This is episode 27 of the Dunk Talk Podcast and the biggest panel I’ve ever hosted. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by Hunter Castona, Donovan Hawkins (back for his fourth appearance), Billy Doran of Dunkademics, pro dunker CJ Champion, and Justin Barber, the original low-rim creative dunker from the 2006-2007 YouTube era and current technical committee director of the World Dunk Association. This is Part 2 of the “how does dunking become a real sport” conversation we started in episode 25, and this panel went deeper on all three fronts: the actual Olympic eligibility checklist, the math behind a women’s rim height, and where the WDA objective scoring system stands.
The actual Olympic checklist
Hunter pulled up the real IOC requirement: a sport must be widely practiced by men in at least 75 countries across four continents, with an international oversight body, codified rules, and women’s participation. Finding dunkers in 75 countries isn’t the hard part. Having organized competition in 75 countries, tracked by a federation, is.
CJ has had conversations with Dunk Elite and the FIBA people, and the consensus timeline from inside the industry is 10 to 20 years, not 2028. The pieces that have to come first: standardized contests running worldwide (FIBA’s circuit is the early prototype), a real fan base beyond social media clips, and a sponsor with deep pockets. Billy’s blunt version: dunking needs a Red Bull moment, where one big brand decides to fund the infrastructure the way Red Bull built cliff diving and Crashed Ice into world-tour sports.
The women’s rim height math: 8 feet
Justin came in with actual research on the women’s division question we raised in episode 25. Across long jump, triple jump, and high jump, the women’s world record is consistently about 85 percent of the men’s (about 83 percent in sprinting). When the WDA ran that ratio against dunking multiple different ways, the answer kept landing in the same place: the women’s competition rim should be around 8 feet, give or take a couple of inches depending on how you round.
The supporting logic stacks up well:
- 10’ for elite women today is what 12’ is for Isaiah Rivera or Donovan: above what human anatomy permits beyond basic dunks.
- 8’ rims are widely accessible at parks across the country, which matters for growing a talent pool that mostly won’t have adjustable hoops at home.
- Dunking is not basketball. The 10’ height is a basketball convention, not a dunking requirement. High jump doesn’t use the same bar for men and women, and nobody thinks less of the event.
CJ added the practical near-term step: Andy at Dunk Camp has floated an open-invite women’s 8’ contest at the next camp, free entry for any girl in the host city. The two female jumpers at the Dallas camp a couple of years ago ended up on SportsCenter and Overtime, which is the kind of exposure loop that builds a division. Kelly and Vic are getting viral reach right now precisely because almost no other women are competing, which means right now is the highest-leverage moment in history for a female athlete to cross over from track or volleyball.
I also gave the honest version of Brooke’s arc (she posts as One Foot Gal): she didn’t get into dunking because I do it. She tried it about once a month, saw her own progress, and the consistency built gradually over six months. The barrier for most girls isn’t ability. It’s that nobody around them treats dunking as an option at all.
What the WDA actually is
Justin gave the fullest public history of the World Dunk Association I’ve heard. The website launched in June 2020 (peak COVID), built by Damian, a programmer and author, together with Kadour and one other founder. The site had a dunk encyclopedia, dunker profiles, a city-by-city dunker map, and a tag system that organizes every feature of every dunk. Justin joined that same month after spotting scoring-system pitfalls he’d already hit in his own research, and Jewel joined around the same time.
The WDA scoring system got its first real-world contest at Dunk Camp 2022, then 2023, then both 2024 camps with CJ doing most of the live scoring this year. The longer-term vision Justin described is the part that excites me most: a stats layer for dunking. Every contest submission catalogued, every dunk tagged, attempts and makes and misses tracked, career dunk percentages computed. Imagine interns on a technical committee rating footage all summer the way baseball built its records. Even show dunks could feed your career stats.
The SRS scoring debate: style, power, flight
The WDA’s simple rating system scores dunks on style, power, and flight, with complexity handled separately. The panel went deep on the hardest one:
- Style and power are easy. You can tell a punched dunk instantly. Style is visible.
- Flight is brutal. Measuring actual jump height in a live contest is unsolved. Hip-mounted sensors exist but feet leave the ground at different times depending on foot size and hip hinge, and grabbing the rim corrupts any descent-based measurement. CJ floated compressing flight to a 1-3 scale; Justin pushed back because an inch matters enormously at the top end (the gap between 47 and 50 is much bigger than the gap between 40 and 43).
- Score after the contest, not during. CJ’s best structural idea: have every dunker complete all their dunks with no eliminations, then rate everything with full information. Live judging forces you to anchor on early scores you can’t take back, which is exactly what ruined the China contest scoring.
Time limits and the alternating-ends format
Hunter asked whether Olympic dunking should be miss-limited or time-limited. The panel landed on time, for two reasons. First, every attempt-based Olympic sport (gymnastics, skateboarding) runs on the clock. Second, the China contest showed the failure mode: a dunker meticulously resetting props between attempts can burn eight minutes on one dunk while the next competitor sits cold.
Justin proposed the format I’d most want to watch: two baskets, alternating ends. Dunker A attempts on one end; the moment he misses, dunker B’s clock starts on the other end. The contest ping-pongs continuously, nobody cools down, and the broadcast never has dead air. Three misses and you’re done on a given dunk.
Billy’s three-event Olympic format
The most original idea of the night was Billy’s: sidestep the judging problem by splitting dunking into three Olympic events, the way track splits into distances.
- Highest dunk. Raise the rim until the field is gone. Purely objective.
- Farthest dunk. Distance from takeoff. Purely objective.
- Best dunk. The artistic event, the only judged one.
You could compete in all three or specialize, exactly like a sprinter running the 100 and the relay. Two-footers would dominate height, one-footers would have an edge in distance, and the creative dunkers get their own podium. Donovan added a fourth: a Dubble Up event, with everyone doing double-ups against each other so the boost question stops mattering. The panel half-joked about Chen winning the inaugural Dubble Up gold, but the underlying logic is sound: double-ups are too crowd-pleasing to erase from the sport and too hard to compare against no-prop dunks, so give them their own category.
What informal contests should do meanwhile
I asked the panel about contests like the one I just won, where I was up against 6’8” basketball players and went double-up-heavy because it was a show, not a championship. Justin’s answer was the practical bridge: use whatever scoring the promoter wants, but measure the rim with the standardized method, submit the footage to the WDA afterwards, and let the contest count toward your career statistics even if the scoring was informal. The formal-tier contests (the championship series, the FIBA events) determine titles. Everything else feeds the record book. That two-tier structure is how basically every real sport handles its sanctioned vs. unsanctioned events.
The honest summary
Dunking has the talent, the content engine, and now the beginnings of the infrastructure: the WDA scoring system, the FIBA circuit, DunkMan League, and the dunk-group ecosystem. What it doesn’t have is money and a federation. The panel’s consensus action items: write a real proposal document (rules, judging certification, event format) and start sending it to Red Bull, brands, and the promoters already spending money on contests like the China event; run online cross-country WDA contests now, since they cost nothing; and put a women’s 8’ open contest on the next Dunk Camp schedule.
Part 3 is coming, with complexity scoring and the no-extra-points-for-passing debate Justin teased at the end. Subscribe on YouTube so you catch it. Comment with what you’d add to the Olympic proposal.