Andy Behle

Andy Behle is a five foot ten dunker out of Austin, Texas with a tested 45 inch vertical, and almost none of it came from basketball. He grew up in a small Texas town playing football from six through eighteen, ranked top ten in the state for receivers and for kick return yards on teams that reached the state semifinals or finals nearly every year without winning one. He found the triple jump in seventh grade by elimination, after running into the second hurdle in the 110s and then failing at long jump, and ended up ranked fifth in Texas and roughly 25th in the country.

He never liked basketball. He watched Dunkademics sessions to get hyped before football games, and in class when he was not supposed to. Texas football had him on programmed Olympic lifts at twelve, and he left high school with a 570 sumo deadlift and a 265 full clean. His first remembered dunk came at sixteen off one foot; the first he knew was ten feet came at eighteen. He went all in the winter of his senior year, using dunking as his plyometrics once it got too cold for track, then realized after graduation that there is no rec football and no rec track, but there is a rim in every gym.

He moved to Austin at nineteen, went a month without a gym, then got a job at one, walked in and tried to lift exactly the way he had before, and bulged two discs in his back that same week. He refused to stop jumping, which turned it into a two-year hole. He is back now but permanently changed: chronic pain, some nerve damage, and jumping is essentially the only thing that still hurts. His advice for dunkers with back pain is unglamorous: stop jumping for a while, walk several times a day, judge pain week over week rather than day to day, and accept that you are a different athlete now.

His comeback ran through good company. Dmytro Kryvenko moved to Austin, and a friend mentioned some guy at his gym who was six one, Eastern European, and bounced the ball off the floor to catch it between his legs. Andy knew instantly who that was, sent the DM and dunked with him that week; later he, Smoove and Miller dunked six weeks in a row. The coaching was blunt and useful: take half a step in, focus on the transfer instead of the jump, and stop worrying about how the punch looks, because it will not look good if you miss.

Then he won the $1,000 Dunk Camp contest in Utah, which is episode 52. He got in by sending footage from a Vegas session and commenting that he would fly out from Texas just for the chance. The field included Hyrum Fechser and Mason Baker, and he went first in the opening round on purpose, to push the others into harder dunks. In the final he hit a behind the back on his first attempt, a dunk he had not made once in preparation, then missed an Eastbay, recalculated, closed with a back scratcher and won. He had entered five contests before that one and finished second in every single one. Afterward he hit the Eastbay anyway, just to prove to himself he could. What he wants beyond the free camp entry it earned him is a full year without missing a session, and a coaching business, The Bounce Academy, solid enough to keep the dunking funded.