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.