Put the highest jumper in the world next to the best pair of hands under 20 and let them ask each other questions. That is the whole video, it runs about two minutes, and somewhere in the middle of it one of them gives away his entire training routine without being pushed.

The two dunkers are Ethan Pimstone and Piotr Zawiślak, and I filmed them at The Dunk Camp in Salt Lake City. The number gets stated in the first ten seconds, because it always does.

“that’s a world record holder. 52.5 inches.”

Ethan Pimstone

For anyone outside this community, 52.5 inches of max vertical is not a slightly better version of what good athletes do. It is a different category of human. Ethan tested 47.5 at this camp in 2025 and landed his first Eastbay in the same week, which tells you how fast the arc is moving.

The Matchup

Piotr is 18, he is from Poland, and he is the youngest black band the sport has produced. His edge is not altitude. It is what he can do with the ball between takeoff and the rim, which is the part of dunking that takes the longest to build and cannot be bought with a training block.

“this man was hitting dunks that I can’t even fathom hitting. And your age, that’s impressive.”

Ethan Pimstone

Ethan then laid out the gap using his own timeline, which is the most useful comparison in the video because it is honest about himself.

“I got my first dunk at 17, and this man is 18 years old doing 360 Underboth, 360 Eastbay, 360 inverter which I just turned 23, I still can’t even do all that.”

Ethan Pimstone

Every dunk on that list is a 360 with a second move layered inside it. Under both legs. Between the legs. Each one takes a full rotation plus a ball move plus a landing, and Piotr is doing all three of them at an age when most dunkers are still trying to make their first clean windmill look repeatable.

“he’s levels ahead of where most people are at, and he’s already close to the top of the game.”

Ethan Pimstone

Piotr’s answer about Ethan ran the other direction, and he found a way to make a compliment out of a criticism.

“His jumping ability probably because even though some people are saying that your technique isn’t perfect… you’re still jumping like 52 and a half.”

Piotr Zawiślak

That has been the take on Ethan in comment sections for two years. Piotr’s read is that the number happens regardless, so the form debate matters less than the training behind it. Coming from a dunker whose whole reputation is built on technical precision, that is a real concession.

Let Us Trade

“Let’s trade. We’ll trade some talents. And then we’ll both be top of the game.”

Ethan Pimstone

This is the line that will get clipped, and it is funnier than it looks because both of them are completely serious about the deal. Ethan wants the bag. Piotr wants the inches. Neither of them is confused about which side of the trade they are on, which is rarer than you would think among dunkers at this level.

The Part Worth Saving

Ethan then did something most people in these interviews forget to do. He stopped complimenting and started asking. How are you able to do all those dunks. Is it hand speed training or is it just reps. Rim or wall. How often.

Piotr answered all of it, in order, with no hedging. This is the full breakdown.

“So I used to be doing a lot of low-rim dunking.”

Piotr Zawiślak

At 15 and 16. That is the base layer, and it is the one everybody underrates. A low rim buys you air time, and air time buys you repetitions of a movement pattern that a full rim will not let you practice yet. He was building the bag years before his jump could support it.

“I’m having two dunk sessions a week… And I’m doing a lot of hand speed drills.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Two dunk sessions a week, with heavy lifting around them. Ethan reacted to the number in the video, and so did I. The community assumption about a dunker with that bag is that he lives at the rim. He does not. He protects the jumping and puts his volume somewhere that costs his joints nothing.

“I’ve seen some drill at Jordan Kilganon’s channel. And I started doing it a lot.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Free videos on YouTube. A ball, a wall or a rim, standing still, running the motion of the dunk without jumping. Then Ethan asked the question that turns a nice answer into a usable one.

“Daily… when I’m before a important contest or event I’m bringing my ball to the gym. And I’m spending like one hour just doing it.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Daily. One hour of nothing but hand path before a contest. No weighted ball, ever, though he said he wants to try one. That is the entire program that produced the best hands under 20 in this sport, and there is not a single piece of equipment in it.

“And it shows. It’s crazy. It really shows.”

Ethan Pimstone

The Kilganon Loop

Here is what makes this specific week at camp unusual. Piotr says on this video that he trains daily off Jordan Kilganon’s drills. On a separate video at the same camp, he meets Kilganon in person, tries those same drills in front of him, and cannot get them while Kilganon does them with ease.

Kilganon explained on that video why the drills exist at all. He can only jump so much, so he went looking for a way to keep improving without adding vertical. The full conversation is in Kilganon on running out of rivals.

So the chain runs like this. Kilganon hits his jumping ceiling and invents a way around it. A kid in Poland finds the videos and runs them daily for years. The kid becomes the youngest black band in the sport, flies to Utah, and gets beaten at the drills by the person who made them. Both halves are on camera, filmed three days apart. That is not a story anybody would have caught if the two conversations had not both been recorded and written down.

What This Says About Where the Sport Is

Ten years ago, an 18-year-old with this bag would have been a rumour on a forum. Piotr learned from a free channel in another country, built his hands on a low rim, and arrived at an American camp already at black band. The pipeline is now open in both directions, and the tools that produced him cost nothing.

Ethan’s side of it matters too. He got his first dunk at 17, was coached by his brother Jordan, and is now the world record holder at 23. Neither of these guys came up through anything resembling a traditional path, and they met in the middle at a camp in Salt Lake City.

They each wrote their own version of this conversation: Ethan on trading talents and Piotr on the craziest jumper. Dunker Spotlight covered why opposite superpowers work on camera, Athlete Spotlight took it to athletes outside dunking, and BlitzMetrics broke down why the routine travels.

This got filmed because Dennis Yu and I ran a session at camp for 76 campers on how athletes show up on Google and in AI tools, then offered to interview anybody who wanted it. The method is documented in the repurposing system from camp.

Go do the drills. That is the takeaway. The world record holder heard the answer and said he was taking it, and he already jumps higher than you.

This one was just me. No guest, no co-host, just me, Dylan Haugen, catching everybody up on where my dunking has been over the past year, because it has been all over the place. Three months ago I was dunking on 8-foot rims off my wrong foot because my knee would not let me do anything else. Now I am getting ready for the biggest dunk contest ever put together. Here is the whole ride, the good stretches and the bad ones, in order.

I have been honest about being inconsistent with the podcast lately, so if you are a dunker who wants to come on, message me, because I am trying to get at least one person a week from here on out. A lot of the recent content has come from being around other guys, like the sessions I did with Cam Hazzard, and the interviews I filmed at The Dunk Camp.

Last Summer: Chasing My Weaknesses

A year ago I was in a good place. I was consistent with my dunks, hitting Between the Legs, Behind the Back, and 360 Windmill, but I honestly was not improving much. So I put my focus on my two biggest weaknesses, my off-dribble and my left hand, and it paid off with my first off-dribble Behind the Back and Eastbay on a 9’10.75” rim. Around then I flew to North Carolina for about ten days and trained with Travis Reynolds, Ben Hopkins, and Bishop Ukata. Being around like-minded people every single day is the fastest way I know to level up.

