Ethan Pimstone

Ethan Pimstone played everything as a kid, but basketball was his sport; at 10 he was dropping 30 a game in rec leagues. Then everyone else hit puberty and he did not. He was 5’4″ as a high school freshman, too small to get on the floor, and his goal in practice was not dunking but scraping the bottom of the backboard. He quit after that season, and for the next couple of years he was, in his own words, the fluffiest and least active he has ever been, gaming ten hours a day.

The weight room pulled him back at 17, mostly because his older brother Jordan Pimstone had been lifting since he was young. From 17 to 21 the goal was bodybuilding, up to around 200 pounds. He got his first rim grazer at 17 and became the guy his friends called the LA Fitness Zion, but he dunked like a big man, two hands, nothing fancy. He could not windmill even with the 44.5-inch vertical he tested in 2023 off no jump training at all. Jordan spent close to two years telling him what that number meant, and Ethan kept answering that he did not care how high he jumped, he just wanted his legs to be big.

What he left out of that argument was that his knees were destroyed: he would play for hours, then spend a week unable to walk up stairs. He handed his training over about eight months before this episode, and the first phase was not jumping, it was rehab, then sprinting, because he still wanted to walk on at a Division I school. He timed a flying 10 in 1.01 seconds, over 20 miles an hour. He also learned what impatience costs, betting $20 he could touch a 13-foot light cold and then taking six max jumps on a Vertec the next day, which set him back a month.

Dunk Camp 2025 was the switch. He tapered, ate roughly 500 grams of carbs a day beforehand, and went in hoping for 45. He tested 47.5 inches, touching 12’1″, with plates stacked under the vert trainer and a crowd that formed once the number passed 40. He missed it twice, was ready to stop, and made it after someone told him to take one more. Then he took a height check with his nose at the rim, which drew an audible reaction from Isaiah Rivera. Rivera gave him pointers and he hit his first Eastbay that day, plus a 360 windmill first try. Nobody there had heard of him; he was not even posting.

His knees paid for it. He took about 12 max-effort jumps that day on top of a 30-jump dunk session, and by contest day squatting was eight out of ten pain and he was warming up with double-leg wall sits because single-leg was impossible. He opened with a clean windmill off a lob from Rivera and felt nothing in his knees, then his left quad seized so badly he thought it might tear. He hit a 360 windmill first try anyway, made the final four, hit another, missed twice on a 360 Eastbay he had attempted once in his life, and closed with a windmill so he would end on a make.

Ground contact on the 47.5 was 0.23 seconds, which is why the word he keeps using for his own jumping is fluid. He has since tested 48 stone cold at a Dunkademics session after sitting for 20 minutes, and rebuilt his Instagram and TikTok from unrelated niches into full-time dunk accounts under his own name. His max vertical now stands at 52.5 inches, the number his program, Pimstone Performance, is built around. He still has not hit a behind-the-back, an under both, a double up or any reverse dunk, which is the strange and specific shape of his ceiling.