This is episode 6 of the Dunk Talk Podcast and the first guest interview with a professional dunker. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by my co-host Hunter Castona, and the guest is Connor Barth, a pro dunker of about five or six years with a dunk on his resume that has roughly 80 million views. The reason this conversation lands different is that Connor sat down with us about two and a half weeks after finishing chemotherapy. The headline he gave us mid-episode: he is officially cancer-free.
The cancer diagnosis and how it landed
Connor was diagnosed with cancer in September 2023, right after The Dunk Camp. He had gone to the doctor for an unrelated check while he was still at camp, then got the confirmation a few weeks later. He framed it on the podcast as “not a serious type of cancer, but still cancer,” which is the kind of one-line description a dunker would give. He had surgery that same month. October was follow-up testing, and the verdict from his medical team was that he needed to do chemo to keep it from coming back. He started chemotherapy in February 2024 and ran it for about three and a half months. He finished about two and a half weeks before this recording.
The way Connor talks about being out of training for three and a half months hits different when you remember he’s been a working pro dunker for five or six years. He was, in his words, “basically a potato laying in bed for the last three and a half months.” He gained roughly 15 pounds. He had zero cardio. He was meaningfully weaker than he’d been before the diagnosis. He says it’s the most out of shape he’s ever been in his life.
Then the headline: a week before recording, his doctor told him he’s cancer-free. Imaging clean. Everything checks out. The road from here is just the long grind back to being the dunker he was.
Two weeks into the comeback
Connor started training again two weeks before this recording. Week one was literally walks. Thirty minutes at a time, which exhausted him at first. That detail alone tells you how much three and a half months of chemo takes out of someone who started the cycle at peak dunker conditioning. By week two he was easing into low-intensity gym work. The morning of this recording he went to the gym, did an easy warmup, shot around, and got one dunk off a max-vert attempt. Not a Windmill, not a trick dunk. One dunk off a serious effort. He laughed about it on the podcast. The point isn’t that the dunk was clean. The point is that two and a half weeks off chemo and he’s already throwing one down.
Connor said something about the experience that I won’t forget. He’s spent his career coaching clients through their own comebacks: people who are out of shape, overweight, dealing with their own setbacks, trying to come back to the sport they love. He’d always sympathized with them but never fully felt what they were feeling. This was the first time in his life he’s ever been on the client side of that equation. His take: it’s one of the coolest things he’s ever gone through. Cancer and chemo aren’t anywhere close to fun. The experience of being the “out of shape comeback” person, though, makes him a better coach to every client he’ll work with from this point forward.
How Connor got into dunking
Connor’s dunk progression looks a lot like a lot of the other guests on this show. Freshman year of high school going into sophomore year, he got his first dunk: a baby off-one, two-hand rim-grazer fingertip dunk. Sophomore year he was around 5’10” to 5’11”, hitting baby two-handers, baby one-handers off two, and one-handers off one. Junior year he was up to 5’11” or 6’ and could do a “half Windmill” that involved going out to the side. He didn’t play basketball his senior year because he attended an all-academic high school, but he was hooping in pickup the whole time. After high school, between 18 and 22, he grew significantly and his bag opened up. That growth window is when the foundation for his pro career got built.
The first dunk contest he ever entered was a FIBA 3×3 in Mexico City, right after a Dunk Camp. He got the invite as a direct result of being in the dunk-community circle by that point. He went up against a dunker named Gemini Linus, who Connor flagged as one of the international dunkers very few people in the US have actually heard of. (Watching Connor pull up dunkers I’ve never seen and gas them up is one of my favorite things about talking to him.)
The 80-million-view dunk and the peak vertical
Connor’s peak vertical was early 2022. That’s also the window where he hit the dunk that’s sitting at roughly 80 million views across platforms. The viral side of dunking is real income, and Connor has more direct revenue tied to a single dunk than most people in the sport. He’s also one of a handful of professional dunkers I can name who is actually making real money from the act of dunking itself, not just from training programs and coaching. That gap (between “pro dunker” as a title and pro dunker as an income) is one of the things that makes Shaq’s DunkMan League such a meaningful step for the sport.
The tap dunk nobody had done before
One of the better stories from Connor’s contest career was a 10′ round he was in where he hit a tap dunk first try that nobody had done before in that format. The opponent in that round won the matchup with a Dubble Up, which set up Connor’s extended position on the Dubble Up debate that’s been running through the dunk world the last year or so. (More on that next.)