A Stretch of Travel, Shows, and Contests

When I got back I hit a run of events. I did a dunk show at the Daniel Freetag camp and closed it with a Dubble Up Elbow, then flew to LA and dunked with Dunkademics and Dom, and went at Vier Sunday in a dunk-horse setup at Venice Beach with some NBA guys watching. I also found a gym near me, H4 Sports Academy in Edina, that has hosted some of my best sessions since, including a big one with a ton of the Minnesota Dunk Squad guys.

The contest highlight of that stretch was an Inverted Scorpion over somebody, which as far as I know had never been done in a contest before. That is a dunk I first messed with on low rims years ago. Jordan Kilganon may well have done it on a low rim before me, but I brought it to 10 feet and then to a contest, which meant a lot. I kept the momentum into the fall and went back-to-back at the Nickel Dickle contest in Waconia, and across all of 2025 I did not lose a single dunk contest besides the one at Dunk Camp.

The Knee Injury That Cost Me Months

Then it turned. First an annoying ankle thing, then, on one of my last jumps at a huge fifteen-person session, I felt something deep at the bottom of my left patella tendon that I had never felt before. Every tendon injury feels like the end of the world the first time, and this one dragged. I got back to feeling good right before a big contest in Maryland, got flown out, and did really well, hitting Between the Legs, a Dubble Up X over three people, and a Dubble Up Elbow to close.

The problem is what happened after. I tweaked that same spot in my knee again, and this time it was months. For a long stretch I could not even jump off my normal plant. I was going to the gym on Saturdays and dunking on 8 feet off my wrong foot just to feel athletic, then benching and doing muscle-ups because that was all I could do. Every time I thought I was back, I did something dumb like a staff basketball game or a few no-warmup dunks at a Globetrotters event and set myself right back.

The Comeback: PRs and New Dunks

I finally broke the cycle on a random day when I tested my vertical almost as an afterthought and PRed at a 42-inch running vert on a jump that did not even feel maxed out. That gave me the confidence to push, and from there it snowballed. I started stacking sessions: my first 360 Between the Legs off-dribble, my first Underboth since early 2025, my first 360 Eastbay off-dribble, and eventually my first 360 Windmill. One session I hit six new dunks in a single day, including a two-hand Dwight tap and a handoff 180 Eastbay first try.

The theme I have talked about for years finally clicked. I had done everything I could at my old vertical and just needed a few more inches to unlock the next tier, and this was the stretch where those inches showed up. Suddenly 360 Underboth, 360 Inverter, and 360 Behind the Back all felt within reach instead of like far-off goals.

Fixing My Weak Quads in the Weight Room

Someone in a reaction video guessed I probably do not strength train properly, which is fair since I never talk about it. I train under JumpX with Tom Barnes and Austin Young, and have since I was fifteen. Coming out of the knee injury I realized my quads were badly weak, so I hammered leg extensions up to 140 pounds each leg and worked deep belt squats from about 158 pounds all the way up past 290. That base is a big reason I could handle two real jump sessions a week again, which is a lot of volume for me.

DunkMan Media Day and Dunk Camp

The best session of the whole run lined up perfectly, healthy and deloaded at a super nice gym in Wisconsin, where I hit a 360 Eastbay off-dribble first try and one of my best Windmills ever. Not long after, I got flown to Atlanta for DunkMan League Media Day with Mac McClung, Shelly McEwen, Doug Anderson, Cam, and fifteen-plus other guys, and on my day to dunk I hit Double V Space, a Hide and Seek, and an Underboth first try off a lob.

Then came Dunk Camp, where I dunked mostly with Piotr Zawislak and Nate, all three of us the same age and all going crazy. I hit my first Windmill Elbow off a handoff and hung, plus a 360 Scoop off a lob. I also got to do a presentation with Dennis Yu on personal branding, AI, and social media for dunkers, which ties right into why I document all of this in the first place.

Prepping for the Biggest Dunk Contest Ever

That brings me to now. I am officially in the DunkMan League, Shaq’s new league, competing against the best dunkers in the world for 500,000 dollars. Just being there is wild to me. These next few sessions are about feeling out which dunks I have consistent enough to actually throw in the biggest contest ever assembled. If you follow the sport, this is the moment it has been building toward, and I could not be more excited to be part of it.

If you want the earlier chapters of this story, I broke down how I changed my training after turning 18, and there are more guests and DunkMan athletes coming to the show soon. If you are a dunker who wants on, reach out.

This is episode 67 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, and our most popular guest is back with the biggest number this show has ever hosted. I’m Dylan Haugen, with Hunter Castona, and Dillan McCarthy, the self-described and now community-ratified “alien,” has officially tested a 50-inch vertical at 19 years old: roughly the sixth human ever verified, and the youngest by years. When we interviewed him nine months ago he was at 49, jumping seven days a week with self-invented training we explicitly told you not to copy. The story of what changed between 49 and 50 is, satisfyingly, partly the story of him finally training intelligently, and partly the story of him remaining gloriously incomprehensible.

The recap, for the unfamiliar

The short version from episode 30: volleyball kid from New York (never one game of organized basketball), 4’10” in seventh grade, got into dunking at 12 watching Kilganon, broke his kneecap clean in half in eighth grade after a week of 500-pound leg presses at 90 pounds bodyweight, rebuilt from a 2-inch vertical via seated calf raises at his school desk, first dunk at 16 at 5’6”, and then the regime that made him famous: 300-plus max-effort jumps a day, every day (one recorded day hit 427; one week hit roughly 1,300), alongside 27 exercises a day at four sets of 12-20 reps, including 225x20x4 ass-to-grass elevated-heel squats. He once did so many barbell reps that blood came out of his arms, a sentence I am quoting and not elaborating on. Injuries through all of it: essentially none.

The funniest THP signing in history

What changed everything was the best cold-DM ever sent: THP guarantees six inches of vertical in six months or free training, so Dillan, sitting on a 49, messaged Austin Burke to inform him that he’d be collecting a 55-inch vertical for free. Austin found this funny enough to hand over John Evans’ phone number. John’s reaction to Dillan’s training history was, per Dillan, speechlessness: in a career of coaching every kind of athlete, he had never seen volume like it. To John’s great credit, the onboarding wasn’t “throw it all out”: two weeks of observation, a month of testing exercise responses, then a gradual transition, respecting that this body had adapted to loads that would hospitalize the rest of us.

The new shape of his training: lower reps, heavier weight, real explosive work, actual deloads, sprint training, one knee iso from John, and jumping cut from seven days a week to one or two (still five-hour sessions of 200-400 jumps with 40-second rests, because the alien remains the alien). The results: an ATG squat now at 405 for 2, dramatically better jump and lift technique, a longer penultimate, learned breathing mechanics, and a body that feels “wired” instead of fatigued. Cleans lag at 185, sabotaged by an anatomical quirk: unusually long forearms that torque his wrists in the catch, a disadvantage that extends, cruelly, to his favorite dunk, the Elbow (Travis Reynolds’ stubby forearms making elbows easy is the exact inverse). Knee pain since we last spoke: twice, gone by the next morning, both times.

