Billy Doran

Billy Doran introduced himself on Dunk Talk as “Dunkademics, not really a dunker anymore, but I like to film dunks,” and both Dylan and Hunter Castona cut in to correct him: still a dunker at heart. They had a point. Known in the scene as White Flight, he is a 5’11” dunker who won the 2009 YouTube Dunk Contest, and he has spent the years since behind the camera rather than under the rim.

Before Dunkademics he produced for Ballislife, Hoopmixtape, Mars Reel and the Drew League. Dunkademics became the media brand at the center of freestyle dunking: the channel that finds the best dunkers alive, films them, and puts them in front of an audience no individual dunker could reach alone. A feature there can start a career. A Tyler Currie clip is what pulled Donovan Hawkins into the sport in the first place.

He came on for Episode 27, the second half of a long panel on what it would actually take for dunking to grow into a real sport, alongside CJ Champion, Justin Barber, Donovan Hawkins and Hunter. Most of the panel argued as competitors and judges. Billy argued from behind the camera, and it produced the sharpest objection in the episode.

The group had been moving toward a gymnastics style scoring model, where every dunk carries a fixed starting difficulty and judges deduct from there. Billy’s problem with it: in dunking, difficulty is not a property of the dunk, it is a property of the dunker. A between-the-legs is one thing for Doug Anderson and something else entirely for T-Dub. Lock in start values and dunking quietly becomes, as he put it, a six foot five and up sport, because the math will always favor the taller athlete. Whatever scoring system the sport lands on has to keep a human in it. He also pushed back on assigning one judge per category, arguing you need more than one set of eyes on each criterion or the panel becomes far too easy to skew.

His other argument was about the bottom of the sport rather than the top. Lowering the rim is one of the real keys to growth: it is how nearly every dunker started, and a fan base needs people who can participate, not only watch. Making low rim dunks normal to post is part of that. He also named the most slept on dunk in contests, from years of filming them, which is the elbow hang, and specifically the windmill elbow hang, a dunk he watches draw silence and eights.