Shankar Iyer

Shankar Iyer came at dunking sideways. He was a triple jumper and high jumper in high school between 2009 and 2013, never played high school basketball, and got his first dunk at 15 at about 6’2″. By the time he reached his full 6’5″ he could tomahawk off one foot and graze a windmill, which he assumed was his ceiling. Then a hip injury shut it down and he did not really hoop again until he was 24.

What pulled him back was a video: the Ball Is Life clip of pro dunkers taking over an LA Fitness. Watching Connor Barth, a guy basically his height, do things he had assumed were closed to him, he figured that with enough training he could get 60 percent of the way there. He tried ATG, which did not take because of knee pain, then Connor Barth’s program, then THP when he plateaued. That run carried him from a 31 or 32-inch vertical to 37 or 38. His goals, in order: the Eastbay, which he has; touching his head to the rim on ten feet, roughly a 43-inch vertical; then dunking at 60; then at 70.

The other half of him is why people know his name. Shankar runs Above the Rim Reviews, and he is direct about where the depth comes from: shoes are his ADHD hyper-fixation. It started at 12 or 13, when Team USA wore the Nike Hyperdunk 2008 and he and his dad spent three days hunting a pair at a tournament in Vegas. When the pandemic left a closet of sneakers gathering dust he sold them to fund performance shoes, then started reviewing so the buying could justify itself. Last count: 77 pairs.

He built the channel around one question: what is the best possible shoe for dunking? The answer came down to three. The Way of Wade 10, for the angled carbon fiber running toe to heel, the best implementation he had seen in a basketball shoe. A Kobe 8 chassis with a 361 Aaron Gordon drop-in midsole, pairing the lightest shell he knows with the best insole he knows. And the Li-Ning Gamma, which he ranks above the Way of Wade 10 on weight, traction and carbon fiber, and below everything on price, since a shoe retailing around $165 in China sits in the mid $400s on resale here. Carbon fiber, he explains, has a flexibility-to-rigidity ratio light enough to act like a miniature springboard, and works far better built into a midsole than bolted on as an aftermarket insole that kills court feel.

His advice is much cheaper than his shelf. Traction matters most, a point Isaiah Rivera had made to Dylan, and cushion is what people overvalue. The All City 12 gets you about 90 percent of the Way of Wade 10 at $150. Nike puts the same technology across its line, so the budget models still hit. And if you do not know what you want, go try on every shoe in the store rather than ordering and returning.

The rest is the kind of detail only someone this deep in it has: why the Way of Wade 11 took 19 months to arrive; the 361 AGs he gifted CJ Champion before a torn Achilles shelved their collab review; and Dom Gonzales planting so hard in new Way of Wade 10s that he left blood on his socks and turned down the padding Shankar kept offering. He also made a point most guests do not: what was missing from his own childhood was low-rim reps, and he thinks discouraging kids from them costs them hand speed and even shooting mechanics.