Jason “JaySmoove” McCoy

Jason McCoy, better known as JaySmoove, is a 6’1″ power dunker from Detroit with an athletic background unlike anyone else’s in the sport. He swam competitively from age four to 21, including at Lincoln College in Lincoln, Illinois, where he took five medals at nationals. He did not start playing basketball until he was 19, and he still says he plays it for cardio and stays for the dunking.

The interest came long before the sport did. He grew up drawn to high flyers, watching Jason Richardson and Vince Carter, and around 16 he was watching T-Dub videos all day. His first dunk landed right before he turned 16, off one foot, at about 5’10”, at school before his first class. He is candid that he was a good athlete rather than a natural leaper, and that swimming gave him nothing to build on in the weight room: pull-ups, dips, core work, and a deliberate avoidance of getting big.

So the strength was built late and from nothing. At 17 he could not bench 155 and could not deadlift two plates. At 18 he bought BoingVert, the first structured program he had ever seen, and put roughly seven inches on his vertical that year. Today he works almost entirely off lifts he loves: an RDL max of 455 for four, box squats and hip thrusts at 605 for five, and 120s on dumbbell press, crediting his upper body for most of the power. He is honest about the gap too: his power clean, started only in January, sits at 205 and still feels like all back and no hips.

Durability is what other dunkers ask him about. At the 2018 Dunk Camp, the first one ever held, he jumped Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and twice on Thursday, after the coaches had openly bet he would be finished by Tuesday. When he retested his vertical on Thursday it was three inches higher than Monday. He was 27 when he recorded this episode and still jumping all four days at camp. His theory is that swimming preserved his knees: two decades of no impact, always lean, then a straight handoff into jump training with fresh joints. He has had jumper’s knee once, in 2017, and once fractured his wrist slipping off the rim on a 360.

His career has been show-heavy rather than contest-heavy. Finishing top three at that first camp contest put him in the 2018 Utah dunk show, and it was there, on a pro lineup including Jonathan Clark, Isaiah Rivera and CJ Champion, that he met Connor Barth back when almost nobody knew who Connor was, a moment he compares to the way Mason Baker later appeared out of nowhere. He toured three times with Flight Squad as a show dunker, and his favorite memory is not a dunk: a stop at a juvenile center where the team talked with the kids and played with them. In November 2022 he won an online bracket contest that flew the top two out to dunk for $1,500 at the Utah Hoopfest halftime show, his first paid win, and the night he hit his favorite dunk ever, a windmill over four people off a handoff.

He is chasing the Black Band now, and is upfront about the missing pieces. Underboth has rimmed out on him about four times, he has hit a behind the back twice in his life, and he has been low-rimming the scorpion and finding the transition friendlier than expected. In the weight room he wants a 500-pound RDL for five and a 700-pound box squat for six. He would tour again if the money were right, and makes a point of it: show-ball does not pay enough to justify leaving a job for five months, which is why more great dunkers do not stay in it.