Connor’s position on the Dubble Up scoring debate
Connor loves Dubble Ups. He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with them as dunks. The problem, as he sees it, is the scoring in international and FIBA 3×3 contests, where Dubble Ups have been graded as if they’re objectively harder than an off-the-bounce trick dunk, when in his measured experience the push-off gives a real vertical boost that should affect the score. Connor literally measured the difference: on an Eastbay on 9’10”, he was hitting roughly 42″ of vertical leap. On a Dubble Up attempt with a push-off, he was hitting roughly 47″. That’s a real five-inch boost from the human being he’s jumping over.
His proposed scoring fix is fairly simple. If a between-the-legs off the bounce is a 40 out of 50, then a between-the-legs out of someone’s hand and over them should probably be a 35 out of 50. Because the off-the-bounce version is technically harder and gets no push-off boost. He’s clear that this isn’t anti-Dubble-Up sentiment. It’s pro-clean-scoring sentiment. Dubble Ups are spectacular in shows and contests should keep them. The judging just has to reflect what’s actually happening physically.
Connor also pointed out that the T-Dub-purist crowd (the dunkers who say “T-Dub didn’t use a push-off when he invented it, so push-offs are wrong”) is operating with an incomplete read of T-Dub’s own position. I’ve had this conversation directly with T-Dub recently. He lives close to me, we’ve been talking, and when I sent him videos of my push-off Dubble Ups, his reaction was “those are sick.” T-Dub doesn’t care. The push-off line in the sand is being drawn by people on T-Dub’s behalf without his input.
Connor’s coaching philosophy
One of the most useful sections of the episode was Connor walking through the levels of coaching as he’s lived them. He framed it as a three-stage progression and it’s applicable to anyone who’s ever trained another athlete:
- Phase one (early): “What worked for me works for everyone.” You hand out your program. It works for some clients. It doesn’t work for others. You don’t know why.
- Phase two (middle): “Everyone needs everything custom.” You overcorrect. Each client gets a completely bespoke setup. You realize you’re running yourself into the ground for marginal returns.
- Phase three (mature): “Not everyone needs everything custom, but everyone has small differences.” You learn to identify the specific 10–20% of a program that needs to be customized for the specific athlete in front of you, and the 80–90% that can stay standard.
The clean version of how Connor described his coaching now: “all coaching is being able to look at what someone wants to do, have them do that as much as possible, but then give them what they need outside of it in the weight room.” If your client is a basketball player who wants to jump higher, the answer is some weight room work plus more basketball, not pure weight room work that crowds out the sport itself. If your client is a dunker, the answer is letting them dunk as much as they can recover from while shoring up the lifts that protect them from injury.
This perspective shows up in how Connor talks about Jordan Kilganon, THP, and JumpX (he’s now in Orlando and gets to talk with the THP guys directly more often). Each program has its own strengths. The error isn’t picking the “wrong” one. The error is not knowing what your specific client actually needs.
What he wants out of the comeback
Connor isn’t in a rush. The next three weeks he’s aiming for slow rebuilding: gym walk-ins, gentle conditioning, getting his body used to load again. After that the schedule starts to look more like his old training, with sessions ramping back up. He’s lived this long enough to know the comeback timeline is not linear and trying to force it is a recipe for either reinjury or burnout. (Dillan McCarthy, who jumps 49 inches a week, is doing the opposite of this approach because he has the runway to. Connor doesn’t, and he’s adjusting his expectations accordingly.)
The longer-term goal is the same one he’s had for five or six years: stay one of the better dunkers in the world, build the coaching business, and pull the next generation of dunkers up with him. That last part is why Hunter and I are so excited Connor sat down with us at all. The first guest pro on this show was always going to set the tone for the rest, and Connor showing up two and a half weeks off chemo to talk about coaching philosophy and Dubble Up scoring is exactly the tone we wanted to set.
Where to find Connor
Connor is on Instagram and the usual platforms. He’s coaching out of Orlando, so if you’re in Florida and looking for one-on-one work, reach out. He’ll be back on the show as his comeback progresses, and we’ve already talked about a follow-up episode once he’s back to dunking at his old level.
Next on the show is the “best shoes for dunking” conversation with Shankar Iyer, and after that the Donovan Hawkins interview a lot of you have been requesting. We’ve also got Minnesota Dunk Squad sessions every weekend, so if you’re in the area and dunk, come through. Thanks for listening.