Dillan McCarthy

Dillan McCarthy is a professional dunker from New York known around the sport as the alien, and one of the highest jumpers alive. He is volleyball-rooted rather than basketball-rooted: organized volleyball from seventh grade on, and never a season of organized basketball in his life. Jordan Kilganon is what pulled him in, at around 12, watching Dunk League. He was 4’10” then, short enough to walk under a volleyball net, and what he actually wanted was to jump high enough to spike over people.

In eighth grade he was loading 500 pounds on a leg press at roughly 90 pounds of bodyweight. A week later, messing around at the Y, he planted his left foot for a between-the-legs layup and broke his kneecap clean in half: three months in a full leg cast, no school, and a vertical he describes as two inches by the time he started jumping again. He spent the recovery doing seated calf raises through every class until he had worn out four pairs of shoes.

He got his first dunk at 16 at 5’6″, off the dribble, and by his first Dunk Talk appearance with Dylan Haugen and Hunter Castona he had just tested a 49 inch vertical, the first time he had ever measured. What stunned people was everything around it: seven days a week at full effort, sometimes 300 jumps a day, 27 exercises daily, four sets of 20 on a 225-pound squat, pool work at the YMCA where he worked, and no coach at all. The show pushed back on how unstructured it was, and he has since said the same thing himself.

Two things changed after that episode, which is still the most popular one on the channel. Free hoops off Facebook Marketplace filled his backyard with rims he could lower, which along with a weighted ball finally gave him a way to build hand speed. And he messaged Austin Bourque about THP’s six-inches-in-six-months guarantee, joking that he would take a 55 inch vertical for free, which got him John Evans’ phone number. Volume came down, weight went up, and his squat climbed to 405 for two.

He tested 50 inches at 19: roughly the sixth person ever verified at that number and the youngest by about five years, in a cold gym, about 20 jumps in, coming off two weeks of no jumping. He missed 51 by half a centimeter. He also became the world’s 12th blackband dunker, clearing the full list in one unplanned session after work, and drove 21 hours to Florida to train with Isaiah Rivera and John Evans. More recently, in 2026, he PR’d at a 52 inch vertical. His dunking is filmed by Dunkademics.

At 5’9″ with a 7’8″ standing reach, the gap between those two numbers is most of the story. He plants left-right and deliberately built a right-left plant because it makes Eastbay elbows, backboard windmills and under boths far easier. His signature is the Eastbay Elbow, and the version he is chasing is off a lob, which he believes no one has hung. Asked whether he would rather jump the highest in the world or be the best technical dunker ever, he did not hesitate: technique can be learned on rest days.