Hunter Castona

Hunter Castona is a 6’1″ dunker from Wisconsin and a recurring co-host of the Dunk Talk Podcast. Football and baseball came first. He found basketball around third or fourth grade and fell in love with it by fifth, and from roughly eight to ten years old he was playing endless low rim games with his friends. He credits those games directly for being able to dunk in real games later, on the logic that nobody dunks in a game without having spent years dunking in something that felt like one.

He discovered Jordan Kilganon around thirteen, watching his YouTube videos with his dad, which is also roughly when he decided the NBA was never going to be the path. He is refreshingly blunt about that: a 5’10” kid with average genetics was not making the league, and realizing it early let him enjoy the part he was actually built for. His advice to young players is to spend their time having fun on lowered rims rather than being forced onto ten feet before they are ready.

His first dunk came at fifteen, somewhere around 5’9″, off one foot with a vertical he estimates in the low thirties. He now jumps off two feet with a 40 inch vertical, and his signature is the Underboth.

He and Dylan Haugen met online rather than in a gym. Hunter was posting only on TikTok, doing one-handers and windmills, and Dylan watched him land his first one-hand 360 and told him to try it with two hands. They talked in comments, Hunter moved to Instagram where the dunk community actually lives, and they met in person at Dunk Camp. His climb from windmills to Underboth inside a year is what got him on the show in the first place.

The year that followed was harder, and he documented all of it. A bone bruise on the heel of his plant foot cost him a month and forced him to relearn his penultimate step on his toe. A four hour solo session left him fine for three hours and forty five minutes and wrecked for the last fifteen, and the Achilles pain that followed put him on load management for another month. There were good sessions in between, a ten foot rim at the UCF practice facility in Florida and a Missouri trip with Josh Ruble and Donovan Hawkins, and a bad one at Dunk Camp Utah when he expected to peak and did not.

He responded by attacking his actual limitation. Having jumped his whole life, strength was what he lacked, so he dropped rim height for a training block to build it while keeping his technique sharp. It paid off: after one genuinely bad ten foot session, he came back the next week and hit his Underboth, punched windmills, and landed a double up elbow. As he puts it, his plateau keeps getting higher, so even his worst sessions are now pretty good.

That willingness to talk about the bad sessions is a big part of why the joint episodes work, including the live dunker Q and A and the year in review where he and Dylan set their goals for 2025. His dunking is filmed by Dunkademics.