Dylan Haugen

Dylan Haugen is a professional dunker, content creator, and the founder and host of the Dunk Talk Podcast. He grew up in Blaine, Minnesota. It started with one YouTube video of Michael Jordan’s top 50 plays, watched around age 11. He went outside, cranked the family hoop down to seven and a half feet, and copied what he had seen with a mini ball. His fourth grade season high was eight points. A summer of nothing but low rims later he was one of the best players on his fifth grade team, which he credits entirely to dunking.

He got the rim at a seventh grade water break. Around then he started talking to Jordan Kilganon, who sent him a screenshot of his own approach with the correct line drawn over it. In September 2021, at a gym in Ham Lake, a stranger named Adam Anderson offered to throw him lobs, and four or five attempts in he had his first dunk, at 5’8″ and 13. He filmed all of it, misses included, which is why the audience exists: over 100 million views.

He tested a 36.5 inch vertical at his first Dunk Camp at 14, 37.5 at 15, and 41.5 at 16. His first Eastbay came on October 21, 2023, two days before he turned 16, in a session with Hunter Castona, now the show’s recurring co-host. He jumps off two feet on a left-right plant, technique he built by studying frame by frame video of Isaiah Rivera and Kilganon, who plant the same way.

At 17 he quit high school basketball. He had reached the point where he could not practice five or six days a week and still jump his best, and his knee pain was the worst of his life. The year he stopped, he tested 41.5, landed his first behind the back and his first hide and seek, the latter younger than anyone had before, then got the dunk he had chased longest: an underboth in Winona at 5’11” and 17, the youngest anyone under six feet had done it.

He has won six of the seven or eight contests he entered, starting with a Minnesota title at 16 and a Maryland flyout at 17. At another he landed an inverted scorpion over a person, the first time that had been done in competition, and now his signature. He has trained under Jump X, run by Tom Barnes out of Australia, since he was 15. Turning 18 changed the method: caps of 25 to 30 max effort jumps a session and deep squats after a lifetime of half squats. A patellar tendon injury then cost him months, most spent dunking on eight foot rims off his wrong plant, and the person he called was Travis Reynolds, who knew the injury.

In 2026 he signed with the DunkMan League, Shaquille O’Neal’s new professional league built by Chuck Millan, as one of 24 athletes competing for a $500,000 grand prize and the youngest professional dunker in the world. He founded the Minnesota Dunk Squad the summer he got home from Dunk Camp 2023, which still runs sessions and events across the Midwest. Away from the rim he co-founded Local Service Spotlight with Dennis Yu. His dunking has been filmed by Dunkademics and covered by KARE 11 in Minneapolis.

Dunk Talk came from the same instinct. Most dunkers are extraordinary at what they do and close to invisible online, years of work sitting as loose clips with nothing written down anywhere. Every episode is a dunker telling their own story for an hour, and every one gets repurposed into articles, profiles, and pages across the web. That is the mission behind the show: take the stories and in-the-weeds knowledge that live in dunkers’ heads and put them where Google and AI assistants can actually surface them. Dylan has personally interviewed every guest across more than 70 episodes.