Episode 5 of the Dunk Talk Podcast was honestly one of the heavier conversations I’ve had on the show. I’m Dylan Haugen, and I sat down with Zach Velis, a 19 year old dunker from Northern Virginia who’s about 6’1.5”. Zach was one of the first people I ever talked to in the online dunk community when I was a kid, and we’re both right-left jumpers off the same plant foot, so I followed his stuff a ton when I was starting. He’s been out of the dunk game for a while because of a knee injury that turned out way weirder than anyone thought, and a week before we sat down he had surgery to finally fix it.
Last episode I had on Josh Ruble covering an 8 inch vertical jump and 20+ new dunks (Episode 4). This one’s the opposite side of the coin. Zach’s vertical didn’t really drop, but the pain was so bad he had to stop dunking anyway.
How Zach got into dunking
Zach was into basketball but kind of late to it, starting in middle school. He hit a growth spurt around late freshman or sophomore year, got to about six feet with long arms, so the jumping came pretty naturally. He was always the kid touching rim and trying to dunk way before he could.
His first dunk came at 15, and he was consistent by 16. COVID is what really got him into it. He had a rim in his backyard, started low rimming on the 8 foot. He made his Instagram literally as a personal archive to have a gallery of every dunk he hit. That’s how he found Jonathan Clark, the first professional dunker he saw, and through him the whole Dunk Camp scene. He didn’t realize there was a community doing the same thing until he started posting. That’s a piece of advice I’d give anyone starting out: even if you don’t post any of it, record every milestone dunk on every rim height.
Zach’s prime: New Year’s 2022 and the dunks that stacked up
By early 2022 Zach was getting pretty crazy. He told me about a January 1st session that year where he hit an off-the-wall eastbay with his squad plus an eastbay off one foot, which was wild because he’s mostly a two-foot jumper. That year he added the elbow dunk, the Vince Carter reverse 360 windmill, 360 eastbay, a 360 scoop, an over-somebody eastbay, and consistent backboard eastbays and windmills. His first eastbay came at 16 on a 9’11” rim, and a week or two later he hit a between the legs off the dribble on a real 10 foot rim in a high school gym.
What I thought was cool is that he wasn’t chasing the next new trick. His goal was to make his staples (eastbay, windmill) hit on any decent day, not collect dunks. Most people are trying to add new stuff every session, but Zach was locked in on consistency.
The day his knee twisted: two days before Dunk Camp 2022
The week of Dunk Camp 2022 (the camp where Zach and I first met in person), Zach was just low rimming. Like 10% effort on an 8 foot rim. He did a between the legs, and on the landing his right knee twisted and he felt a sharp pain. The crazy part is he wasn’t even jumping hard, maybe six inches off the ground. He plants on his right leg, which made it worse.
The injury happened two days before camp started. He’d already paid, so there was no refund happening. He took the first few days off, took a lot of Advil, and tried to make it to the contest. His goal that year was to be the youngest person to ever win the 10 foot contest.
He tested a 35 inch vertical at camp, way down from where he’d been. For reference, the year before he’d tested 37.5 outdoors. He still made the contest and hit a side tomahawk off a pass from Jordan Kilganon plus a two-handed windmill. Watching him in that contest I had no idea he was that far below his peak. After camp Zach flew to LA to dunk with Elijah Bonds and on the Hoop Bus, since the trip had been planned, and pushed through the pain to get the content. By the time he got home his knee was wrecked.
Almost two years of misdiagnosis
The first specialist Zach saw told him it was patellar tendonitis. So did the next one. And basically every dunker he talked to said the same thing. So he did what you do for tendonitis: isometrics, slow strength, drop jumps. He knew most of the protocols because of his connections in the community.
For almost two years he cycled through it. He’d rehab for three to six months, sometimes locked in and not jumping at all, try to come back, and the pain would slam right back at full intensity. He didn’t really post about it, so a lot of the community had no clue what was going on.
