Isaiah Rivera

Isaiah Rivera is a professional dunker from Puerto Rico and the owner of the highest officially tested vertical jump in the world, 50.5 inches at 6’2″. One of his earliest memories is climbing the tall bleachers of a covered court near his school and jumping off just to feel the shock in his feet when he landed. His parents put him in basketball at eight because he was a hyperactive kid who needed somewhere to put the energy, and he was hooked the first time he swished a free throw at the end of a game.

He also played baseball, football and volleyball, dabbled in wrestling, and credits an old PS2 street basketball game for much of his creativity in the air. He specialized in basketball around 15, got cut three years in a row, moved from Utah to Florida and finally made his senior team. His family had no high-speed internet until he was about 15, so he missed the Team Flight Brothers era that raised most pros his age. The introduction arrived at 16 in a school computer class, when Jordan Kilganon‘s Crown dunk came up on YouTube and, in his words, shattered his reality. Scrolling back to Kilganon’s oldest videos was the second shock: Kilganon had been rim grazing at 16 too.

Isaiah got his first dunk in February 2014, at 5’9″ or 5’10”, before he had finished growing. He posted a video that summer asking for windmill tips, Kilganon answered with a wall of text plus four more paragraphs in his messages, and Isaiah hit the windmill half an hour later. He was windmilling on a measured 10 foot rim by October, on asphalt, and hit his first Eastbay ten or eleven months after that first dunk. Willie Rhodes, a one-foot creative doing on low rims what Jordan Southerland now does on 10, then told him to scrap his realistic goals and write a list of dunks he thought were impossible. Every item is checked off.

The engine underneath it came from his stepdad, an Olympic weightlifter and a college athlete of the year in Puerto Rico. He grew up around bumper plates and chalk dust, learning barbell technique with a broomstick, and the rule at home was that whatever you do, be the best at it, down to being the best janitor in the world. He turned pro at 18, starting with an amateur student contest against CJ Champion and, within a year, an ESPN call-up on twelve hours notice. His signature is the 360 Behind-the-Back Between-the-Legs, a dunk almost nobody else attempts.

Bad knee pain followed him from his first dunk until 2017, close enough that he was ready to quit. A phone call with coach John Evans, who asked what would happen if a dunker trained like a track and field athlete, produced both the answer and the business. The pain resolved, the vertical climbed, and the two merged client lists to launch THP Strength, now one of the biggest jump-training companies in the world. Isaiah says he has never repeated a week of training in his life. Nearly a decade into his professional career he is chasing 51 inches, names Donovan Hawkins as the athlete closest behind him, and wants dunking recognized as an official sport.

His dunking is documented on Dunkademics, and he broke down his full story on Dunk Talk in how he became the highest jumper in the world.