Ben Hopkins

Ben Hopkins is a 6’5.5″ dunker from North Carolina who goes by Ben Bounces. His athletic life started with t-ball at three, which is also where he met Travis Reynolds, on the same team. Baseball held him for about a decade, from three to thirteen, with soccer and basketball around the edges.

Dunking crept in around fifth or sixth grade, when he and Travis were going at an eight foot hoop in the driveway. Travis was the one he calls the OG dunk kid. Ben was struggling to dunk on eight feet at all, and says he wishes he still had the footage. His first real dunk came at fourteen, in a pickup game during gym class, at around 6’1″. He had never touched a weight at that point. It simply happened as he grew.

High school added a little: some squatting in a PE weight training class where, by his own description, neither he nor the coach knew what they were doing, but beginner gains did their work. He got as far as simple off-the-backboard dunks, played JV basketball for about a year and a half, then drifted out of sports. He did not hit a windmill until roughly two years ago, which makes the rest of this remarkable.

The pandemic ended his dunking entirely. What restarted it was Travis inviting him to a session at the blue Cavalry gym, which turned out to be one of the biggest gatherings around, with Jordan Kilganon and the whole North Carolina crew there. Ben had no idea what he had walked into, loved the energy, and decided on the spot that he was going to windmill. He got it, only the second windmill of his life, with the wrong hand, in front of Kilganon, whom he did not yet recognize.

From there it went in spurts until his spring semester ended, when he started seriously weight training and jumping with Travis most weeks. In August 2023 he went all in on structured jump training. He is a one-foot left-leg jumper with an 8’5″ standing reach and a 43 inch vertical, and he is left-handed in sport despite writing right-handed, which he suspects was trained out of him as a kid. His signature is the Tamalah, the dunk his first episode is built around.

What sharpened him was competition. He describes learning to handle adrenaline with other dunkers standing next to him, and discovering he badly wanted to win. He went into Dunk Camp 2025 mid-rehab for patellar tendonopathy, having spent weeks on off-vert jumps, no-approach sessions, leg extension isos and wall sit isos, only for his knee to flare after a session he thought he had managed perfectly.

Day one of camp was the best jumping day of his life. His best Underboth, his best Tamalah, his best height check, looking into the hoop for the first time, with his knee quiet enough that he kept going. The adrenaline hid the damage and set his rehab back. Four days later he won the contest anyway and earned a trip to FIBA. He says it was worth it, which is the most honest sentence in the episode.

His dunking is filmed by Dunkademics.