What made it clear something was different was the pattern. With normal tendonitis you can usually push through a 2 or 3 out of 10. For Zach, the rehab exercises themselves were zero out of 10. Slow squats, isometrics, all of it felt fine. Then he’d jump and the pain would come back exactly as bad as the original injury. His tendon, per his MRIs and x-rays, was completely intact the whole time. The pain also felt different, more bony than soft, like something was hitting against something every time he jumped. He was 19, limping to class in college, doing every single thing the protocols said to do, and getting nowhere.
The actual diagnosis: an Osgood-Schlatter bone fragment
The third doctor Zach saw works with the Washington Commanders and George Mason Athletics, and he’s the one who finally figured it out. The x-ray showed an extra bone fragment left over from Zach having Osgood-Schlatter as a kid. Osgood-Schlatter is the thing a lot of kids get where you have a bump below the kneecap during a growth spurt. Usually it goes away once you’re fully grown, and Zach’s had years ago.
Somehow that one landing on the 8 foot rim shifted the way that leftover fragment was interacting with his patellar tendon. Zach was clear he’s not a doctor and might not be perfectly correct on the mechanism, but the fix was: surgery to remove the fragment. They had to split through his tendon to get to it. He told me it’s a pretty uncommon procedure but it does happen with people whose Osgood-Schlatter didn’t resolve correctly. He had the surgery one week before we recorded.
A week post-surgery and the rehab road ahead
When we sat down Zach had just started PT that day. He couldn’t bend his knee. He couldn’t lift it. He was walking with a straight leg and a brace. He’d gone into surgery thinking he’d be functional in two weeks, and the reality was hitting that it’s going to be way longer. The estimate is six months of PT.
What he kept coming back to is that structurally his knee is fine. Tendon intact, meniscus intact, cartilage intact. The only thing wrong was that floating piece of bone, and now it’s gone. In theory, once the incision heals and the swelling drops and he gets strength back, he should be able to dunk again. He doesn’t know what his skill level will look like, or when he’ll be cleared to jump. The plan is rehab day to day, return to basketball recreationally, then eventually return to dunking.
One thing that’s wild is that his vertical didn’t really drop through any of this. Even with the injury he was hitting Dubble Up X (a reverse off a Dubble Up), backboard between the legs, and consistent windmills in the rare sessions he had in 2023. He just couldn’t do it more than once every couple months because of the pain.
Pro dunker reality checks and rim height honesty
A couple other topics came up too. Zach went to Dunk Camp 2023 and watched Jordan Southerland and Jordan Kilganon run the Gauntlet (the last level of the Dunk Camp progression with 360 eastbay, eastbay off the backboard, 360 between the legs, scorpion, and underboth). Southerland did it without missing, off one foot for most of it. He also told me about a North Carolina session he flew to where he dunked with Obi, Jordan Kilganon, and Dan Gross, struggling to hit eastbays while they were doing them off vert.
On rim height honesty, Zach rounds his measurements to the nearest half inch and posts the height on every clip. I’m a big advocate for dunking on legit rims, so I agree with him on this. If it’s 9’9” say 9’9”.
What this episode meant to me
Zach’s story stuck with me. If your knee isn’t responding to standard rehab and the pain feels different from a normal tendon ache, push for more imaging and more opinions. Almost two years got eaten up because every doctor and every dunker assumed the same thing. He’s 19, he’s got time, and the fact that his vertical never really went away gives me a lot of hope for his comeback. He said he’s probably going to start posting rehab updates on Instagram, so go find him.
If you want to keep going on the injury thread, check out my conversation with Travis Reynolds on his dunk journey and injury history, and the episode with Nolan Larson on injury, identity, and the love of dunking. Both of those guys went through long stretches trying to figure out what was actually wrong with their bodies, kind of like Zach. Appreciate Zach for coming on and being open about all of this. See you guys in the next one.