The other unlock: Facebook Marketplace and a weighted ball

The skill-side change is my favorite detail. Last episode, Dillan had no low rim and essentially no hand-speed practice. The fix: free hoops off Facebook Marketplace. His backyard currently holds six hoops (peak inventory: ten); he lowers and destroys them with weighted-ball low-rim work, and when one dies, he gets another free one. Daily weighted-ball control work, including in his bedroom against the wall, transformed his hand speed and ball control, exactly the gap we flagged nine months ago. The man took our one criticism and solved it for zero dollars.

The 50, jump by jump

The test-day protocol is a study in accidental professionalism. His prior session had been a flat-tire day (could barely Windmill), so he took two full weeks off jumping, at the start of a deload, the closest thing to a taper he’s ever run. Diet locked for days: nothing processed, carbs the day before, grapes in the morning, a banana three hours out, water and a Body Armor. Cold gym, never broke a sweat. Roughly 20 jumps in, the 50 went up clean. He then spent the next 30 jumps hunting 50.5 and 51, came agonizingly close to the 51, and shut it down at about 50 total jumps, which for Dillan constitutes restraint. He’s also now training the right-left plant alongside his natural one, because apparently one world-class plant wasn’t enough inventory.

The meta-question Hunter and I keep circling: is his durability the result of the insane workload (a tendon base built by years of daily volume) or pure genetic lottery? Dillan’s own answer is honest: no clue. He tried his old program on a friend; the friend did not become an alien. As we said in the genetics episode: study the outliers, don’t copy them. He is the outlier other outliers point at.

What 50 at 19 means

Some context for the number: the verified 50 club is a handful of humans, mostly mid-to-late twenties at the time of testing (Isaiah at 24-25, Dak, Espinosa at 20). Dillan is 19, roughly one year into intelligent training, with his first contest behind him (he now accepts the title “professional dunker,” reluctantly), an Eastbay Elbow off the lob in progress, and a bag that grows weekly now that the hand-speed work exists. The 51 he nearly touched on test day is not a ceiling; it’s a scheduling question. The world record conversation now includes a teenager from New York who trains in a backyard full of free hoops, and honestly, the sport is better for it.

Dillan posts as himself on Instagram (still under-posting relative to 3,000-clip archives; still our ongoing campaign to fix that). Watch the 50 test footage and pay attention to how casual it looks; that’s the scary part. Next episode: pro dunkers react to the 2026 NBA dunk contest and the new Mac McClung dunks. See you there.

This is episode 66 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, a solo one, and the most honest training update I’ve recorded. I’m Dylan Haugen, I just turned 18, and the body that used to shrug off anything has started sending invoices. This episode is the full story of the past year (the highs were high), the two injuries that forced the conversation, and the new training rules my coach Tom and I built for the adult version of me. If you’re a young dunker whose body still forgives everything: this is a postcard from your future.

The speedrun: how I got here

The compressed history for new readers: low-rim daily from age 10-12, lifting fundamentals learned young at what’s now Dunamis (shout out Cam and Ian), first dunk at 13, 36.5” tested at 14, first Windmill and first Eastbay at 15 (37.5” tested), joined JumpX immediately after (the program that became Jump Master X and is now back to JumpX; keep up), quit basketball, tested 41.5 at 16, behind-the-back and Hide-and-Seek that August, then the 17-year-old campaign: the February Underboth day (plus first backboard Eastbay and Honey Dip, on a two-week deload with the Olympic lifts pulled, the freshest I’ve ever felt), the Maryland fly-out win, four straight contest wins, an Inverted Scorpion over a person in a contest (first time that’s been done in a contest by anyone), and a show closed with a double-up Honey Dip.

The pattern hiding in that list: every legendary day came on real freshness, and the freshness has been getting more expensive. A year ago I could play YMCA ball mid-training and survive; today I couldn’t handle the lightest basketball season. The forces grew; the recovery bill grew with them.

The Nickel Dickle problem: my best day ever, spent on push-offs

September’s title defense at the Nickel Dickle in Waconia was, physically and mentally, the best I have ever felt. Warming up in an elementary classroom, walking out to hundreds of people, hitting a 360 cuff Windmill first try with my hand that deep over a true 9’11.5” rim, a double-up Eastbay where I botched the push entirely and essentially hit a clean Eastbay by accident, straight 50s, zero misses, the win. And here’s the melancholy economics of contest dunking: I spent the best jumping day of my life on dunks I could have hit feeling half as good, most of them push-offs. I haven’t seen my true peak since February; I probably had a 360 Eastbay and multiple Honey Dips in me that day and will never know. I love contests and I’m not complaining about winning one. I’m noting, for every dunker who plans their year, that peak days are a budget, and contests bill them at full price for dunks that don’t need them.

The two injuries that forced the rewrite

The ankle: right after the contest I tweaked something in my right ankle, recognized it vaguely from before, assumed it would fix itself, and jumped on it through two more sessions until it was wrecking everything. A rare doctor visit diagnosed a simple midfoot sprain; one week of actual rest cured it completely. Lesson filed: a week of discipline beats a month of denial.

The knee: subtler and scarier. At a recent session I felt nothing through the entire warmup (isos, dynamic work, sprint development all clean), then pain arrived at 40 percent jump effort and sat at a real four-to-five by 60 percent. I cut the session, which historically is not a thing I do, shout out to me. Then I lifted two days later with zero knee pain, which makes no sense and is exactly the kind of nonsense aging tissue produces. The long call with Tom afterward produced the thesis of this whole episode: I’ve never had to try to stay healthy; health just happened to me. That era is over.

The new rules

• A hard jump cap: 25-30 max-effort jumps per Saturday session. Warmups don’t count. And the cap doubles as a focus tool: if my routine dunks go down first-try (say Windmill, 360 cuff, Eastbay: three jumps), I have 22-plus jumps left to dedicate entirely to one target dunk: Inverted Scorpion or Lost and Found, five attempts at behind-the-back, then everything else into the project. Boring sessions, but new dunks beat the hundredth rep of old ones, and my routine-cycling habit (diagnosed at camp) finally gets structural treatment.
• Wednesdays at 80 percent on a low rim, ~10 jumps, all spent on one skill (a 9’6” 360 Eastbay block, for example), replacing the midweek max sessions my body stopped cashing.
• Deep squats, at last. A lifetime of half and quarter squats ended after camp: started at a humbling 135×5 that left me sore for days, now at 205×5 for sets. Still embarrassingly weak there by my own standards, and that’s the point: it’s the largest untapped adaptation I have left.
• Sleep and protein get tracked like training. Between school, a 15-20 hour digital marketing job, the podcast, and social media, my sleep has been the sacrifice, and at this force level that’s no longer survivable. Protein target back to ~1.25-1.5g per pound, tracked, per many lectures from Travis.
• Daily standing ball-handling and hand-speed work (Fridays light), because fewer jumps means the dunk skill has to be maintained off the floor. This one’s for all of you too: standing low-rim mechanics work is free vertical-less practice.
• Creatine, finally. My parents made me wait until 18. Three pounds gained in days; updates to follow, and a “creatine for dunkers” episode with Donovan and Hunter is on the idea board if you want it.

