This is episode 36 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by Hunter Castona, and the guest is Elijah Davis, a 5’8” dunker from Central Illinois with one of the strangest growth stories in the sport: he reached 5’8” at age nine and never grew another inch. He dunked on 10’ at twelve. He measured a 45-inch vertical the summer after eighth grade. And the whole thing started because a chubby comic-book kid was getting bullied and his dad sat him down to watch Nate Robinson win a dunk contest.
The Nate Robinson talk
Elijah didn’t play sports as a kid. He describes himself as a fat comic-book nerd who watched every NBA game with his dad and assumed he’d get around to basketball once he got tall, because getting tall was just what happened. Then, at nine, doctors told the family he was done growing. 5’8” was the final number.
His dad’s response is the best parenting moment we’ve had on this show. He sat Elijah down to watch Nate Robinson win the NBA dunk contest and said: he’s out there doing that, and you have two inches on him. Worst case, if you do everything you can, you’re doing that two inches higher. The people who get what they want and the people who don’t are separated by work ethic and belief, not height. He bought Elijah a gym membership the next day and told him: you have Google, you have YouTube, choose a schedule, start now, don’t stop until you have what you want.
That summer, nine-year-old Elijah walked to the local gym when it opened for kids at 10 a.m. and stayed until 10 p.m., every single day, hooping and doing leg work, ignoring his mom’s calls to come home. Then he set the rule that defined the next decade: five days a week, 45 minutes a day, something for the vertical, no exceptions. He kept it from age 9 to age 20 without missing.
Three years of “nothing,” then everything at once
The early years were honest chaos: 40 lunges, two back squats, no idea what he was doing, no visible progress. When he wanted to skip, his dad would ask whether he really couldn’t stretch for 45 minutes or do wall sits during the game. The insight that eventually organized everything is the one I wish every beginner internalized: jumping muscles respond like any other muscle. Nobody asks the 500-pound bencher his secret and hears anything but “I benched.” If you want to jump, train the jump, and don’t stop.
Seventh grade he upgraded: chore money bought sessions at a local facility called Sports Enhancement, where an ex-Army trainer strapped him into a makeshift resistance setup, a weightlifting belt with bands clipped to all four corners, and ran him through 45 straight minutes of alternating banded squat jumps (sets of 20) and free max-effort jumps (sets of 10), three days a week, with plyometrics on the alternating days. Every time the jumping stopped looking painful, the trainer added five pounds to the dumbbell, with a standing rule: if I see you doing something that looks doable, why are you here? Elijah credits this regime for both his bounce and the fact that he has zero one-foot athleticism. Everything was built off two feet.
Then one warm spring day at recess, with three years of invisible work banked, he started grabbing rebounds clean off the rim. Classmates asked if he could dunk. He said no, obviously, I’m 12. They said try. He grabbed the rim and hung two-handed on the first attempt, threw down a rim-grazer two-hander on the next, and spent the rest of the day punching dunks with a kickball because his hands couldn’t palm a basketball yet. He’d never once tested himself before that day. His words: the job wasn’t finished, I wasn’t Nate Rob yet.
Steven Selby, low rims, and learning to dunk before being able to dunk
Two influences get full credit in Elijah’s telling. The first is Steven Selby, who he calls the number one reason for 100 percent of his athleticism. In the pre-boom YouTube era, Selby was the only creator showing the journey instead of the highlight: full videos of missed dunks, sore tendons, honest bad days, from a 5’9” guy who was never going to grow into it. Nine-year-old Elijah watched daily, commented from his parents’ computer, and has DM’d him thank-yous repeatedly as an adult. (Selby is at Dunk Camp every year, and his own comeback is on: he just got a 9’9” dunk down. The community knows what he means to it.)
The second is low-rim work, and Elijah’s version of the argument is the cleanest I’ve heard. He perfected every dunk on a low rim before it ever touched 10’: the form, the ball control, how the dunk flows in motion. So when his bounce arrived, the trick dunks were already waiting. A clean Windmill on 8’6” just needed more height, not more learning. He also ran the daily ladder drill I did as a kid: set the home rim at the maximum height you can finish on, dunk for hours, raise it an inch when it gets easy. By spring of freshman year he back-rimmed his first 10’ Windmill twice, hit it third try, then spent four more hours that day until the between-the-legs went down too. A 5’8” freshman with a Windmill and a between-the-legs, in the era before anyone was watching.
The 45-inch vert and the eighth-grade poster hunt
The summer between eighth grade and freshman year, Elijah measured a 45-inch vertical. He says his raw bounce never really improved after that; everything since has been learning to express it on a court, and he can dunk far better today at a lower jump height than he could then. Eighth grade itself was a comedy: the only Black kid in an all-white Catholic school league, studying Ballislife mixtapes and trying to poster somebody on every single drive. He has a photo that looks like the greatest dunk attempt in middle school history; the video shows him front-flipping over a defender and landing on his neck. A rude awakening about real competition came later, but the fearlessness stuck.
COVID, the half-foot rest bounce, and the cost of the grind
Elijah played college basketball until COVID ended his career at 20. Then something strange happened: after months of forced rest, the first real rest of his athletic life, his vertical went up roughly half a foot. The accumulated fatigue of a decade of five-day weeks had been suppressing his ceiling the whole time. It’s the most dramatic single argument for recovery we’ve ever had on this show, and it cuts both ways, because the same news made it easy to stop training entirely. He hasn’t done a leg workout in four years.
The medical ledger explains some of the hesitancy: both menisci are essentially gone, worn away rather than torn in any single moment (“straight fall damage,” discovered by accident), plus multiple stress fractures in both knees. And yet he doesn’t hurt the way the chart says he should. He still hoops, still dunks in traffic off muscle memory, still goes up when a lane opens. He’s honest that “I’m old and broken” has been more excuse than diagnosis.
The comeback, declared on the record
The reason Elijah reached out to us is the part I’ll remember. He said Hunter and I are the first dunkers he’s watched who feel like his nine-year-old self from the outside: kids his height doing the work he used to do. (He’d seen my viral baseline-poster TikTok long before we ever talked and didn’t know it was me.) Watching this generation made him want to dunk for fun again instead of treating it as an on-command party trick. So he committed, out loud, on the podcast: the grind restarts now, smart this time, strength work and knee isos first, with two stated goals: have enough left to dunk on his future son when the kid’s old enough to be hurt by it, and show up to a Dunk Camp without getting embarrassed. He’s 24. As Hunter told him, Isaiah is peaking at almost 27; the window is wide open.
His closing note was about why this podcast exists, and I’m keeping it: watching only the Isaiahs and Kilganons makes elite dunking look like divine selection. Hearing the full stories humanizes it. That’s the whole project here.
Elijah is “real.swav” on Instagram; go follow the comeback and hold him to it. He also tipped us to a friend who went from non-hooper to off-the-backboard Eastbays in one year of bodybuilding leg days, so that episode may exist eventually. Next up is Dmytro “Smoove” Kryvenko, one of the greatest dunkers of all time. Comment with any dunker you want us to interview next.