This is episode 15 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by my co-host Hunter Castona, and the guest is Jordan Pimstone, a 23-year-old dunker from LA who tested a 45-inch vertical at Dunk Camp 2024. Two years before that test he was at 38 inches. The seven-inch climb came from a program he designed for himself based on years of self-study in strength and conditioning, and he’s been logging every workout in physical journals since 2017. This episode is the one to listen to if you want a real example of what it looks like to actually engineer your own jumping career.
A LA kid raised on Lob City
Jordan grew up in LA on a steady diet of basketball, soccer, and baseball, with basketball as the obvious favorite. He’d play before his soccer games started until the moment the referee blew the whistle. He stacked pillows as a kid to jump over them. He jumped over tables and touched doorways. Classic dunker origin story before he ever realized what dunking was.
The inspiration he keeps coming back to is the 2011 Clippers, the Lob City era with Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, and DeAndre Jordan. He’s a Clippers diehard despite being a Lakers town kid. He has a Clipper tattoo. The amount of dunking that team generated per possession is the reason a lot of LA kids his age got pulled into the jumping side of basketball. Jordan’s the case study.
The late bloomer + jumper’s knee story
Jordan was a real late bloomer. 5’4” as a high school freshman. Voice still sounded like a kid’s. He went to a competitive basketball high school that sent D1 players every year. His freshman season was wrecked by jumper’s knee that he didn’t know was jumper’s knee. He skipped sophomore year. Played junior year, never made varsity. Senior year jumper’s knee came back and he skipped that season too. He didn’t land his first dunk until late junior year or the summer going into senior year, on a 9’10” outdoor hoop. Then he didn’t dunk again for a while.
The math from his sophomore year (barely touching the backboard) to junior year (dunking on 9’10”) is maybe five to six inches of growth in a year. He attributes it mostly to puberty plus some weight room work he was already doing from age 13. Late bloomers who lift early end up with a different curve than peers who develop earlier.
The gap year, the bad college season, and the “Male Scholar Athlete of the Year” story
After high school Jordan took a full gap year. No school. He trained three times a day for the entire year for basketball. He took the Kobe approach: a court session, then rest, then a weight room session, then rest, then handling work, then rest, then injury prevention. He also started self-studying strength and conditioning around age 16 and was building his own framework.
The gap year got him into a D2 community college program. The COVID timing meant 18 months of practice without a single game. Then his actual season was rough. Politics on the bench, an incident where half his team got chased by cops for stealing a golf cart and got suspended mid-season, and a culture he didn’t feel was good. He spent most of the season on the bench (which, looking back, he says was somewhat deserved). When games opened up because of the golf cart suspensions, he showed out, then went back to the bench the next game when the suspended players returned.
By February he knew he was done. He’d already decided he was transferring schools to Northern California as a student-only, not as an athlete. End of the season the coach called him into his office and said he had something coming his way. Then an email arrived from the school: Jordan had been named the Male Scholar Athlete of the Year. He’d been a benchwarmer all season. He found it baffling. Looking back he says the entire season was just weird from start to finish.
(He briefly tried to come back to basketball at the new school in 2022 (three months of training) before pulling the plug for good in favor of dunking. The difference, in his framing: training for basketball and training for dunking are completely different jobs.)
38 to 45 in two years (and the program he designed himself)
Jordan’s vertical when he quit basketball in 2022 was about 38 inches. He could throw down basic dunks off one or two feet but his bag was minimal. He went all in on jumping, started designing his own program based on the strength and conditioning study he’d been doing since age 16, and started running it himself. Two years later he tested 45 at Dunk Camp 2024. Seven inches.
The program is now what he calls Jump Backs and is the basis for the training he runs other athletes on. He’s been on the current iteration of it since October 2023, which is when he says “the really good training” started. He gives early-2023 him a pass for the rougher periodization but doesn’t pretend he was doing it perfectly. The biggest pivot he made was load management. He calls it the most underrated training concept in the dunking world, partially because the NBA has poisoned the term. Once he learned to manage his weekly load, his jumper’s knee stopped flaring up. It hasn’t been an issue since.
One of the most repeatable habits of his I want to call out: he’s logged every workout he’s done since 2017 in physical journals. Every rep, every set, every exercise. They’re on a shelf behind him in the call. When he hit his first Eastbay in November 2023 and felt like he was flying, he flipped back to the workouts he was running at the time, identified exactly what was working, and replicated the macro for the rest of the year. Most dunkers don’t know what training they were running six months ago. Jordan can tell you what he did three years ago last Tuesday.
7’10” reach, 11’7” max touch, and why low-rim is his biggest regret
Jordan’s standing reach is 7’10” (just slightly shorter than Hunter’s 7’10.5”). His max touch is 11’7”. By raw numbers he should have hit an Eastbay much earlier than he did, because the height for one was there at his vertical level for a while. The reason he didn’t is that he never lowered the rim as a kid. His skill bag is significantly behind his vertical, and he’s explicit on the episode that the low-rim gap is his single biggest regret.