The plan and the bigger picture

The calendar: the rest of this month and next are purely about getting healthy; a big session I’m not ready to talk about lands in early December, an event in late December, and a loaded 2026 after that. And the meta-note, since this episode is itself an example: there’s almost no long-form talking content in the dunk community, and building that archive, for this generation to listen to and the next one to look back on, is the whole mission here. Everything gets repurposed to the website, where these stories rank on Google and even feed the AI search engines; if you’ve been on the podcast, an article about you is coming, and yes, ChatGPT will be able to tell people about your dunk career because of it. Episode 59 explains the why; this is the practice.

Eighteen years old, slightly creakier, considerably wiser, jump-capped and creatine-loaded. Tell me who you want on the podcast next; the booking list is open. See you in the next episode.

This is episode 56 of the Dunk Talk Podcast and a personal one: the guest is my coach. I’m Dylan Haugen, and Tom Barnes (“Ask Dunks” on Instagram) is the founder of JumpX, the coaching service that has programmed every workout of my rise from a 37.5 to a 41.5-inch vertical and three contest wins, now operating as Jump Master X alongside Austin Young, Jordan Kilganon, and Brody Stevens. Tom is also one of the strongest dunkers alive (a 682-pound paused deadlift will be discussed) and a 47-inch tester in his own right, from Perth, Australia, where every rim is actually 10 feet. We covered his whole arc: the journey, the numbers, the coaching philosophy, and the merger story nobody has told publicly.

An Australian childhood of rotating sports

Australian schools rotate sports by term, four terms a year, so Tom grew up playing everything: Aussie rules football, field hockey, cricket (“baseball, but you have to bounce it off the floor first”), basketball, cross country, track. He didn’t focus on basketball until 12 or 13 and didn’t choose dunking over it until 17. His theory on why he tolerates brutal training loads as an adult: a childhood spent literally racing friends through the park after school every day. He worries, credibly, that the phone generation is building less base work-capacity than any before it, and his advice to parents matches every guest we’ve had: if you want an athlete, raise an active kid.

His gateway into the community was the same as Elijah’s and so many others: Steven Selby, a 5’10” guy barely grabbing rim, exactly like teenage Tom, who built his way to Windmills and between-the-legs on camera. Tom filmed everything from day one (camera balanced on a water bottle) and credits that archive with keeping him grounded ever since: same height the whole time, completely different athlete. He also named the cultural headwind Australians know as tall poppy syndrome: announce you’re skipping the basketball season to train jumping, and people look at you like a villain. Doing anything unusual draws the same stares I get power-cleaning on the actual Olympic platform at LA Fitness. Do it anyway.

The land of true 10-foot rims

The Australia-versus-America rim segment deserves permanent citation in the rim-height debates: in Perth, roughly 95 percent of available courts are state or national-level facilities, so rims sit within half an inch of true 10’. There are no LA Fitness courts with floors installed after the rim. Tom isn’t attacking American low-rim culture when he notes this (he had a glorious childhood adjustable hoop himself, 7’5” to 10’8”, which built his technique); it’s just calibration: when an Australian posts a dunk, it’s almost certainly on regulation. Imagine the arguments we’d be spared if every rim everywhere matched.

The strongest dunker numbers we’ve ever put on this show

Tom got coaching within his first four to six months of dunking, refusing to waste his prime years on bad training, and the weight room became a parallel love affair after watching Jonathan Clark and T-Fly High rep squats over double bodyweight. His current PRs, converted live on the call from kilos while we both failed at arithmetic:

• Deadlift: 310kg / 682 pounds, with a deliberate pause below the knee. He hasn’t “full sent” an unpaused max in ages.
• Back squat: 200kg / 440 pounds, raw.
• Power clean: 130kg / 286 pounds. Twice.
• Bench: 155kg / ~340 pounds.
• Vertical: 47 inches tested a month ago, with flight times on non-Vertec jumps that flirt with the 49-50 territory.

His framing of the lifting obsession is the right one: he’s not a powerlifter, he’s “a dunker at heart” whose two loves happen to feed each other. He’s also the standing proof, alongside Travis Reynolds, for the no-one-right-technique doctrine: his jump looks nothing like the textbook and produces world-class heights anyway. (He was also three weeks deep into an illness during this recording and still showed up, which tells you most of what you need to know about him.)

How a coach actually gets made

Tom’s coaching education came from four stacked sources, ranked by his own honesty: a sport science degree from Curtin University that taught him real physiology and, in his words, zero vertical jump coaching; years of obsessive self-experimentation; training athletes informally before he was even qualified and learning through their results; and the endless online sorting of good information from garbage. That last one is his pitch for coaching generally, and as the athlete in his program I co-sign it: I know plenty about jump training, and any idiot can Google a program, but periodizing a year so you peak in June without breaking in March is a different profession. Tom and Austin studied so their athletes don’t have to; the app tells me what to do, and the questions are always answered when I want to learn the why.

Founding JumpX: green before blue

The origin story, told fully for the first time: Tom and Austin Young dunked together for one to two years as friends who talked training constantly. Right as Tom graduated university, Austin wanted to move from in-person coaching to online and had already built a website; Tom planned the same path solo. One meeting settled it: complementary strengths, better together. JumpX was born (the brand was green before it was blue, for the deep-lore collectors), and the training model has remained essentially the same ever since: individualized programming, heavy strength bias, athletes like me as the proof of concept. They signed me the day after my first Eastbay, right before I turned 16, which remains the best bet anyone’s placed on me.

The merger: Jump Master X

And the news behind the new name: JumpX has joined forces with Jordan Kilganon’s Jump Master ecosystem to form Jump Master X: Tom and Austin’s coaching engine plus Kilganon and Brody Stevens on the technique side, the custom-coaching tier Kilganon described wanting back in episode 47 now fully staffed. The courtship was appropriately funny: Kilganon quietly interviewed JumpX’s long-term athletes for honest reviews, and a month before the announcement he cornered me with weirdly casual questions about how JumpX had been treating me. I thought he was recruiting me away. He was doing due diligence. The athletes all said the same thing, the deal closed, and the best technique mind in dunking now shares a roster with the strongest programming duo in it. As the guy whose training comes out of that pipeline: it’s a good time to be coached.

Tom is “Ask Dunks” on Instagram, and Jump Master X is where the coaching lives. Thank you, coach, for the four inches and counting. Next episode: getting flown out for a dunk contest. Comment with your conversion of 310 kilos without a calculator, liars.

This is episode 46 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, with Hunter Castona and Donovan Hawkins, on the question that fills our DMs more than any other: do genetics actually matter for dunking? The short version of our two-hour answer: less than you think, more than zero, and almost everyone asking the question is using it as an excuse not to train. The long version follows, including a genuinely interesting argument from Donovan that the question itself can’t currently be answered.

