This is episode 58 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, recorded the same day as one of the most fun sessions I’ve run all year. I’m Dylan Haugen, and the guest is Adam, an exchange student from Taiwan spending a year at Winona State University, where the dunk club turned a guy who could barely touch rim into a windmilling, 360-hitting dunker in nine months. I’ve watched it happen in time-lapse: every time I’ve visited Winona since last November, Adam has jumped a level. Today we put him through the entire Dunk Camp band gauntlet on a low rim, his first low-rim session ever, and he cleared all of it. This episode is his story, and it’s one of the best arguments for everything this podcast preaches.
Ten hours a day in Taiwan, and never a dunk
Adam’s childhood was basketball at a volume that sounds invented: eight to ten hours a day, every day. No school teams through high school; in college in Taiwan he played serious club ball, chasing championships year after year until 21. And at the end of all of it, he could touch the rim and the backboard and had never dunked. The jumping volume was there (he loved rebounding, blocking, leaping for everything, which he correctly identifies as the fundamental skill bank), but nobody had ever taught him the difference between jumping a lot and training to jump.
His read on the two basketball cultures is worth recording: Taiwan emphasizes teamwork and grinds players with miles of running until no energy remains for skills; America emphasizes individual skills to the point that pickup games contain no passing whatsoever (his pickup-in-America review: scathing, fair). And in Taiwan, nobody cares how spectacular you are, only whether you win. A dunker culture can’t grow in that soil, which is part of why he found his here.
The Winona machine: Owen, Justin, and the Friday dunk club
Adam arrived at Winona State in September, knew nobody, and did the only sensible thing: went to the gym every day and hooped. There he met Owen, told him he wanted his first dunk before his year ended, and Owen pointed across the gym: ask that guy, he’s the president of the dunk club, he knows everything. That guy was Justin Blanchard, founder of the Winona State dunk club (plausibly the first college dunk club anywhere), which meets every Friday from 1 to 3, or longer if the reps demand it.
Justin did what Justin does: diagnosed Adam’s plant, analyzed his arm-swing timing, and handed him the fundamentals. Adam’s summary of what he learned belongs on a poster: dunking is 50 percent vertical, 50 percent technique. By the second Friday meeting, Adam just kept jumping and jumping at his max until the first dunk went down, the whole club erupted, and he calls it the happiest moment of his college life. Everyone remembers their first dunk. His had a cheering section, which is the entire dunk-club thesis in one scene.
Nine months of compounding: the numbers
- Vertical: roughly 33 inches when he started structured training; tested 37.5 yesterday (an 11’11”-adjacent touch), and today, his highest-jumping session ever on a measured true 10’ rim, was probably 38. Four-and-a-half-plus inches in under a year.
- Bodyweight: up 20 pounds in nine months, and before anyone clutches pearls, watch the footage: the guy went from barely dunking to windmilling, so the mass is clearly going where it should. The drivers: a real diet for the first time (2,500-3,000 calories, 1.8-2.2 grams of protein per kilo, fueled substantially by the college meal plan).
- The bag: one-handers and two-handers in the hundreds, off the dribble, off the backboard, self-bounces by the hundred (his recommended easiest entry to reverse dunks), the Dwight Tap, the 360, and the Windmill, which took seven to eight months and roughly 100 misses before the first make.
That Windmill number is the headline stat of the episode. A hundred documented failures, and his takeaway wasn’t frustration but a worldview: the more failures you collect, the more improvement you’ve banked, and the result won’t lie. Most people try a new dunk once, feel far away, and shelve it forever. Adam tried it a hundred times and now owns it. He applies the same frame to everything in life, and honestly, so should we all.
Training: a year of lifting that didn’t work, then coaching
Adam had lifted for about a year before getting coached, with nobody teaching him properly, and gained roughly six or seven pounds of progress to show for it. Then, after grilling me about my training every time I visited, he joined Jump Master X (my program: Tom Barnes, Austin Young, Jordan Kilganon, and Brody Stevens coaching). His description of the difference is the cleanest coaching testimonial we’ve aired: not just programming, but correct knowledge on demand, every question answered with details you’d never think of, and the confidence that comes from that. His distilled formula for anyone starting: get stronger, keep jumping (two or three times a week), and respect recovery, fueled by enough food. Three keys. He’s living proof of the compound interest.
Today’s session: a first-ever low rim and the full gauntlet
The session that prompted this episode had two halves. First, the true 10’ rim (measured on the dot, a rarity around here, as regular listeners know), where Adam had his highest-jumping day ever. Then we lowered a rim, Adam’s first low-rim session of his life at 22, and I walked him through the entire Dunk Camp band system, beginner through the Black-Band-tier elite dunks, dunk by dunk until each one went down. He cleared all of it: the Scorpion, the 360 between-the-legs, the Eastbay off the backboard, the Underboth, the 360 behind-the-back, and, the one that genuinely shocked us both, an Inverted Scorpion. A man who had never lowered a rim ran the gauntlet in one afternoon.
Part of that is having someone present who’s done every dunk and can cue it (the coaching effect compounding again), but most of it is the trait I want to highlight for every reader: Adam is ferociously coachable. Tips applied instantly, ego nowhere in the room. I’ve coached people at sessions where nothing I say lands; coachability is the highest-leverage trait in this sport and most others, and it’s a choice.
Next on Adam’s list: the 360 Windmill, then the Eastbay, and given the trajectory, I’d set reminders. His year in America ends soon, which means Taiwan is about to receive its most dangerous returning exchange student. Follow the Winona dunk club’s work through Justin’s pages, and if you’re a college student anywhere: start the club. Next episode is a special one for this site specifically: how dunkers can build their personal brand on Google, with Dennis Yu. Peace out.