Hyrum Fechser

Hyrum Fechser was not in public school until ninth grade. Water Canyon, the school he landed at on the Utah-Arizona border, had a graduating class of about 62 and a brand new track team with no coaches who really knew what they were doing and no track, just a grass field. He skipped basketball because he did not know the rules, and he told Dylan Haugen and Hunter Castona he did not even know you could not dribble with two hands. He wanted to dunk anyway: a 29-inch vertical, an eight-week program called Vert Shock, 35 inches, first dunk at 14.

By his junior year he had a 40-inch vertical and a track season he expected to win state in, and COVID cancelled it after one meet. He skipped basketball as a senior to focus on jumping, won state, and set the 1A long jump record at 23 feet, which still stands. He also cleared 6’7″ in the high jump at an open meet a month after graduating. Scholarships came, but nobody at his school had told him the ACT mattered, so the offers turned into a year he would have to fund himself. He let them go, started driving a truck, and dunked at Vasa on weekends.

He had been watching Dunkademics mixes before games since freshman year: Chris Staples, Jordan Southerland, and above all Jordan Kilganon, who he had followed for close to a decade. So when Kilganon came through for All-Star Weekend and Fechser walked into Vasa to find him warming up, it registered. Kilganon was hurt and could not dunk, so he coached instead. Fechser hit four new dunks that day, including his first honey dip, and posted the height check that got him noticed. He spotted a Dunk Camp shirt in the same gym, learned camp was down the road, and got in despite it being full.

He tested 46 inches at that first camp on an ankle sprained a week earlier and won the max vert anyway. A year later he tested 48.5 and called it a little disappointing, convinced 50 is in there on the right day. John Evans put him on THP after that first camp, the first structured training he had ever done, and he fits it around a job that keeps him on the road: whatever Planet Fitness he can find, and when there is none, box jumps onto his car.

His signature moment came on the last day of the second camp. Muscles on fire and feeling, in his words, like a brick, he opened the contest with a back scratcher in skinny jeans, then a reverse pump, then a reverse 180 windmill, which put him third going into the finals. There he threw down a windmill honey dip on a rim measured at exactly 10 feet. He had made it on 9’9″ and 9’10” before, never a true 10. He and Kilganon searched afterward for anyone shorter who had done it and found one clip, on a 9’10” rim.

At 5’9″ with a 7’6″ reach he can put two hands down off a standing jump, and his standing vertical went from 33 inches to 39.5 in a single year. Few gyms he walks into have someone who jumps higher, and plenty have someone who dunks better, which he puts on starting basketball only five years ago. He trains with the Utah Dunkers, won the first contest he ever entered, and is building Dunk School with his friend Josh, complete with a short bus they mounted an adjustable hoop on. Fifty inches and the vertical jump world record are next.