Nolan Larson

Nolan Larson is five foot nine, five foot ten in shoes, and Wisconsin born and raised. He traces the jumping back to a friend’s sunroom around 2011, dunking on a mini hoop under a poster of LeBron, and to the lunch trays he stacked and cleared at nine or ten. He played three sports year-round until he quit basketball his junior year, for the honest reason that he looked forward to the dunking before and after practice more than practice itself.

His first dunk came at the local Y two minutes from his house, the gym where he had practiced dunking a golf ball, then a tennis ball, then a volleyball. He was five foot seven on his sophomore year license and, in his own words, damn near the shortest person there, so nobody thought the lobs were worth throwing. Some friends threw them anyway after a pickup game. Two or three attempts in he got it, then got it again on the next try, and his six foot one friend Shawn went up and got his own first dunk in the same minute. Nobody filmed any of it.

In November 2020, at seventeen, he had a three-hour session where his bounce never seemed to drop after the second jump: a one-hander with his sweatshirt still on, his first reverse two-hand windmill, and the best double pump he has ever hit. He posted the mix, and Isaiah Rivera, John Evans of THP and Jonathan Clark all commented and followed him. He joined THP a week or two later, then went back to that same hoop, chased a J-Rich for an hour and tore up his groin. It is why he tells younger dunkers to play the long game.

He is known for the win. He landed the off-the-wall version at eleven at night on Thanksgiving, after two hours of attempts inside a four-hour session. The margin is centimeters: a skid mark on the wall to hit, a ledge above it to stay under, and a plant foot in one exact spot. He did not believe he had made it until the ball dropped through the net. He calls himself a fiend for precision. The other version came off the backboard at the first Wisconsin Dunk Camp, back to back with Dylan’s hide and seek, in his home state, with his family seeing him dunk in person for the first time. He calls it the best moment of his life.

The back started his senior year of high school football, when he landed from a jump in warmups and felt his spine crunch. By the fall of 2022 it was sciatica bad enough to leave him bedridden, with MRIs showing three bulging discs and a partial tear. He rebuilt slowly and came back jumping higher than ever, his highest jump on record a windmill at the UW-Milwaukee rec center in 2023 with Hunter Castona there to see it. It returned in February of his senior year of college, and again in March, when he dropped into a through the legs at half court in an intramural game and collapsed. The new diagnosis included spinal stenosis, and more than one doctor told him his spine was in the condition of someone fifty-five to sixty-five years old.

He never posted about any of it. He moved the creative energy instead, picking up music during the first injury and never stopping, with around 150 songs he has never released. He is golfing again, has stayed off hardwood since March and is relatively pain-free. He is honest that he loves dunking and also loves being able to eat at a table, and he is at peace with the possibility that the win at Wisconsin was his last real session: a bang to go out on. His advice to Dylan Haugen and every younger dunker was to play the slow game, because you never know how much you will miss it until it is gone.