Our own family files

We opened by auditing ourselves, since all three of us get called genetic freaks weekly. The results are humbler than the accusation. Me: both parents played sports, nobody in the family was a notable jumper, and I’d describe my build as solidly above average, nothing Olympian. Hunter: dad was a volleyball player who could rim-graze without training, mom played nothing, and the one gem is his grandpa, who held a high school sprinting record for thirty-some years. Donovan, the closest thing the sport has to a unanimous freak: multiple generations of basketball players on both sides, none of them remarkable, dad topping out at rim-grazers. The best dunker of 2024’s genetic inheritance is “everyone hooped a little.”

Donovan’s argument: the sample size doesn’t exist

The sharpest point of the episode came from Donovan, with the disclaimer that none of us studied kinesiology. His claim: we can’t actually know how much genetics matter for jumping, because almost nobody trains for jumping. Outside track athletes, the population of humans who jumped seriously from age 10 onward is vanishingly small. His bet: take an average kid, have him jump five days a week from age ten, and regardless of genetics he clears 40 inches as an adult. Until that experiment exists at scale, every “genetics are everything” claim is built on people who never tried.

This connects to his favorite misconception, straight from his Instagram Live the night before: someone asked what his vertical “started at.” Started at? At six years old he jumped two inches like every other child. People watch a Ja Morant or a Donovan and assume the gift arrived complete at age 11; in reality even the freaks couldn’t touch net at 12. Everyone builds it. The build is just invisible by the time you see the highlight.

The 50-inch stress test

The best segment was adversarial: we tried to name a single person who reached the truly elite tier, the 50-inch standard, on raw genetics with no training. The candidates fell one by one:

• Gideon (my Minnesota teammate): jumps around 46 with no lifting. Incredible, and not 50.
• Dillan McCarthy: Donovan prosecuted this one mercilessly. The 20-rep squats count as training. The seated calf raises in class count as training. And the 49 came on a Vert Trainer with an unverified standing reach. Verdict: trained, and still not a verified 50.
• Anthony Height: played football, meaning years of weight room. Trained. Not a tested 50.
• T-Dub and the natural legends: decades of jumping volume, which is itself training, and none of them with a tested 50.

Donovan and Isaiah have discussed this directly and share the conclusion: no human gets to 50 inches on jumping alone, and probably none ever will. Every member of the verified 49-plus club (Isaiah, Kilganon, Tony, Donovan, Dak) trains seriously. So the honest synthesis: genetics set a ceiling that matters enormously at the very top and barely at all below 40, training is the thing that actually moves you, and starting young effectively raises your ceiling, because a childhood of jumping reps is a biological investment that changes what your adult body can do.

Why your ceiling shouldn’t change your behavior

The practical conclusion all three of us landed on: your genetic ceiling is irrelevant to your decisions, because the prescription is identical at every ceiling. Maybe I top out at 46; it doesn’t change a single training session, because I want whatever dunks exist at my ceiling, and dunking’s great gift is trackability: there’s always a next inch, a next dunk, a next rim height. The people who quit over genetics were looking for permission to quit. (Hunter’s corollary from the myths episode applies: don’t copy the outliers’ training, and don’t borrow their ceilings as your excuse either.)

The technique footnote: there is no one right way to jump

The episode closed on a related orthodoxy that’s been quietly retired. John Evans and THP used to teach a “correct” jump: long penultimate, strong block foot. Then guys like Travis Reynolds and Tom Barnes kept jumping 48-plus with stubby penultimates and unconventional everything, and the doctrine got updated. Per Donovan, John’s current list of actual universals is three items: build speed consistently through the approach, lower your center of mass as you come in, and take off. Everything else is style that hardened into function. The one trend that does correlate with elite jumping is speed off the floor: THP actually timed Donovan’s ground contact, and from block-foot touchdown to airborne he takes 0.25 seconds. Strength gets you some of that (even bad-form bodybuilders jump okay through pure force), but the elastic snap is built by exactly the thing this whole episode keeps arriving at: years and years of jumps.

So: do genetics matter? At the margins, at the summit, yes. For you, almost certainly less than your consistency does. Donovan is “donovanhawkins_37” on Instagram. Next episode is the big one: how Jordan Kilganon became the greatest dunker of all time. Comment with your genetic excuse so we can talk you out of it.

This is episode 45 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, me and Hunter Castona on the episode we’ve wanted to make since the show started: the myths. I’m Dylan Haugen, and what follows is everything TikTok, Instagram, and decades of basketball folklore get wrong about dunking and jumping, corrected by two people who measure their rims with tape measures and write their lifts down.

Myth 1: Rims are 10 feet

Almost none are. I’ve measured essentially every hoop I’ve dunked on for two years and found exactly one true 10’ rim; Hunter’s found three or four, mostly at colleges (UCF, the Dunk Camp Utah rim, the UWM gym). The typical installed hoop is off by anywhere from a quarter inch to three or four inches, and commercial gyms like LA Fitness are notorious for running low. This is the entire reason the rim-height honesty debate from episode 11 exists: if you assume 10’, you’re probably wrong in one direction or the other.

Myth 2: NBA player verticals

Michael Jordan’s 48. Wilt’s 50. LeBron’s high-40s. None of them were ever tested, and Jordan himself has said he never measured his vertical, so as far as we’re concerned he doesn’t have a 48; he has a great-looking maybe-44. (To be unambiguous: MJ is my GOAT. This is arithmetic, not hate.) At 6’6”, head-at-rim is roughly a 42, and I’ve never seen footage of Jordan’s head meaningfully above the rim, let alone eight inches above it. The highest credibly tested NBA-adjacent vertical is around 48 (Keon Johnson at the combine), with a measured standing reach about eight inches below average for his height, which conveniently introduces the sub-myth: your standing reach is probably wrong too. I get DMs weekly from people my height claiming 72-inch reaches. At Dunk Camp the reach is measured with the opposite shoulder dropped, stretching maximally, and the numbers come out honest. The real tested-49-plus club is the one that deserves the credit: Isaiah, Kilganon, Tony Crosby, Donovan, Dak.

Myth 3: 5,000 calf raises (and other miracle exercises)

Everything that’s actually moved my vertical is boring: jump a lot, squat heavy, power clean heavy. We both do calf raises, loaded heavy for sets of 12-20, progressively, like any other lift; the myth is the 5,000-bodyweight-reps-a-day version, and its cousins: every absurd-looking Instagram exercise engineered for views. The tell is simple: if the top jumpers in the world don’t do it, it isn’t the secret. The credible programs (THP, Kilganon’s JMX) are built on research and run on simple movements with intelligent variation; John Evans has literally never given Isaiah the same training week twice, but the ingredients are squats, cleans, pulls, jumps, and loading, not circus tricks. One related warning: be wary of testimonials from athletes who were already freaks before they joined anything. Isaiah is a real program success story (THP built the Isaiah you see). The guy who trained nothing and then credits a program for his genetics is not.

