If you have watched freestyle dunking on the internet at any point in the last fifteen years, you have watched footage Billy Doran of Dunkademics shot. He has been filming dunkers since 2007. He has produced for Ballislife, Hoopmixtape, Mars Reel and the Drew League. So when I got him on camera at The Dunk Camp in Salt Lake City, I asked the one question his whole career qualifies him to answer: out of everybody you have ever filmed, who was the most impressive?
He said it was hard. Then he gave four names, and the reasons he gave for each one say more about where this sport is heading than any highlight reel would.
The Full List
“My favorite of all time is probably T-Dub. Just his balance and his style was so good.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
T-Dub is the all-time answer. Not the highest, not the strongest. Balance and style. That is the frame Billy judges everything by, and he set it before he named anybody else.
The current answer was Cam Hazzard’s recent footage, which has been running on the Dunkademics page all year and which Billy summed up in two words: Cam is crazy. Cam films at Billy’s gym in Los Angeles, so that assessment comes from someone who has watched the entire arc up close instead of catching the finished clips.
Third came Kaodirichi Akobundu-Ehiogu, who Billy described as the freakiest athlete he has ever seen in person. Kao is 6 foot 10. Billy’s point was not that he is the most complete dunker on the list, it is that watching someone that tall get that far off the ground in a live gym does something to your sense of what is physically possible.
“Donovan’s a beast. He’s just like a dunking machine. He’s so big, so strong. His hand speed is so good, his technique.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
Donovan Hawkins closed it out. Big, strong, elite hand speed, clean technique. Billy’s exact framing was that he is all around awesome, which is the compliment you give a dunker with no weak side. Billy wrote out his own long-form version of all four picks in the most impressive dunkers he has filmed.
Nobody on the List Got There for Vertical
Read back the words Billy used. Balance. Style. Hand speed. Technique. Four names, and the only one where raw athleticism is the headline is Kao, whose case is really about the ratio between his height and his hang time.
That is a real shift. Ten years ago the conversation in this community was almost entirely about numbers: how high, how many inches, whose head touched what. The person who has filmed more elite dunkers than anyone alive now grades on control and aesthetics first. The sport has moved from a jumping contest toward something closer to a judged discipline, where the shape you hold in the air matters as much as the altitude you reach.
You can see it in what wins now. A clean between-the-legs at a reasonable height reads better on camera than a violent one-hander that nobody can quite make out. The audience is more literate than it used to be, and the filming is better, and slow motion is unforgiving about sloppy technique.
The Sport Is Not American Anymore
The fifth name in the conversation was standing right next to Billy. Piotr Zawiślak is eighteen, he is from Poland, and it was his first time at this camp.
“He’s crazy. He’s young in the game and he’s already black band. That’s, it’s insane.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
Black band is the top of the band system dunkers use to rank each other, and holding it at eighteen is close to unheard of. Piotr told Billy that dunking in front of that camera used to be in his dream. A Polish teenager grew up on footage filmed in Los Angeles gyms, trained on outdoor rims, and showed up in Utah good enough that the person who shot that footage now rates him.
That pipeline did not exist in 2007. It exists because a media brand made this sport watchable from anywhere, and because camps like this one give the people who watched it a physical place to meet. I wrote about the first half of Piotr’s week in two 18-year-old dunkers meeting, and he told his side of this specific day in dunking in front of Dunkademics.
What Billy Told Him to Fix
I told Billy that Piotr’s goal is to be the number one dunker in the world and asked what stands between him and that. His answer was one variable.
“if he gains a few inches of vert… ’cause he’s already got the hand speed, the technique stuff like that.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
Which is the inverse of the advice most young dunkers actually need. The usual note is that you jump fine and your hands are slow. Piotr got told the hands and the technique are already elite and the jump is the last piece. Billy also flagged balance and polish earlier in the same conversation, which is exactly the criteria he used on T-Dub, so that note is not filler.
“Stay healthy, stay consistent. Work hard. You can definitely do it. You got it in you.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
Hyrum Said the Quiet Part
Hyrum Fechser, who posts as @hyt_check, was in the interview and gave the most honest line of the whole thing.
“I wasn’t at Dunk Camp until now, so this was the coolest part for me, seeing all these guys in person.”
Hyrum Fechser
He also said he wished he had caught Piotr’s Monday session live instead of watching the highlights afterward. That is the tension the whole community lives in. We know each other through screens, we rate each other through screens, and then once or twice a year everyone is in the same gym and it turns out the screen was underselling it the whole time.
This conversation only got filmed because Dennis Yu and I ran a session at camp on how athletes get found on Google and in AI tools, then offered to interview anyone who wanted one. The system behind it is written up in the repurposing system from Dunk Camp. Dunker Spotlight argued that this footage is a credential, Athlete Spotlight took it to athletes in every other sport, and BlitzMetrics covered the search side in coverage from the category authority.
Ask Billy this question in 2031 and the list changes. That is the healthiest sign this sport has.