This is episode 32 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, no Hunter this time (scheduling), just me and Donovan Hawkins on his fifth appearance. I’m Dylan Haugen, 17 now, and the premise of this episode is the question I get DM’d constantly: what is being a pro dunker actually like? Donovan has spent the past year living it: Abu Dhabi with Team Flight Brothers, Florida with the THP crew, FIBA 3×3 in Edmonton. So this is half travel recap, half career manual, and the career-manual half contains the most concrete pro-dunking advice we’ve ever put on the show, including a contest-ordering strategy I’ve never heard another pro endorse.
Abu Dhabi with Team Flight Brothers
Donovan calls Abu Dhabi the best trip he’s ever done: first time in that part of the world, eight days, three events spaced a day apart, everything running smoothly. The lineup was Donovan, Tony Crosby, and Doug Anderson under Chuck Millan’s Team Flight Brothers banner (all three right-left jumpers, which I gave him grief about; clearly they need a left-right guy next time).
- Event 1: a mini show, eight or nine jumps total.
- Event 2: a fan-appreciation-day mini contest, three dunks each, in a packed stadium with the entire Celtics and Nuggets rosters watching and NBA players judging. Donovan went Underboth, Windmill, 360 Eastbay and won it. (No, he did not tell Jaylen Brown he’d take him in a contest. He figures Jaylen could tell by watching.)
- Event 3: a show that turned into a full open session. Chuck told him there was no time limit, Donovan was feeling good, and the result was basically every dunk in his bag in front of a crowd. He rates it the best set of dunks he’s ever hit in a show.
Chuck posted a clip captioned “number one ranked pro dunker in the world,” which set off a comment section demanding to know where the rankings live. There are no rankings. The community got pro dunker rankings discourse before GTA 6.
Florida with THP (and Donovan playing basketball)
The Florida trip with John Evans and Isaiah Rivera was Donovan’s favorite trip overall, even if not the biggest stage. Isaiah moved the session up a day while Donovan was still asleep, which is very Isaiah. The clip everyone should watch is the pickup run: Donovan plays basketball the way I used to play imaginary games on my 7’6” hoop, which is to say he attempts to dunk literally everything, including lobs thrown outside the backboard and putbacks at terrible angles. He and Isaiah share the philosophy: every possession is a dunk attempt. It works disturbingly well when your floor is an Underboth.
How dunkers actually get noticed
This is the section I most want young dunkers to read. The core insight: dunking does not work like other sports. If you’re a Duke-level basketball recruit, scouts come to your games whether you post or not. In dunking, nobody is coming to your open gym. Chuck Millan will never wander into your rec center and put you on tour. The only scouting network that exists is social media, which leads to the practical rules we laid out:
- Your page is your resume. Donovan’s framing. When a promoter considers booking you, they scroll your profile: your dunks, your consistency, who follows you, who you dunk with. Post accordingly.
- A $15 tripod is the whole barrier to entry. Film your sessions, post, tag, comment, talk to people. It’s the cheapest career investment in sports.
- Connections are deliberate, not luck. Donovan asked Billy at Dunkademics to film him for two years before it happened in 2021. That one yes became a standing relationship that still produces videos. Nobody builds your network for you.
- Video quality floor: watchable. Not a $4,000 camera, just not two pixels propped against a water bottle. And the rim needs to be visibly legit, or nobody can verify the dunk.
- Stop over-editing. If your dunk freeze-frames into 0.1x choppy slow-mo three times before the rim, nobody can tell what happened. Learn basic keyframes or post it raw. (Donovan and I then spent two minutes begging Finn Addy, with love, to switch from Videoshop to CapCut. It’s free, Finn. The watermark, Finn.)
What a pro trip actually looks like (and which events to take)
The typical good event: travel covered, transportation covered, hotel and food covered, fly in with a rest day before you dunk, leave the day after. The typical bad event: a nine-hour flight landing the day you perform. The quality of the organizer predicts which one you get, which is why working with established names matters.
Donovan’s three-question filter for whether an event is worth taking: Is the exposure high? Is the pay high? Is it worth my time? If it clears two of three, strongly consider it. For a 17-year-old just breaking in, the bar drops, take most things, but not all the way to zero: a free show for a promoter with a thousand followers and fifteen people in the gym clears none of the three. Early-career dunkers will sometimes take exposure-only gigs that lose money, and that’s occasionally fine if the exposure is real, but know which trade you’re making.
FIBA 3×3 events are the gold standard of the current circuit: flights, transport, and food covered, a real rest day, $4,000 for first place, and (I learned this on the episode) $1,000 for second and $800 for third, so nobody flies home empty-handed. If FIBA calls, take it.
Consistency: five dunks you own
Donovan’s preparation doctrine echoes what Isaiah told us in episode 29 but with a working number: a contest is two to six dunks, so you need a maximum of five dunks you can hit on command. Every session, even the fun ones, doubles as a readiness check. Don’t bring dunks you can’t make; missing repeatedly kills the room. But don’t sandbag either: the bag has to be consistent and impressive.
The cautionary tale is one we’ve covered before: Donovan losing K54 in Paris on an off-the-backboard Underboth he wasn’t consistent with yet, when a punched Windmill would have won him the contest. I ran the same calculation in my own contest this fall: up after two dunks, choice between Dubble Up X (a layup for me) and Dubble Up Eastbay (a coin flip), took the X over more people, won. The lesson generalizes: late in a contest you’re leading, choose the dunk you cannot miss.
Donovan’s contrarian contest order: best dunk first
Every pro will tell you to open with a guaranteed make and escalate. Donovan does the opposite, and his reasoning is the smartest piece of contest game theory I’ve heard. Judging is notoriously bad, usually celebrities or random locals. So he opens with his best dunk, usually an Underboth. The judges’ reference frame is now set at “this guy does impossible things,” and every subsequent dunk inherits that halo. A fourth-round Windmill from the guy who opened with an Underboth scores like a miracle. Meanwhile the competitor who opened with a 360 looks a tier below him for the rest of the night.
It also pairs with his other rule: simplicity over technicality. To a general audience, a punched one-hander, a punched Windmill, and a punched Eastbay read as a flawless show; a missed Windmill Elbow reads as failure regardless of difficulty. Visually clean and made beats technically advanced and missed, any day of the week. Both strategies only work because of the judging reality we keep coming back to on this show: until the WDA-style objective scoring arrives, you’re optimizing for human first impressions.
The takeaway for aspiring pros
The pro dunker job, compressed: build a five-dunk bag you own completely, film everything watchably, post relentlessly, ask for the connections you want for as long as it takes, filter events on exposure-pay-time, and when you get there, open big and finish clean. The travel perks are real (Donovan has seen Abu Dhabi, Paris, Edmonton, and most of the US in twelve months), and so is the grind underneath them.
Donovan is “donovanhawkins_37” on Instagram. Part 3 of the how-dunking-grows panel with Justin Barber, CJ Champion, and Billy Doran is coming once Hunter fixes his scheduling (roast him in the comments). Next episode is Ben Hopkins on his journey to a Tamale dunk. Comment with any dunker you want us to interview next.