move anything below his neck.

Three weeks later he started saying he could feel his legs. Doctors called it phantom sensation. On February 12 he was airlifted to Shepherd Center in Atlanta, where he spent eight months doing eight to ten hours a day of therapy and slowly got back partial feeling and movement in all four limbs. Staff called it a miracle. Jackson, deadpan, started calling himself the miracle boy.

None of it was gentle. Weaning off the ventilator meant practicing breathing on his own for minutes at a time, for months. Nerve pain made his body feel like it was on fire. A misplaced feeding tube punctured his colon and left him without nutrition for weeks, and he dropped from 180 pounds to 126. He came off the ventilator on May 30, 2025, his eighteenth birthday, which almost nobody with his injury does.

Home that September, he started at Courage Kenny in Golden Valley two or three times a week, three hours each way, and was back in class at Alexandria High in October. In March 2026 he began twelve weeks on the ARC-EX by Onward, the first FDA approved spinal cord stimulator of its kind. He had set one goal for the year, and on May 29, 2026 he met it: across the stage at graduation on forearm crutches, in front of his whole school. The next day he turned nineteen.

Jackson is still quadriplegic, and will be for life. He is also not finished. He is in Atlanta now, back at Shepherd Center for Beyond Therapy, building the strength and independence to go to college on his own in 2027. What he told his family in the hospital, when he could not speak and had to mouth the words, was that he was going to walk again and play hockey again.