This is the first episode of the Dunk Talk Podcast, and I’m using it to walk through my own journey from not being able to dunk at all to getting my first dunk as a 5’8” 13-year-old in September 2021. I’m Dylan Haugen, and five years later that same kid is one of the only dunkers in the world under six feet to land an Underboth at 5’11”, has six dunk contest wins, and just signed with Shaq’s DunkMan League as the youngest pro dunker in the world. All of it traces back to this episode.
Before basketball, there was one Michael Jordan highlight video
I didn’t play basketball growing up. I played soccer and baseball and just a bunch of other random sports. Basketball honestly didn’t click for me at all. What flipped it was one specific YouTube video. I was on YouTube one day, watched something called “Michael Jordan’s Top 50 Plays of All Time,” and that was probably the first basketball video I ever truly watched. From that moment on I just fell in love with dunking. A lot of dunkers say Michael Jordan got them into it, and even though I’m part of the younger generation, even he got to me.
Right after that video I went outside. We had just recently gotten a basketball rim, so I cranked it down to about 7’6”, grabbed a small ball, and started dunking like Michael Jordan. I wasn’t trying to be the best at anything. I didn’t even know pro dunkers were a thing. I just wanted to be like the guy in the video.
Fourth grade: terrible at basketball, addicted to the low rim
I was probably 11 when I started messing around on low rims, in fourth grade. For the record, I was terrible at actual basketball. My career-high points in my fourth-grade season was eight points, and I was so excited any time I got over two. I was not good at basketball at all.
But the entire summer between fourth and fifth grade, I basically just low-rimmed the entire time. By the end of that summer I could do some decent stuff on 7’6”, nothing crazy compared to today, but I was having a ton of fun with it. The wild thing is that summer flipped my actual basketball trajectory too. By fifth grade I went from being one of the worst players on my team to one of the best. I credit all of that improvement to one thing: low-rim dunking. I dribbled here and there, I shot here and there, but the thing I did the most was literally dunk on 7’6”.
In sixth grade I made a stronger team and went right back to being kind of bad on it, like fourth grade all over again. Not a lot of scoring. The constant through all of it was the low rim. If practice didn’t go well, if a game went sideways, I could go home, low-rim, and have a ton of fun. The dunking was the engine.
Touching the backboard, then touching rim during a water break
The summer of sixth grade going into seventh grade, I touched the backboard for the first time. Up until then I was just touching net, which basically anyone could do. Touching the padding of the backboard put me in a group of like one or two kids who could actually do it. I was super hyped about it.
Going into seventh grade tryouts I was touching the backboard on layups and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. Then during my seventh-grade season I went through what was probably the start of puberty and had a huge athleticism change. I went from being kind of awkward with all my dunks to actually being able to do Windmills and between-the-legs on 7’6”. The rim was still really low, but I wasn’t doing the motion on the ground anymore, which is when I started to get into pro dunking too. Around that time I also started posting low-rim dunk videos to YouTube. I didn’t know a single other dunker. I figured people might think it was dumb, but I didn’t really care because it was something I enjoyed and I had a big passion for video creating on top of it.
The first time I touched rim, my dad was an assistant coach for my seventh-grade team and I was like “Dad, watch this.” I tried to do it again and I couldn’t get it consistent for like two weeks after that. At the time I was thinking “oh I can’t do this, why?” Looking back now it’s hilarious. Two weeks to make a new dunk consistent is otherworldly. Right now I’m working on between-the-legs at 10’. I’ve hit it maybe six, seven, eight times total and I cannot do it every single day. Past me was frustrated that something took two weeks. Current me would be ecstatic if a new dunk locked in that fast.
The summer between 7th and 8th grade: 1 to 4 hours of jumping a day
The summer between seventh and eighth grade was when I really started to get into jumping a lot. Before that I was probably jumping 20 to 30 minutes a day. That summer I was jumping every single day, one hour minimum, up to four hours. A lot of that was on low rims, but I also started doing way more 10’ stuff, just attempting dunks even when I wasn’t close at all.
When Jordan Kilganon started coaching my approach
Shortly after I touched rim for the first time, I started talking to Jordan Kilganon. That brought a whole other level into my love for dunking. If you don’t know who he is, he’s probably the greatest dunker of all time, and seeing his passion through him helping me out was beyond anything I expected. When I was getting started he was the most helpful person ever and coached me through everything. He’s also been a guest on the show. Go listen to Jordan Kilganon’s episode on becoming the greatest dunker of all time if you want to hear his side of it.
The biggest thing he helped me with was my approach. I knew what good jump technique looked like, but I wasn’t always applying it, and I was doing a few things incorrectly. He sent me a screenshot of my approach path and drew the corrected line over it. I used that screenshot countless times. As soon as I started applying what he said I went from barely dunking on 9’6” to dunking on 9’6” pretty consistently.
