SANTA CLARA, Calif. — For three tense minutes on Aug. 20, it appeared the San Francisco 49ers were in big trouble.
Toward the end of practice, Ricky Pearsall made a diving touchdown catch but was slow to get to his feet. When he did, he was clutching his arm. One trainer, then another, then a third gathered around him on the sideline and eventually began gently rotating Pearsall’s shoulder, which had given him trouble the previous summer.
Until that play, Pearsall had been a rare commodity in 49ers training camp — a starting-caliber receiver who was healthy and on track to play in Week 1. Brandon Aiyuk, Jauan Jennings, Jordan Watkins and Jacob Cowing were out with injuries. Demarcus Robinson was facing a three-game suspension. Skyy Moore and Marquez Valdes-Scantling had not yet been added.
Pearsall, grimacing as he continued to rotate his arm in increasingly larger arcs, eventually returned to practice that day, and the shoulder hasn’t been an issue.
“It’s football,” he said, sloughing off what happened.
Still, the sequence underscored both how fragile the position is and how essential Pearsall, who enters his second season with just four NFL starts, has become to the offense.
He’s already a favorite among teammates and coaches. That’s partly due to the gunshot wound he suffered before last season — Sunday marked one year since the shooting — and the grace with which he’s responded to it.
But he was well on his way to endearing himself to the 49ers before the incident. Pearsall is friendly, funny, cheerful (even through his ordeal) and talkative — extremely talkative. The 49ers want to see him succeed and, more to the point, need him to succeed due to their precarious receiver situation.
How does he try to prevent the injury bug from biting him, too? Whom does he consult in the locker room? What’s a typical day for the up-and-coming receiver?
We trailed Pearsall during the Aug. 20 session, one of the longest and hottest of training camp. The following is a tick-tock of what we observed. Pearsall spoke about his routine a day later.
10:46 a.m.: Pearsall emerges from the double doors of Levi’s Stadium holding his jersey and white cleats in his left hand. A few other 49ers, Nick Bosa prominent among them, have exited ahead of him, but Pearsall is the first wide receiver out the door.
10:47 a.m.: He walks straight into the weight room adjacent to the practice fields and doesn’t emerge for nearly 20 minutes. What’s he doing inside? There’s a reason he was carrying his cleats. He goes through a ground-up warmup, beginning by rubbing a small massage ball on the bottom of his feet.
“Everything starts with your feet, right?” Pearsall said. “And Elliott’s (director of functional performance Elliott Williams) doing some toe stuff. I know it sounds weird, but we’re doing a lot of toe stuff. We’ve got a foot fetish on this team or something.”
Pearsall works his way up his body, stretching and warming his calves, hamstrings, quadriceps, glutes and hips. He pays special attention to his ankles with controlled articular rotations (CARs) and other exercises. For Pearsall, ankle flexibility is paramount.
“When I come out (of breaks), I feel like that foot angle I’m at, it allows me to open up my hips better because I can get in that real deep position,” he says. “I think that’s helped me a lot. I remember in high school, I had terrible, terrible mobility. After getting on top of that, I felt like I was a totally different player as far as cutting and speed.”
11:05 a.m.: Pearsall walks out of the weight room with his cleats on and dons his No. 1 jersey for the first time. This is the so-called “activation” period, a time when every player is on the field to get the blood pumping and the muscles warm for practice. Pearsall works with bands, steps over hurdles and mimics firing off the line of scrimmage.
Five players seem more active than anyone else: Bosa, Bryce Huff, George Kittle, Christian McCaffrey and Pearsall. That Pearsall is part of that group is no coincidence.
“I’m not gonna lie, I watch them all the time,” he said. “I’m always asking those boys questions, especially Christian, George and Juice (Kyle Juszczyk) and those guys. The most psycho ones (as far as conditioning) are the ones that are right next to me in the locker room.”
11:15 a.m.: The 49ers start their walk-through. Pearsall is in the huddle with the starters, sandwiched between Kittle and McCaffrey.
11:26 a.m.: The players line up in rows across the width of the field and begin a more formal stretch — a series of jogs, sprints and other movements back and forth across the field.
11:30 a.m.: Special teams. Pearsall and the other starters don’t take part. Instead, they continue the movements they were doing in the activation period. Pearsall sprays water on his face, takes a swig and chats with Kittle, with whom he’s become especially close. They attended BottleRock, a local musical festival, together in the offseason and also traveled to Panama to play golf.
