This is episode 41 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen (no Hunter this week, and apologies for the gap between episodes; life got busy and I’m flying to Vegas in a week for reasons we’ll get to). The guest, for something like the sixth time, is Donovan Hawkins, and the premise is simple: he was the best dunker of 2024, and we went through the whole year, month by month, number by number, to document how a season like that actually gets built.
The year in numbers
Donovan started lifting with THP thirteen months before this recording, and the before-and-after table is the cleanest progression I’ve ever put on this show:
- Power clean: 205 in January, 275 now, with three near-misses at 315 that he throws too high and can’t catch.
- Back squat: 335 to 435.
- Front squat: 245 to 365.
- Bodyweight: 199 to 222, thirty pounds of mostly lean mass at 6’4”.
- Vertical: roughly 45-46 to a working 48.5-49+, capped by the famous 0.968-second flight time.
His one-word answer for the driver: consistency, paired with the harder thing, figuring out what works for his specific body, because his programming looks like nobody else’s on the THP roster.
The weirdest recovery profile in pro dunking
This is the section every training nerd should bookmark. Donovan’s nervous system is, per John Evans, unusually sensitive: if he lifts even twice in a week and then jumps, he jumps worse. The protocol they’ve converged on is four weeks of loading followed by two weeks completely off, not a deload, actually off, repeated as a cycle. The cautionary tale that taught them: last winter he lifted five months straight and his jumping collapsed to the point where Eastbays took 110 percent effort. They tapered him down and he jumped better every week as the volume disappeared.
The jumping schedule is even more extreme: on average once every other week, and the session before we recorded was his first jump in four and a half weeks (40 minutes, nothing crazy). He was careful to add the disclaimer, and I’ll repeat it: do not copy this. The textbook says jump weekly for adaptation; Donovan jumps when his body says yes. The reason his hands stay world-class anyway is six years of accumulated reps since he started low-rimming at 15, plus deliberate hand-speed drills: the same three drills, half an hour each, two to four times a week, starting about three weeks out from any big event. He pairs that with visualization that begins the moment an event is confirmed.
On the upper-body question (Donovan is the community’s leading bench-press apologist): his honest answer is that he does it because training is fun for him, John’s rule being that a program you hate is a program you quit. And the weight-gain data point matters: thirty pounds in a year with zero observed cost to his vertical. The working theory he and John share: two-foot jumpers tend to jump better heavier as long as the mass is lean; one-foot jumpers should stay as light as possible. Every two-footer they ask reports the same thing.
The events: Abu Dhabi, K54, Venice, Dunk Camp
The 2024 schedule: an NBA All-Star event in February, Final Four work in April, then the summer gauntlet of K54 in Paris, FIBA Edmonton, the Black Band Gauntlet, Dunk Camp, and the Venice Ball win (no props, which mattered to him). His favorite event of the year, and of his career: the Abu Dhabi trip, a week-plus in the Middle East, three events, NBA players judging. Second place: Dunk Camp, with admitted bias since he performs in the show; 2025 will be his first time at the Utah location.
His top three dunks of 2024, ranked live on the call:
- Underboth Scorpion, which he hit twice this year.
- Eastbay Whirlwind (we settled the nomenclature on air: the Whirlwind implies the 360, so no need to say 360 Eastbay Whirlwind), roughly 16 attempts before it went.
- Tomahawk 360 Windmill at Dunk Camp, the one that caught even the pros off guard.
The In-N-Out phone call
Asked for his highest-adrenaline moment of the year, Donovan didn’t pick a contest. He picked a booth at In-N-Out. After the Vegas session with Billy and Josh where everything clicked, they’d recorded his height check properly: 240fps slow motion, phone held high and stationary past the three-point line, clean straight-leg landing. Nobody at the gym knew what the number meant. Sitting at dinner afterward, Donovan called John Evans and read him the flight time: 0.968 seconds, four thousandths longer than Isaiah Rivera’s when he first tested 50 inches in 2022. John started yelling through the phone. Donovan, genuinely, did not know what it meant until John told him: that’s 50. The biggest rush of his year arrived over the phone, after the session, holding a burger.
2025 goals
- Test 50 officially. One number, on a Vertec, then new goals get set. Nothing else matters until that.
- Weight room: 315 power clean (then 335, because I bullied him into raising it; he catches everything high anyway), 500-pound parallel back squat by December, 405 front squat.
- Dunks: characteristically, Donovan keeps no dunk checklist; he does what’s fun or what someone suggests. Under pressure he gave me three: Underboth Whirlwind, 360 Underboth off the backboard, and a new Bounce dunk record (the current mark sits around 9’9.25”). I also demanded a 540 on the record. He owes us a 540.
The Vegas mega-session
And the announcement: Donovan texted me a couple of months ago about a date in Vegas, and it has snowballed into possibly the biggest amateur-pro group session ever assembled. The confirmed list he read off: Dom Gonzales, Tre Finley, Brandon Ruffin, Alex Arzone, JaySmoove, Isaac Baker, Schunker, Travis Slayen, Kyle Cornell, Slinks, Finn Addy, Hyrum Perry, Dylan Peru, Dominic Moore, Andy Behle, Hyrum Fechser, Jacob Yun, Mason Baker, Donovan, and me. Fourteen-plus dunkers, four hours of court, Billy filming for Dunkademics. A show was floated and fell through, and honestly Donovan and I both prefer it this way: session atmosphere over performance atmosphere. Whether Donovan is fully peaked for it is an open experiment (four weeks loaded, two weeks unloading by session day), but “not fully peaked Donovan” has been the best dunker in the world all year anyway.
Donovan is “donovanhawkins_37” on Instagram. The Vegas session content drops across everyone’s pages soon. Comment with your own best-dunker-of-2024 pick if you disagree, and make your case. Next episode is on how your training environment affects your jumping.