Before I saw Jordan’s stuff, I was mostly in it for basketball and just wanted to dunk in games. Once I scrolled through his Instagram and saw all the creative dunks he was doing, that’s what made me fall in love with the art of dunking on top of just dunking in basketball. That shift in how I thought about the sport is honestly the same shift that led me to eventually quitting basketball to dunk full-time, which is its own episode.
Recreating Kilganon’s bag on 7’6” and 8’
Once I started copying what I saw on Jordan’s feed, my bag exploded. I was hitting Windmills on 8’ (and sometimes 9’), a 360 between-the-legs on 7’6”, and a Lost and Found in the same range, all with varying ball sizes. The reason any dunk I see now is pretty easy for me to learn is all the work I did when I was 12 and 13 years old recreating every hard dunk I saw. I was doing 360 between-the-legs on 7’6”, getting into Lost and Founds, all kinds of cool stuff with different ball sizes on 7’6” to 8 feet, just from watching Jordan and falling in love with what he was doing. I covered the actual vertical climb (37.5 → 41.5 inches in one year) in a later episode if you want the training side of that story.
Getting close to a real dunk
Then I had one of those random progress spurts. Probably more puberty kicking in, plus all the low-rim work paying off because my lobs to myself were so on point. I went from barely grabbing rim to having really close dunk attempts. I remember one specific day I was outside on my home court and missed like 20 dunks in a row, all of them super close. Once I started having days like that I didn’t even want to low-rim anymore. I loved it, but I had to save my energy for 10’ attempts.
That’s when I set the goal: dunk before I turned 14. I was 13, 5’8”, and this was around June or July. I turned 14 in October.
There was a basketball camp at a middle school I went to during this stretch. Back then I didn’t bother warming up, so I’d show up about 10 minutes early to the camp and just try to dunk the whole time. I’d force one of my friends to record me. I back-rimmed a lot of dunks at those camps because I didn’t usually get to dunk inside on wood courts, so my jump felt different there, and I just never had enough time.
First dunk at The Lab with Adam Anderson
Going into the day it actually happened, I had a little bit of doubt. I’d tell my dad “yeah I’m going to hit a dunk today” and then come back and be like “well, that was close.” This one day I went to a gym called The Lab. If you watch my videos, it’s the gym with the red court. I told my dad before going there that I was going to hit a dunk that day. He was like “yeah, sure you are.” I’m sure he didn’t think I was actually going to hit one.
I got there and I was jumping, but I was not actually that close to making one. Then this guy named Adam Anderson, who I saw dunking on the other side, randomly walked up to me and said “hey bro, do you want me to throw you some lobs?” I cannot explain how much that meant to me. Having someone come up and ask to help me out like that meant the world. He started throwing me lobs and they were so perfect. About four or five attempts in, I made my first dunk. I didn’t get too excited in the moment because I didn’t want to embarrass myself, but I got really excited. I hit my first dunk in September of 2021, about a month before I turned 14, at 5’8” and 13 years old.
The full-circle Dubble Up Eastbay over Adam
I still talk to Adam today. A couple of months ago I actually saw him at the gym and hit a Dubble Up Eastbay over him. If you don’t know what that is, it’s holding the ball on top of his head and jumping over him doing it between-the-legs. Pretty cool full-circle moment. The guy who threw me my first lob became the prop in one of the dunks I’m most proud of. It’s also a big part of why I ended up building Minnesota Dunk Squad, which is the local crew I dunk with every weekend.
The lesson I want other dunkers to take from this
Honestly the bigger lesson here for anyone reading is this: if you’re at a gym and you see someone trying to dunk who is close, ask if they want you to throw lobs right in front of the rim so they can tip it in. That can make someone’s day. It made my year. The whole reason I do this podcast, the whole reason I write these articles, is that the dunk community is built on people like Adam doing that for kids like the 5’8” 13-year-old in the corner. I came back to this same theme on my Dunk Camp 2025 recap, where the same community dynamic plays out at scale.
What happened after the first dunk
Progress got a lot harder after that first one. I hit a couple more dunks here and there for the rest of that year, mostly tip-ins, and then I got hurt. I don’t even remember exactly what I did, but it was something with my MCL, PCL, and meniscus. That’s a topic for another day, I’ll definitely cover that injury in more detail at some point.
The next milestone after the first dunk was the Eastbay, which I cover in how I got my first Eastbay at 15. The plan for the episode after that was going from first dunk to first Windmill, which was about a year and a couple of months later. If you’re chasing a similar progression, those are worth a watch too.
Thanks for watching the first episode of the Dunk Talk Podcast. If you want to leave requests for who I should interview next, drop them in the comments on YouTube or leave a review on Spotify or Apple.