Hunter and I have the opposite problem (long hand-speed history, lower vertical), so the contrast is real. The two skill sets, hand speed and vertical, almost always trade off in young dunkers because the hours you spend on one come at the cost of the other. The dunkers who land at Jordan Kilganon, Isaiah Rivera, or 1FootGod tier are the ones who somehow got both in the same window.
Jordan’s plan for the next year is mostly skill: get his hand speed, transfer technique, and lob catching closer to where his vertical already lives. Push the vertical to 46 if it’s available, but treat that as secondary.
The dunk community vs. the basketball community
One of the most useful parts of the conversation was Jordan’s side-by-side comparison of dunking and basketball as cultures. He spent enough time inside competitive basketball to know what the dynamic feels like: politics, pre-determined roster decisions, draining team-sport pressure. He started his Instagram dunk account about a year before this recording and walked into the dunk community cold.
His read on the difference: the dunk community is supportive in a way basketball isn’t. The reason isn’t that dunkers are nicer people. The reason is structural. Dunking has to grow to become a real sport, and a sport that only one person is good at isn’t a sport. So everyone in the dunk community has a vested interest in pulling other dunkers up. When you see someone hit a new dunk it’s a benchmark you can chase, not a threat. The competitive edge stays (everyone on this episode is competitive), but the framing is collaborative.
Justin Blanchard made the same point in the previous episode about why dunk groups have started forming.
Dunking isn’t a team sport (and that’s why Jordan likes it)
Jordan’s other framing I want to surface: dunking is uniquely individual within the broader basketball world. You don’t have a coach who decides your minutes, refs who decide your foul calls, opponents who can scheme against you, or teammates who can’t convert their assignments. The variable in your dunk session is you. The output is yours. If you have a bad session, it’s your training or your day, not the team. If you have a great session, same answer.
This is the part Hunter and I both said yes to on the episode. Group sessions matter for adrenaline and inspiration (see: Minnesota Dunk Squad), but the underlying work is yours. Jordan’s wired for that kind of accountability and it’s why dunking clicked for him faster than basketball ever did, even though basketball got the better part of two decades of his focus first.
The college contest that traumatized him (and the Dunk Camp redemption)
The other Dunk Camp moment that stuck with me from this conversation was the contest backstory. Jordan’s only prior contest was a school basketball rally in October 2023 that he calls the dumbest dunk contest he’s ever seen. The four competitors sat in the crowd for two hours, didn’t know when they’d be called down, got zero warmup, and were just told to start dunking when the rally MC announced it. Jordan’s vertical that day dropped to around 37 inches because he couldn’t warm up. His first dunk was a basic 360 and he got rim-stuffed three times in a row. The videos exist. He’s never going to release them.
The scoring on that contest was crowd noise. Three of the four competitors were affiliated with student groups (a frat, the basketball team, and the baseball team) and brought their crews to be loud. Jordan was the only unaffiliated competitor. He went out first round.
So Dunk Camp 2024 was his redemption opportunity. He went in mentally prepared. His plan worked:
- Dunk 1: 180 Reverse Windmill. His most consistent dunk, even on bad days.
- Dunk 2: Power lob punch. He’d watched the field go up early and figured he could punch a clean lob harder than they were.
- Dunk 3: Eastbay out of the hand. He had someone hold the ball for him to take the lob variable out. The jump felt off in the air and he thought he was getting rim-stuffed, then adrenaline got him through.
- Final round dunk: Another Eastbay out of the hand. First try. (John on the call thought it was Jordan’s second Eastbay total; the clarification is that it was his second time hitting one specifically out of the hand. He’s landed several Eastbays off-lob since November 2023.)
The mental coaching he gave himself was the redemption framing. He spent the contest treating every dunk as a reset of the bad college contest. The mindset held.
What’s next for Jordan
Jordan is back in LA now and dunking with the LA crew. The dunking scene there is by far the densest in the country between Dom, Chris Staples, Tyler Curry, T-Jackson, and a long list of others. He’s plugged in, training other athletes on the Jump Backs program, and working on closing the skill-bag gap. His core goals for the next 12 months:
- Hand speed and transfer technique to where his vertical is.
- 360 Windmill on 10’ consistent.
- Behind-the-back consistent.
- 46″ vertical at next Dunk Camp (he says 50 is what he wants, but is being realistic about a one-year window).
- Keep building the program and the athlete-training side of his work.
Where to find Jordan
Jordan posts as himself on Instagram. Jump Backs is the program he’s built around his own training framework, and he’s actively taking athletes through it now. DunkMan League starts this summer. Next episode is “What I Would Do if I Had to Restart My Dunk Journey,” my own retrospective with the perspective of a year on JumpX. Comment on YouTube with any dunker you want me and Hunter to interview next.