A day earlier, Pearsall had turned in one of the most dazzling catches of training camp, an over-the-shoulder snag at the sideline over safety Ji’Ayir Brown. Pearsall had told Kittle he loves that route, which prompted Kittle to go to offensive coordinator Klay Kubiak and request that he call it for the receiver.
“That’s my guy. That’s my brother,” Pearsall said. “I call him my brother now because he’s been that for me. He’s been big bro for me. He’s been a good vet. My locker’s right next to his.”
11:41 a.m.: The team breaks up into position groups. Pearsall and Robinson lead the receivers through drills.
The most interesting 49ers player to watch at the beginning of the season? It might be No. 1 … pic.twitter.com/puWvmPBGrL
— Matt Barrows (@mattbarrows) August 29, 2025
11:56 a.m.: The 49ers begin one-on-ones, a rare event this summer. They had scrapped the segment for two weeks because they had so few healthy bodies. Even more unusual: The first matchup features Pearsall against the team’s top cornerback, Deommodore Lenoir.
The two paired up only a handful of times last year and not at all in 2025, as Pearsall had missed the start of training camp while coming back from a hamstring strain.
On their first clash, Pearsall releases to the outside, and Lenoir completely shuts him down. Brock Purdy’s pass goes incomplete. But Pearsall takes note that the cornerback likes to wall off the outside, and on their second matchup, he runs a curl to the inside and creates plenty of separation. However, he slips at the top of his route and can only deflect the ball as it arrives.
“I volleyballed the ball,” he says.
12:08 p.m.: Time for 11-on-11 drills. Purdy and Pearsall have been on a tear during this segment in previous practices, but this one begins slowly for the duo. The first ball to Pearsall is a deep attempt knocked away by safety Marques Sigle. Pearsall gives the rookie a nice-job pat on the helmet as they jog back to the huddle.
His first competitive catch of the practice doesn’t come until 12:15 p.m., when he snags a short crosser against cornerback Dallis Flowers. When he rotates off the field during team-wide sessions, Pearsall invariably stands next to receivers coach Leonard Hankerson.
“I like to talk a lot about my route after (I run it),” he said. “Hank might not like that because he’s got a bunch of other things to worry about. But he’s still kind of talking to me after the route. I’m always asking, ‘Did you like what I did there? What could I have done better? What coverage was that?’ I’m asking him that, and he’s over here trying to get all the receivers together in the huddle, and I’m blowing his ear out.”
12:28 p.m.: Special teams again. Pearsall chats with Kittle and Aiyuk.
12:39 p.m.: The 49ers begin a move-the-ball period. As the first-team offense drives into the red zone, Pearsall lines up to the left against cornerback Renardo Green. At the snap, Pearsall steps aggressively to his left, then cuts back along the goal line toward the center of the field. Purdy is under pressure, and his throw is high. Pearsall stretches out to grab it but falls on his shoulder with Green on top of him.
“Oh yeah, I landed right on my shoulder,” Pearsall said. “I was fully extended. I kept the ball extended when I fell. And he was on my back. He was trying to rip it out. I landed straight onto my shoulder. So you can only imagine all that weight plus another person’s.”
12:50 p.m.: After being checked out by trainers, Pearsall is back on the field for a red zone sequence. Purdy executes a quick snap and fires an easy touchdown to Pearsall.
12:54 p.m.: The final segment is a two-minute drill that begins deep in the offense’s territory. When the first-team unit gets close to the goal line, Pearsall comes in motion from right to left, but goes back in the other direction as the ball’s snapped. Purdy drifts toward the right as well and hits Pearsall in the near corner of the end zone just in front of Lenoir.
1:08 p.m.: Three blasts sound from the team horn, which means practice is over.
1:10 p.m.: After a team-wide huddle, the players break off into groups. Pearsall, Aiyuk, Isaiah Hodgins, Hankerson and several other players gather for a post-practice prayer, something they do after every session. Pearsall said he’s been part of that prayer circle since last year.
“That’s probably my favorite moment of the practice because it’s all the guys who put in all the work,” he said. “You get in a circle, you come together. We say prayers for each other, the entire team.”
(Photo: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)