Growing the Sport of Dunking, One Story at a Time
Dunk Talk exists to take the people who are amazing at this, document their stories and their knowledge, and put it where the world (and the rest of the internet) can finally find it.
Where it started
When I started Dunk Talk, the goal was simple: grow the sport of dunking by sharing people’s stories. That’s still the mission that sits above everything.
Here’s the thing I figured out early. So many amazing dunkers have their entire life’s work sitting as random clips on social media. Incredible jumpers, guys with wild bags, people who have put years into this, and almost none of their real story is written down anywhere. After I met Dennis Yu and started learning how repurposing actually works, it clicked for me: a lot of the value of a podcast doesn’t even sit in the video. It sits in the transcript. Filming an episode and letting it sit on YouTube leaves most of the value on the table.
What we actually do
So this is the whole idea. I take people who are amazing at what they do, dunking, jumping, all of it, and I give them a platform to tell their story. We sit down for about an hour and document their journey, their experiences, and their achievements. I am also learning how to interview better every single episode.
Most guests come on once to tell their story. But the ones who are in their prime and still leveling up come back as they do new things, a new vertical PR, a new dunk, a big contest win, so the show keeps documenting what is actually happening in the dunk community as it happens. Then we don’t let that episode just sit there. We turn it into articles, we build personal brand websites, and we build dunker profiles across the web, all linked together.
Why it matters
For the dunker
A lot of these guys go from having basically zero online presence outside their social media to having real, documented properties that show up when you search their name and help build their Google Knowledge Panel. Best case, I get someone a profile on Dunk Talk, on Dunkademics, and on the Minnesota Dunk Squad site, and it changes what the internet knows about them.
For the sport
Before this podcast there was almost no real information about professional dunking online. Plenty of generic stuff, but nothing in the weeds: what being a pro dunker actually is, what specific dunks are, how hard they are, what they mean, how to do them, how to train the right way. All of that lived inside people’s heads. We get it out and onto the internet for the first time.
How it all ties together
Every episode feeds a bigger machine. For a lot of these dunkers, their episode ends up being the single richest record of who they are and what they have done that exists anywhere.
- The podcast is the raw material, an hour of someone telling their real story.
- Transcripts become articles on this site and on the guests’ own sites.
- Those transcripts build and update personal brand websites (Cam Hazzard, Ethan Pimstone, Miles McDeezy, and more).
- They feed dunker profiles on the Dunk Talk guest list, on Dunkademics, and on Minnesota Dunk Squad.
- And it all connects to where the sport is going, including Shaq’s DunkMan League.
Who this is for
First, it’s for dunkers, the people who love this enough to sit down for an hour of pure dunking talk. But the bigger audience is everybody, including Google and the AI models that are becoming how people learn about things. The whole point is taking what lives inside the best dunkers’ heads and putting it somewhere the rest of the world can find it, especially as dunking keeps growing.
That’s the mission. Document the people, document the sport, and grow dunking by making all of it findable.