Adam Lee

Adam Lee is a dunker from Taiwan who spent a year studying abroad at Winona State University and turned it into the start of a dunk career. Basketball had been his favorite thing since childhood, to the point of playing eight to ten hours a day, but he never made a school team; he played on a college club side until he was 21. He jumped constantly the whole time, for rebounds and blocks and layups, and still points to that as the most basic vertical training there is. What he could not do was dunk. Before he arrived in the United States, the best he had was touching the rim.

In September 2024, his first month in Winona, he did not know many classmates, so he went to the gym every day and hooped until another player struck up a conversation. Adam said he wanted his first dunk before his credits ran out, and was told to go ask the president of the school’s dunk club, because that guy knows everything. That was Justin Blanchard, who runs the club’s sessions every Friday afternoon. Justin worked out whether Adam was a one-foot or two-foot jumper and taught him when to swing his arms to get more out of the takeoff. Watching 5’10” and 5’11” guys in that gym dunk cleanly every single time rearranged his sense of what was possible: height, he decided, is not a reason that stops anybody from dunking.

His first dunk came at the second club meeting, after a session of nothing but jumping as high as he could until one finally went down and the room reacted. He calls it the happiest moment of his college life. From there he went looking for structure and joined JumpX, whose coaching staff includes Jordan Kilganon and Tom Barnes, after a year of lifting on his own with nobody teaching him how. He fixed his eating too, aiming at 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day with protein scaled to body weight, and put on roughly 20 pounds in nine months. His summary is three keys: get stronger, keep jumping two or three times a week for the technique, and rest and eat enough to support both. His vertical went from around 33 inches to about 37.5, touching 10’11”.

Nine months after that first dunk he had one-handers and two-handers, dunks off the dribble and off the backboard, a windmill and a 360. The windmill alone took seven or eight months and something like a hundred missed attempts. His view is that failure is the mechanism rather than the obstacle: keep going however many times you clang it off the rim, because the result will not lie. Next are the 360 windmill and then the Eastbay, in that order, because he has decided the Eastbay is harder.

The episode was recorded at Dylan Haugen‘s at the end of a weekend Adam called the highest-jumping day of his life, on a rim that measured a true 10 feet rather than the loose 9’8″ and 9’10” hoops he was used to. Afterward he touched a low rim for the first time in his life and ran the entire Dunk Camp gauntlet, the beginner-through-elite dunk levels that work like karate belts for dunkers, making every one of them, including an inverted scorpion he did not see coming and a 360 that became his favorite of the day. He also went fishing for the first time, and mostly wanted to talk about how strange fish look.

He is also a useful person on how differently the sport reads in two countries. In Taiwan, he says, nobody cares how good you are unless you are winning something, teams will run you for miles until you have nothing left for shooting, and the game is taught as teamwork first, played mostly for fun in threes, with essentially nobody dunking. In America the emphasis lands on individual skill. Adam flew home about a week after the episode, planning to come back, and said what he was taking with him was the habit of facing something hard and continuing anyway.