Elijah Davis

Elijah Davis is a 5’8″ dunker from Central Illinois with one of the youngest first-dunk stories the show has told. By his own description he was a chubby comic book nerd who had never picked up a ball, and he hit 5’8″ at nine and then stopped growing entirely. He started hooping around nine or ten for a blunt reason: he was getting bullied, and he wanted to be good at something that did not depend on being tall.

The turning point was a night on the couch with his dad watching Nate Robinson win the dunk contest. His father’s argument was arithmetic: if that man is doing that and you have two inches on him, then the worst case, if you do everything you can, is the same thing two inches higher. What separates people who get what they want from people who do not, he said, is work ethic and belief. The next day he bought his nine-year-old a gym membership and told him to pick a schedule and not stop until he had what he wanted. That summer Elijah walked to the neighborhood gym when it opened for kids at 10 a.m. and stayed until 10 p.m. every day. He set a rule of five days a week, 45 minutes a day, something for his vertical, and did not break it from nine years old until he was 20.

It got serious in seventh grade, when he spent chore money on a gym in town called Sports Enhancement and trained on a homemade Vertimax: a weightlifting belt with resistance bands clipped to all four corners. Forty-five minutes of alternating banded squat jumps and maximum jumps, three days a week, with an ex-Army trainer adding five pounds of dumbbell any time jumping stopped looking painful. Elijah credits that program for the fact that he is purely a two-foot jumper, and says the first two years felt like zero progress before three years of work arrived at once.

It arrived at recess that spring, on the outdoor hoops in the school parking lot. He was pulling rebounds straight off the rim, and classmates asked whether he could dunk. He told them he was 12. They told him to try anyway. He grabbed rim, hung on it with two hands, then went back up and put down a rim-grazing two-hander on his first attempt, and because he could not palm a basketball yet he found a kickball and started punching one-handers. He had never once checked his vertical, on the logic that the job was not finished until he could do what Nate Robinson did. The low rim is the other half of the story: he learned every dunk on a lower hoop first, raising it an inch a day.

His model was Steven Celi, whose daily videos he watched religiously at nine and ten, commenting on every one from his parents’ computer and getting answers back. What made them different was that Celi posted the journey rather than the highlights, whole videos of missed dunks and sore tendons, made by somebody who was also never going to grow another inch. Elijah calls him the guy who got him where he is and does not know it. Jordan Kilganon was on the list too, back when he was one of the only people dunking on YouTube for fun, with Isaiah Rivera a couple of years ahead of him.

His own favorite dunk is a tip dunk on a rival team’s center at 16, in front of a student section that had been on him all week. It made the local news and settled an argument, because his dad had refused to acknowledge he could dunk until it happened in a game that mattered. At 24 and twelve years in, he is in an unusual position: he stopped training legs when the pandemic ended his college basketball career, and the rest pushed his vertical to the highest it has ever been. Both menisci are gone, ground away across a career rather than lost to any injury, and he found out by accident. His goal, said out loud on the episode so people would hold him to it, is to get back into the grind he started at nine, and to finally try jumping off one foot. He credits Dylan Haugen with restarting that fire.