Chris John

CJ Champion is a six foot professional dunker who has become one of the sport’s most serious thinkers about how dunks actually get scored. He competes, he judges, and he spends a good deal of his own time breaking contest scoring down on his YouTube channel, walking through the simple rating system and how complexity gets calculated.

He has judged at Dunk Camp, where a single day can mean scoring around fifty dunkers, each one on flight, style, finish and complexity at the same time, which he admits is where the delays come from. He scored the contest in China, and he published a head to head breakdown of Travis Reynolds against Finn Addy that Dylan brought up during the episode.

Episode 27 was the second half of a panel on growing dunking into a real sport, with Billy Doran, Justin Barber, Donovan Hawkins and Hunter Castona. CJ spent most of it proposing mechanisms rather than listing what is missing.

On the Olympics he was blunt. Not 2028, and the people he has talked to at Dunk Elite and FIBA put it closer to ten or twenty years out. The requirement that stops everything is that a sport be widely practiced across at least 75 countries and four continents, and nobody is organizing contests at that scale. His workaround was to route around the funding problem entirely and run contests online: two dunkers from a country each submit dunks from a single session, judges score the footage, a winner gets declared. No venue, no flights, no prize money at the start, just international participation that actually exists on the record.

His other proposals were about speed. Split the panel so one judge watches flight, another style, another finish, another complexity, because one person covering all four is slower and less accurate. Have dunkers submit their routine in advance so complexity is computed before anyone jumps. Build an app that feeds it all into a system, which answers the most common criticism in his own comment sections, that nobody wants to pull out a spreadsheet mid contest. And find a way to measure flight objectively, something like the hip mounted sensor he once used that reported jump height straight to a phone, because flight is where judging is least reliable and where real prize money will eventually make that unacceptable.

He also wants the World Dunk Association to start behaving like a governing body: write the rules for how a contest should run and how anyone can be certified to judge one, then send that proposal to everybody, from Red Bull to the NBA, and see who bites. His view is that the dunkers are the leverage. The connections already exist in the room; they have just never been pointed at anything.