Myth 4: That double-up wasn’t a push-off

Every double-up is a push-off. Every handoff is a push-off. Including the ones that “felt clean.” Grabbing a ball off a person’s hands necessarily loads downward through them, even if it’s an inch of boost. That doesn’t make them bad: I love double-ups, I taught Hunter his first one (zero to 9’10.5” in a single session, sorry to every pro he now jumps over), and a Dubble Up Underboth is genuinely one of the hardest dunks alive; it’s the only low-rim dunk I’ve never solved. The myth is in the scoring: judges hand straight tens to Dubble Up X’s that Hunter and I hit first-try, while no-prop dunks of triple the difficulty score the same. In a FIBA setting a basic double-up should cap around an eight. It’s the same judging-literacy problem from the scoring episodes, in miniature.

Myth 5: Strength training makes you slow

Outdated, and only half-survivable as a myth because of one true edge case: strength work with zero jumping attached. Paired with jumping, which is how every legitimate program runs it, heavy training is what breaks the plateau that pure jumping volume eventually hits. The bodybuilder counterexample cuts the other way too: seven-time Mr. Olympia strength with no jumping reps doesn’t produce Isaiah, because Isaiah is a decade of jumps plus the strength. Hunter’s own experiment is the cleanest demo: calisthenics and upper-body work took him from 155 to nearly 180 pounds, and his punch power, hand speed, arm swing, and power clean all jumped with it. Look at the top of the sport: Kilganon, Isaiah, Donovan are all visibly strong up top. Donovan’s every-dunk-is-a-punch era coincides exactly with his 30-pound year.

Myth 6: Pros are just genetic freaks

Partially true, mostly misused. Yes, every elite dunker has above-average genetics; I won’t pretend otherwise about myself either. The myth is the conclusion people draw: that training is decorative. The honest framing is the one we keep repeating: don’t compare yourself to outliers. If your training plan is copied from the guy who jumps seven days a week with no lifting and never gets hurt (hi, Dillan), you’re planning around someone else’s body. Model the trained elites instead: what Kilganon and Isaiah actually do is a program, and programs are copyable.

Myth 7: Slow progress means failure

The DM I get constantly: “I’m plateaued, I only gained three inches in four months.” Three inches in four months is spectacular. At the elite end, gains are measured in half-inches per year; Isaiah plateaued for roughly two years and dipped at one point, with the best coach in the sport. If your vertical is going up at all, on any timescale, the training is working. The beginners’ curve is steep and the advanced curve is nearly flat, and confusing the two is how people quit programs that are succeeding.

Myth 8: A 40-inch vertical is average

I have a 41.5 and I know of maybe two other people in Minnesota with a verified 40. When Isaiah calls a 45 “mid,” he means mid among the ten best jumpers alive, and clipping that out of context has convinced a generation that their 38 is embarrassing. A 38 dunks. A 35 dunks for most reaches. And the related lie in my DMs, “you’re lucky, I’d need a 42 just to dunk,” is almost always a standing-reach measurement error (see Myth 2).

Myth 9: One percent of people can dunk

Even that famous stat oversells it. The realistic dunking population is roughly ages 14 to 30 (below that, most can’t touch net; above it, most have moved on), and within that band it’s a small minority. If you can dunk on a true 10’ rim, you are rarer than the top one percent of the global population at this skill. Act accordingly: any vertical over 30 is genuinely good, and every inch past it is compounding rarity.

That’s the list. If you want a part two or a deep-dive on any single myth, tell us in the comments; this one was a blast to make. Next episode goes all the way into the genetics question with Donovan Hawkins. Subscribe if you’re new, and bring us your myths.

This is episode 42 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, me and Hunter Castona on a topic that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough: how much your environment changes how high you jump. I’m Dylan Haugen, and the thesis up front: dunking with people is a cheat code, certain gyms are genuinely magic, and if you cloned me ten times and sent each one to a different gym today, every clone would jump a different height. Both of us had sessions the day we recorded, and both were environment casualties, which made the topic choose itself.

Exhibit A: today’s two bad sessions

My session: a nice court near the family cabin, packed with parents and kids, dirty looks every time I set up the tripod. I jumped high and hit nothing memorable, because the whole time part of my brain was managing the room instead of dunking. Hunter’s session: dunking with CJ and Jeffrey from his Wisconsin crew, body deep in a heavy-volume cycle that’s had him jumping lower every week since Wisconsin Dunk Camp; a Windmill was his best dunk, and he and CJ have agreed to drop to low rims until their bodies can cash the checks again. Two different failure modes, same lesson: the session is never just the session.

The group-session discovery (we both made it at Dunk Camp 2023)

Here’s the wild stat from comparing timelines: I dunked completely alone for years. Dunk Camp 2022 was technically my first time around other dunkers, and even there I mostly watched. Dunk Camp 2023 was the real first group session of my life, on legs fried by inconsistent training and AAU, and it was still one of my best dunk days ever: three or four Windmills, jumping out of the gym. Hunter’s 2023 camp was the same revelation at higher amplitude: jumping four sessions across three days with no drop-off, five new dunks including four Eastbays (one off one foot, a first), a one-hand Windmill off the backboard, and a Reverse Pump. Before camp, the best dunk he’d ever seen in person was a Windmill.

We both went home and immediately founded dunk groups, Minnesota Dunk Squad for me, the Wisconsin crew (CJ, JJ, Jeffrey, Nolan) for Hunter, and the rest of our progressions trace through group sessions: my first Eastbay landed five minutes after Hunter’s first Underboth on October 21, 2023, the highest-adrenaline moment of my life. Hunter’s tour since reads like a map of the scene: the UCF practice facility with John Evans, Isaiah, Austin, Dom, Nathan, and RJ (his best official-10’ Eastbay ever); the 12-person Missouri session with Josh and Donovan; his hometown Wisconsin camp, where family and friends in the stands flipped a switch and produced arguably his best jumping day ever.

(Status report on MDS, with love: 23 people in the group chat, and the most consistent attendee is 53-year-old Jason. If you’re in that chat and listening: Saturday. Be there.)

Why it works: the adrenaline mechanics

The pattern across every story we told:

• Dunking with better dunkers pulls dunks out of you. Watching someone hit a dunk you can’t do is the single best session stimulant that exists. Hunter tried his first Underboth ever at my gym because the environment said try it, back-rimmed it, then hit it.
• Spectators count even when they’re not dunkers. Some of Hunter’s best solo sessions had a baseball team training nearby, audibly losing it after his makes through his noise-cancelling headphones. A crowd is a crowd.
• Nerves and excitement are the same chemical. A speaker at camp told Hunter this and it reframed everything: after day one, the feeling that used to read as nervousness reads as fuel.
• The wrong crowd does the opposite. My dirty-looks session today is the control condition. People present but unsupportive is worse than an empty gym.

It even extends sideways: at the Wisconsin session with Josh, members of the Milwaukee Bucks’ Rim Rockers trampoline team showed up, and Hunter now has a standing invite to their practice and possibly a Sky Zone trip, which I am demanding to attend.

