Anthony Height

Anthony Height is a 5’6″ dunker from Inglewood, California, and one of the highest jumpers in the world. Height is his real last name, and yes, he gets asked. The gap between his size and what he does in the air is the whole story, and it is why people who see him jump for the first time tend to rewind the clip. He played YMCA basketball around age four in the Junior Lakers program, spent elementary and middle school playing football, then came back to basketball in high school because his school had no football team.

He was a late bloomer in terms of skill, by his own account, but noticeably more athletic than everyone around him since he was about four. His first dunk came in sixth grade, around 11 or 12, at roughly 5’2″, and he barely registered it as unusual. His middle school was connected to the high school, so the older kids hooped in the mornings before class, everyone in the ties and vests his charter school required. A shot came off the rim, he went up and put it back down, and jogged back thinking he could probably do that again.

By 13 or 14 he could walk into a gym cold, no stretch, and throw it off the backboard to himself for two hours. He grew up watching the early wave of pro dunkers online, guys like Young Hollywood and Air Dog, back when Dunkademics was first posting that footage. The measurements explain part of it: a 7’6″ standing reach at 5’6″, longer than Dom Gonzales has at 5’8″, a hand-timed 4.3 forty in high school football, and a broad jump record he broke in his first week as a freshman that had stood for twenty years. His standing vertical is around 33 inches, which he calls trash. Everything is in the approach.

Billy Doran found him at 17 through a posted video and invited him to a Dunkademics session, where he showed up not knowing Chris Staples would be there and spent it insisting he would rather watch. Pre-NIL rules meant a college athlete could not take paid dunk work, so he went quiet for two years of community college ball and came back at 19. Venice Ball shows, the first Ball is Life East versus West dunk show, All-Star Weekend and Complex events followed. He entered few contests and never once drew an easy field, including three losses to Jordan Southerland.

He has never officially tested a vertical, and he never trained for any of it until an injury forced him to. The evidence is circumstantial and overwhelming: at the viral Venice Beach bell, where he and Isaiah Rivera were pulled out cold after sitting around for an hour, he touched 11’8″, which against his reach is a 50 inch jump. He jumps higher with a crowd and dunks better tired. He once made a double Eastbay in a backyard at around 16, using an NBA Live animation as his only reference, and has never landed it again.

He is working back from stress fractures in both shins, told plainly that one more real jump could break one through, so the prescription is time. The goals are specific: get back to 50, enter one FIBA contest win or lose, squat 500, and collect every 360 variation before he hangs it up around 32.

His dunking is filmed by Dunkademics, and he told his full story on Dunk Talk in how a 5’6″ dunker became one of the highest jumpers in the world.