Bishop Ukata

Bishop Ukata found basketball through dunking rather than the other way around. At 12 or 13 he was watching Connor Barth and Jordan Southerland on YouTube, studying styles for a sport he was not playing yet. He did not start playing organized basketball until ninth grade, which makes him, in his own words, a late bloomer. His first dunk came at 13, and then he went a long stretch without another one.

What actually built him was his grandma’s backyard. Through COVID he low-rimmed there every single day on a dirt court, working through the worst patellar tendinitis of his life. He was a one-foot jumper then, watching a lot of Southerland; the first windmill he has on video is a cuffed one off one foot from his sophomore year. Then a growth spurt in his junior year took him to around 6’2.5″ or 6’3″, and Eastbays and behind-the-backs started opening up.

Plant versatility is what makes him unusual. He was naturally one-footed, then learned left-right off two because the dunkers he studied jumped that way, Isaiah Rivera chief among them, and because his cousin was building the same plant alongside him. He still jumps his highest left-right, but he only started working right-left in January and now does most of his actual dunks off it. His reasoning is a basketball player’s: going to the rim you cannot choose your plant, so you had better be able to take off any way the play gives you.

College has been a series of resets. He redshirted his first year, spent two at Erskine in South Carolina, then moved to Patrick Henry Community College for the competition and the scheduled, everything-is-serious environment he had come from at a very competitive high school. Knee pain shadowed those early seasons; he was dunking on adrenaline and hitting nothing new. Backing off basketball at the end of his sophomore year and turning rest into dedicated dunk days restarted his progress, and sharpened his ball control as a side effect.

His training was almost entirely bodyweight and plyometrics for years, and it stalled him around a 40-inch vertical. Getting on Jump Master X, Tom Barnes‘s program, and finally getting right with lifting is what moved him to 44 inches in April, with a squat max around 350 to 360 and hex bar work in place of cleans because a wrist issue will not let him catch. He still calls them baby gains.

He has hit the Black Band twice: once on a 9’11” rim, and once on a rim that measured a tenth of an inch shy of 9’11.5″. In that second session almost nothing took more than four attempts, and the only dunk that gave him trouble was the underboth, and only because he was trying it off a lob. Off the dribble it went down on his second try, and he hit two of them. His list is long and specific: 540 behind the back, 360 underboth, reverse Eastbay, an underboth off the backboard, Hide and Seek, Lost and Found, and eventually an underboth elbow. He has not competed yet, but thinks he could now, and plans to enter the contest at dunk camp next year.