Donovan Hawkins

Donovan Hawkins came to dunking from a direction almost nobody else did. He played hockey from age five to sixteen and has never played organized basketball, only park runs and pickup. It started on the adjustable hoop his dad bought him, and took hold the day he found a Billy Doran Dunkademics video of Tyler Currie. He low rimmed for years, got his first ten foot dunk at fifteen in gym class off one foot, then switched to a two foot right left plant after knee pain. First Eastbay at sixteen, first under both at seventeen.

The line was never straight. From March 2022 to March 2023 he stopped entirely, close to ten months, for mental health reasons. John Evans of THP called him out of the blue, and Donovan went to a park that same day and hit a J-Rich his first session back. He did not touch a barbell until November 2023, at twenty. In January 2024 he was 199 pounds with a 205 power clean and a 335 back squat; by December, 222 pounds, a 275 clean, a 435 squat, and a vertical up from roughly 45 inches into the high 40s.

He dunked on day one of Texas Dunk Camp in 2023 and was moved into the show; that December, Chuck Millan and Team Flight Brothers gave him his first booking, a Phoenix Suns halftime contest. Then came 2024. An NBA All-Star event. Final Four work in April. Second at K54 in Paris, after a cancelled flight got him in six hours before it started. A no props win at Venice Beach, every dunk first try. A win in the nine foot contest at Wisconsin dunk camp by fifty-odd points. Four thousand dollars for first at his debut FIBA 3×3 event in Edmonton, alongside Finn Addy. He became the fifth black band mid session, throwing the last one off the backboard when a plain one would have counted.

The year’s defining number came from a Las Vegas session Billy Doran flew out to film. Josh Ruble shot a height check at 240 frames per second and the app returned a 0.968 flight time, four thousandths above the 0.964 Isaiah Rivera put up on his 50 inch vertical test. Donovan had no idea what he was looking at, and found out at an In-N-Out afterward, reading the number to John Evans and hearing him start yelling.

What separates him is force. He has punched everything since his first low rim dunk, and Doran has called his mix of vertical, style, power and technique a combination almost nobody has. THP timed his block foot to takeoff at 0.25 seconds. He uses no props and has never done a double up. His signature is the under both, which he argues is easier for him than a 360 Eastbay only because he has done more of them. He trains in four week blocks with two weeks completely off, and jumps every other week.

He is also one of the sharpest thinkers in the sport. He opens contests with his best dunk, normally an under both, which he believes no other pro does: judges rarely know what they are looking at, so once they have seen his ceiling, everything after reads as elite. He preaches simplicity over technicality, and wants contests scored on the full ten point scale. On genetics he is blunt: almost nobody trains purely for jumping, so there is no sample size to prove they matter.

Named the best dunker of 2024 and Dunk Talk’s most featured guest, he will not say any of it back. Not all time, he says, and he thinks Isaiah Rivera and Jordan Kilganon would beat him given a month to prepare, even after Isaiah and John Evans said on their show that nobody could. Listed at 6’4″, he had measured 6’3.5″ without shoes before his first Dunk Talk appearance, at twenty, when Hunter Castona introduced him as one of the most underrated dunkers in the community. He is filmed by Dunkademics, trains at Shoot 360 in Las Vegas, and keeps his goals specific: a 50 on a Vertec, 315 on the power clean, a 360 under both off the backboard.