The legendary gyms list

The other half of environment is the building itself: temperature, floor, rim stiffness (forget height, stiffness changes everything), and the invisible thing we could only call iconic-ness. The Karl Malone Center, longtime home of Dunk Camp, is the canonical example: compact but somehow spacious, and saturated with history (Isaiah’s 50.5, his 360 behind-the-back between-the-legs, Dak’s 50, the first band dunks, Connor Barth getting his pro name). We then built the official Dunk Talk bucket list of courts we want to dunk on before we’re done:

• The 9’9” LA Fitness in California, the most legendary low rim in the sport.
• Goldenrod LA Fitness in Florida, where Kilganon has hit hundreds of new dunks.
• The National Sports Center (already legendary to us; the rim feel is unmatched).
• The North Carolina blue gym (Travis, Dan, Obi, Ben, Sam, plus visits from Isaiah, Jordan, and Connor).
• The Sarasota Ballislife court from the ATG era.
• Josh’s Missouri gym (same rim as the Sports Center, somehow).
• The LA rooftop court, the Chicago skyscraper court, and every hoop on Venice Beach. All of them. I don’t care.

The point under the list: put either of us on any of those courts, any week of any training cycle, surrounded by supportive people, and we jump well. The environment can rescue a mid-cycle body, and a bad environment can waste a peaked one.

The takeaway (and what’s next)

If you dunk alone: find someone. Any skill level helps, better-than-you helps most, and a dunk group is the renewable version of camp adrenaline. If your sessions are inconsistent and you’ve only audited your training, audit your environment too: the gym temperature, the rim, the crowd, the head space. It’s the cheapest variable to fix.

And my next environment experiment is a big one: the Vegas mega-session is in six days, fourteen elite dunkers, four hours of gym, fully unloaded. If the thesis of this episode is right, it should be one of the best sessions of my life. Episode 41 has the full roster. After that, Dunk Camp Utah. Next episode is Finn Addy, one of the most improved dunkers of 2024. Comment with the most legendary gym you’ve ever dunked in.

This is episode 31 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, a topic show with me and Hunter Castona. I’m Dylan Haugen, and the timing of this one is no accident: fall basketball just started for me, twice a week, and my last three dunk sessions have been mediocre to bad. So the question on the table is the one every basketball and volleyball player who wants to dunk eventually asks: can you actually increase your vertical during your season? The honest answer is mostly no, and this episode is about why, what you can realistically hold onto, and the handful of things that protect you.

My in-season history, season by season

I’ve now been through enough basketball seasons with a meaningful vertical to see the pattern clearly:

• 5th-7th grade: basketball seemed to help my bounce, or at least never hurt it. I touched rim for the first time in 7th grade at 5’6”. More on why this works for young kids below.
• 8th grade: first dunk, then the season ate it. I rarely dunked all winter because I was simply too fatigued.
• 9th grade: vertical around 36.5-37. I hit my first Windmill in November right before the season, then didn’t hit another one until March. Five to six practices a week, heavy running, and the worst knee pain of my life. I did almost no isometrics because I didn’t understand them yet, and I took zero time off because basketball culture treats playing through pain as normal. I’m still paying interest on that season.
• Sophomore year: first Eastbay in October (vertical around 38-40), then the season started and the bounce vanished immediately. No second Eastbay until January or February. The thing that saved me was structure: Saturdays fully off, Sundays for dunking, and one feel-good lift a week.
• This calendar year: the control group. I cut AAU entirely, and from February until a few weeks ago I gained probably 3-4 inches of vertical and made every dunk in my bag more consistent. Then fall basketball started and the regression began on cue.

One important note on that sophomore season: I didn’t lift at all during it, which is why I survived. I was doing two of the three (basketball plus jumping). Adding the third would have broken something.

Hunter’s version: quitting basketball entirely

Hunter’s arc is the cleaner experiment. He stopped competitive basketball after his junior year of high school, played rec-center runs for a couple of years while his vertical was still modest, and then cut 5-on-5 out completely about two years ago when he committed to dunking. His words: he started gaining vertical within weeks of stopping. During his high school overlap years (functional training plus jumping plus basketball, no real lifting) his knee pain peaked at an 8 or 9 out of 10. He misses playing. He doesn’t miss what it did to his training.

The rule of thumb Hunter put on this episode is the most quotable thing in it: basketball, jumping, lifting: pick two. All three at once ends in injury or in being too fatigued to do any of them well. Nearly every serious dunker you can name either quit their sport or capped it at one run a week scheduled on their jump day. Isaiah Rivera plays pickup, but it lands on his weekly jump day, not on top of it.

Why young kids get away with it (and you won’t)

The reason basketball felt like it built my vertical in 6th grade is that the forces involved were tiny. A kid jumping 25 inches isn’t producing outputs anywhere near what his tendons can absorb, so daily basketball is just more practice jumping. The math flips as the vertical climbs. At 40-plus inches, every max jump is a meaningful withdrawal from the tendon bank, and a season of five practices a week plus games adds hundreds of ground contacts per day on top. The higher you jump, the more your season costs.

That’s also the answer to the “but Ja Morant windmilled every day in high school” objection people send me. Yes, freaks exist. Ja could windmill at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday because he’s genetically different, the same way Dillan McCarthy jumps seven days a week at a 47-inch floor and doesn’t break. Most of the dunk community, me and Hunter included, are average people who out-work the average person. Building your plan off the outliers is how you get hurt.

What you can actually do in-season

If your sport is the priority and you just want to protect (and slightly grow) your bounce, this is the playbook we’d run:

• Daily isometrics, non-negotiable. Leg extension holds, kettlebell isos, wall sits, Spanish-squat-style work for the patellar tendon, calf isos for the Achilles. If you’re playing through tendon pain without doing isos, you are not going to progress, and my 9th grade season is the cautionary tale. Search Isaiah Rivera’s isometrics videos if you need the exact menu.
• One lift a week, feel-good intensity. Slow squats, controlled tempo, nothing close to failure. The THP “feel-good lift” concept: maintain strength, leave the gym fresher than you arrived.
• One small jump exposure a week. Not a three-hour session. Pick a practice day, get a handful of real jumps in, keep the motor pattern alive. The muscle memory decays slower than you fear; the tendons recover slower than you hope.
• Schedule a true off day. My Saturday-zero rule during sophomore season is the single best in-season decision I’ve made. One day of literally nothing.
• Treat the off-season as the build. The window between your season ending and the next one starting is where vertical is actually gained. If AAU eats your summer, you don’t have an off-season, which is exactly why cutting AAU was the biggest training decision of my year. Whatever your sport’s calendar, find the 3-4 month gap and lift hard through it.
• Take time off seriously, including from the sport. Hunter’s big point: high schoolers understand their bodies better than ever but still don’t respect rest. An injury costs you the time off anyway, plus rehab, plus the ramp back. Telling your coach your knee needs a week is cheaper than all three.

The honest answer to the title question

Can you increase your vertical in-season? If you’re young and jumping under roughly 30 inches, yes, the season itself is training. If you’re jumping 35-plus and practicing five days a week, realistically no: the goal is to maintain, stay healthy, and bank your gains for the off-season. And if your true goal is 45 or 50 inches, at some point you face the same decision Hunter and I faced, because the schedule that gets you there doesn’t coexist with a full competitive season. That’s not a sad ending; it’s just a choice. I’m still playing high school basketball with my eyes open about the cost, and the day eventually came where I chose dunking.

