This is episode 65 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, and it’s the most reflective conversation we’ve had on here. I’m Dylan Haugen, with Hunter Castona finally hosting one of his own: Nolan Larson, 5’9” from Wisconsin, founding member of Hunter’s dunk squad, owner of one of the best peak sessions ever posted by a Midwest amateur, and a guy whose back injury in March took dunking away from him entirely. The episode title is the honest table of contents: injury, identity, and what the love of this thing looks like when you can’t do it anymore.
The kid who jumped over lunch trays
Nolan’s origin checks every box this podcast has cataloged: mini-hoop obsession in a friend’s furniture-cleared sunroom under a 2011 LeBron poster, escalating lunch-tray hurdle competitions at age nine, every ball sport available, no Xbox until 13, and a grandpa whose ever-longer bike rides built the legs early. His theory matches our running thesis: jumping genetics aside, the window from roughly 4 to 12 is where bounce gets built, and his was built outdoors. Through high school he ran football, basketball, and baseball year-round, but the tell was already there: he looked forward to pre-practice and post-practice dunk attempts more than basketball practice itself, and after a benched junior season and COVID, dunking simply took over.
Back-to-back first dunks at the YMCA
His first dunk story might be the best we’ve aired. Summer before junior year, around 5’7”-5’8”, post-game adrenaline at the YMCA two minutes from his house (the gym where he’d progressed from dunking a golf ball to a tennis ball to a volleyball), friends long since tired of throwing him lobs for nothing. A few attempts, then the perfect one, and the electric jolt every dunker remembers. Then his 6’1” long-armed friend Shawn stepped up and hit his first dunk on the very next attempt. Back-to-back firsts, witnessed by the friends he’d grown up with. Nolan got his own second dunk immediately after, which seeded the doctrine he’s preached ever since (Hunter can confirm he preaches it): once you make a dunk once, your brain believes it and your body remembers it, and the second comes fast. We’ve watched it hold true at a dozen sessions.
November 7, 2020: the session that summoned the pros
After bootlegged-program self-training (his words: insane volume he survived only because he was young) and summers with NFL-trainer Brad Fitzke, came the session that changed his trajectory, date memorized: November 7, 2020, age 17. Warming up in a sweatshirt he hit a one-hander that felt new, then caught a two-hander at roughly 10’7”, then ran off two Windmills, a between-the-legs, his first reverse two-hand Windmill, and the best double-pump he’s hit to this day, all in a three-hour session where the bounce never faded. He posted the mix, and his idols materialized in the comments: Isaiah Rivera, John from THP, Jonathan Clark, CJ Champion, all asking the same question: where did this guy come from? He joined THP within two weeks and told his mom it was the best day of his life. (His mom and her twin, his self-declared biggest fans, later flew to Utah camp sick as dogs and watched him dunk anyway. Family of the year.)
And then the caveat he insists every young dunker hear, because he lived the other side of it: after a breakthrough session, you will expect to jump like that every time, and you won’t. His very next session he chased a J Rich for an hour at the same hoop, strained his groin, and went home tearing himself apart. The peak session is a gift, not a baseline. Trend line, not session: the oldest lesson on this show, learned independently by everyone on it.
The injury, and the identity question underneath it
The reason Nolan missed camps and sessions over the years was a body that kept objecting, and in March it finally drew a hard line: a back injury serious enough that he hasn’t jumped on hardwood since that day, a first in his life. The middle of this episode, which you should hear in full rather than read summarized, is the conversation the dunk community mostly avoids: what happens to a dunker’s identity when the dunking stops. Hunter framed the perspective gently and well: dunking, however big, is a small part of a life that also requires walking, working, eating, and being a person, and Nolan has visibly done the work of building an identity that survives the injury.
The current status report is genuinely hopeful: relatively pain-free, golfing 36 holes multiple times a day (a back-dependent sport, as Hunter noted, swinging a club at speed is its own athletic certificate), and recently dragged into 3v3 turf volleyball by his best friend Aiden, where his first jump made both teams stop and say “wait, what?” The vert, it turns out, is still in there. A return to basketball is plausible; a full recommitment to dunking is an open question he’s honest about; and his standing offer to remain the community’s most willing podcast guest has been accepted in perpetuity.
Output versus input: the creativity sermon
The episode’s closing act became a three-way sermon I want on the record. Nolan’s thesis: the younger generation consumes endlessly and creates almost nothing, and a person who never outputs creative energy is missing something essential. His own outputs since the injury: golf content on TikTok, and, the detail I love most, 150 unreleased songs on a private Spotify rotation, made purely for himself, with a third album in the works. (His little cousins, camp attendees, are already the counter-example: one just hit his first dunk on 7’ and reports in regularly. The next generation creates.)
Hunter’s addition: creating for yourself first is also the growth strategy, because audiences smell authenticity, and the 2,000-follower creator doing it for love is often getting more out of it than the giants. And the unreleased-dunks reveal: Nolan has a private archive of dunks nobody has ever seen, filmed for his own consumption. I am now texting him daily until the documentary video exists, because it may genuinely be one of the best dunk videos ever assembled, and you, the comment section, are hereby deputized to help me pressure him.
Nolan is “Nolan R. Larson” on TikTok and Instagram; go watch the old mixes (start with November 7, 2020) and the new golf content. The music stays his, for now. Next episode: how I’m changing my training after turning 18. Peace.