For the bigger-picture version of how a full training year fits around a season, episode 23 breaks down my 37.5-to-41.5 year month by month. Comment on YouTube with your sport and schedule and we’ll keep doing these topic shows. Next episode is Donovan Hawkins on what being a pro dunker is actually like.

This is episode 30 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by Hunter Castona, and the guest is Dillan McCarthy, a 5’9.75” 18-year-old dunker from New York who just tested a 49-inch vertical on the first Vertec-style test of his life. On a bad day. While hungry. With three people in the gym. Dillan might be the most physiologically unusual guest we’ve had on the show: he jumps at 100 percent effort seven days a week (sometimes eight sessions in seven days), runs 20-rep squat sets, never maxes his legs, and has stayed essentially injury-free doing a workload that would put most pros in a walking boot. Hunter and I spent half the episode openly bewildered.

A 4’10” volleyball kid from New York

Dillan’s sport is volleyball, and it still is. He’s played since sixth grade, when he was 4’10” and stuck in the back row because he couldn’t threaten the net. Basketball stayed a side thing with friends because his district’s coaching wasn’t good. Volleyball gave him two things that show up everywhere in his dunking now: elite reaction time and a deeply trained left-foot-last approach. He still hopes to play volleyball professionally someday, with dunking as the parallel track.

His introduction to pro dunking was watching Jordan Kilganon at Dunk League 2 with Shaq in 2016, back when Dillan couldn’t finish on a 7’6” hoop. The first real spark was touching the backboard at 4’10” after gym class. He got picked on for being short. He kept jumping.

The broken kneecap and the 2-inch vertical

Eighth grade nearly ended the whole thing. Dillan had been leg pressing 500 pounds in gym class (his words: not a good idea), went up for a one-foot between-the-legs layup at a dunk event, and split his kneecap in half. Clean break, full leg cast from hip to toes for three months, out of school the whole time. When he started jumping again five months later, he measured his vertical at roughly 2 inches.

The rebuild started in class. While teachers talked, Dillan did seated calf raises at his desk, every day, enough volume that he wore through four pairs of shoes from the constant flexing. That detail tells you everything about how he’s wired. From a shattered kneecap and a 2-inch vertical to 49 inches in roughly four years, with the calf work literally starting under a desk.

Training that breaks every rule we know

Hunter and I both train under structured programs with careful load management, so this section of the conversation was genuinely hard for us to process. Dillan’s system:

• Jump seven days a week, max effort. If a day goes badly, he adds reps the next day to make it up. He’s run this for about a year and a half. Some weeks it’s effectively eight sessions because he’s practicing multiple plants (left-right, right-left, off one foot both sides).
• 20-rep squats, never maxing. His staple is 225 for 4 sets of 20: slow eccentric, explode up. He has never tested a true squat max and doesn’t want to (calculator estimate around 405 for 3). His words: he’s not a PR guy, he trains for explosiveness and elasticity, same weight, more volume.
• Self-programmed. Three months of Bounce Kit after the kneecap, one week of Jump Master, then back to his own blend: calves, quads, hips, and a lot of shoulders for power dunks. Exercises pulled from Isaiah Rivera and Kilganon videos and remixed.
• No real rest days, minimal injuries. Outside the kneecap, his injury history is sprained thumbs and shoulder tendinitis from volleyball spiking, plus three recent months of patellofemoral pain that, by his account, hasn’t lowered his jumping at all. He says he feels like an alien. We did not argue.

To be clear about what we’d tell anyone reading this: do not copy this. Isaiah Rivera built THP’s entire philosophy around how much max-effort dunking costs the body, and Hunter has spent months in load management for far less volume. Dillan is the outlier that proves the range of human variance, not a template. But as a data point, he’s fascinating.

The 49-inch test

Dillan bought a Vert Trainer after a height check went viral (head at rim level, pointed across the gym at his girlfriend to make sure it got filmed). The test day was supposed to be an event: he’d arranged for the basketball team to be in the gym for adrenaline. They didn’t show. He’d barely eaten and his stomach was growling between attempts. Three people in the gym recording angles.

The numbers anyway: standing reach 7’8.5” in beat-down Nike running shoes, touched 11’9.5”, official 49-inch vertical, first formal test of his life. He came away annoyed he didn’t get 50. For calibration on how absurd that is: his self-reported floor is about 47 inches, because he needs roughly 46 to put his forearm in the rim and he ends every single session, every day, with a Honey Dip. He has never missed the closing Honey Dip.

He doesn’t use caffeine, either: water, Gatorade, and a protein shake. Hunter and I spent a while explaining pre-session caffeine to him, which felt a little like explaining nitrous to a car that already runs 200 mph. He says 50 inches is coming in 2025, and given the trajectory I wouldn’t bet against it.

No low rim, ever

The other heterodox piece of Dillan’s development: he basically never low-rims. Every new dunk gets attempted on 10’ immediately, repped until it lands, then repped on 10’ until it’s owned. The only exceptions are left-hand work and the occasional friend’s-house hoop. Nearly every guest on this show, from Southerland to Dom Gonzales, has told us low-rim creativity was either their foundation or their biggest regret, so Dillan inverts the entire pattern. With a 47-inch daily floor he can brute-force technique acquisition at full height in a way almost nobody else can. One more reason the template doesn’t generalize.

3,000 unposted videos

I admitted my prior read of Dillan on Instagram: a guy who pulls up, hits three dunks, posts, and leaves. The reality is the opposite. He dunks before class at his college, after class, and again until the basketball team kicks him off the court around 2:50, then goes home to the dumbbells next to his gaming setup, doing sets between matches because sitting still feels unproductive. He has roughly 3,000 unposted dunk clips from the past two and a half years and posts maybe three times a week, mostly new dunks only.

Hunter and I gave him the same pitch we give everyone: put the sessions on YouTube. A guy jumping 47+ daily with this story is exactly what the dunk community wants to watch, the archive becomes a progress record, and the ad revenue is a real income stream for a dunker building toward FIBA-style contests. He’s thinking about it.

What’s next for Dillan

Dillan is finishing a welding associate’s degree (a practical move from his high school’s BOCES program), then pivoting toward physical therapy and sports medicine, which is the career he actually wants. Dunking sits beside it: shows, contests, and eventually FIBA 3×3 events, which he modestly claims he isn’t good enough for yet. He jumps high enough today; the contest bag is the gap, and at his trajectory it won’t be a gap long.

He also hasn’t been to Dunk Camp yet, mostly because he’s on the wrong coast for both locations and flights add up. Everyone in the community wants to see him in a group session, us included. The update on how this story develops is already on the books: Dillan came back on the show after testing a 50-inch vertical at 19.

Dillan posts as himself on Instagram; go follow and tell him to start the YouTube channel. Next episode is a topic show on whether you can increase your vertical in-season. Comment with any dunker you want me and Hunter to interview next.