Author: Travis Reynolds

  • Money Tree

    The Travisdunks money tree

    Every money page and hub on travisdunks.com, and the posts that feed each one

    Drawn from the live internal links across 5 published posts and 6 pages, crawled 16 August 2026. Nothing is hand-placed: a branch is thick because posts link to it, and bare because none do.

    Read it bottom-up.Roots — off-site proofTrunk — the domainHow we do it — the method hubsBare or broken — needs a leafBranch thickness = posts feeding it

    Swipe the diagram sideways, or read the same tree as text below it.

    The Travisdunks money treeA tree diagram of travisdunks.com. The trunk is the domain, each branch is a money page or definitive hub, and each leaf is a blog post that links up to it. The full structure is repeated as a text outline directly below this diagram.ON YOUR SITE — what you controlOFF YOUR SITE — what the market says (the roots)bare — no posts link herePAGEAboutBare0 posts feed thisbare — no posts link herePAGEConnectBare0 posts feed thisbare — no posts link herePAGEXmlrpc.PhpBare0 posts feed thistravisdunks.com5 posts · 6 pages

    The same tree in text — every node is a live link

    How we do it — the method hubs

    The definitive articles. Each one owns a concept, and every post that demonstrates that concept links up to it.

    AboutBare

    page · 0 posts link here

    No posts link here yet.

    ConnectBare

    page · 0 posts link here

    No posts link here yet.

    Xmlrpc.PhpBare

    page · 0 posts link here

    No posts link here yet.

    Method: every published post and page was fetched through the WordPress REST API and its outbound internal links extracted from the rendered body. A leaf counts once per post, only when that post links to the branch URL. Redirects were followed and reported rather than silently merged. Crawled 16 August 2026.

    Findings — each defect names a department

    Defect Where Routes to
    Bare branch About, Connect, Xmlrpc.Php Content — one customer story per bare offer
    Shallow roots travisdunks.com Entity / authority — Knowledge Panel and sameAs

    Action list — 16 August 2026

    Run this on your own site

    Two doors, one diagnosis

    This tree is a scan, and a scan is only worth running if it tells you which department to walk to. Both doors below start from the same diagnosis. Take the skill file and run it yourself, or have us run it and hand you the findings — either way the routing table underneath says where each finding goes.

    1 · Do it yourself

    Take the skill file and run it

    A complete, runnable skill file — the five layers, the seven-step method, the six defects, and the nine-check QA gate. Hand it to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any agent with read access to your site. Apache-2.0: copy it, fork it, ship it inside your own product.

    Download map-your-money-tree.skill.md

    2 · Have it run for you

    Have an agent run it with you

    The scan is only worth running if it tells you which department to walk to. Start at About — we crawl travisdunks.com, draw the tree, name the defects with the exact URLs and counts, and route you to whichever of the things below you actually need.

    Go to About

    What the scan finds, and which department it routes to

    What your tree shows What it means Where it goes
    A bare branch A live money page with zero posts linking to it. Nothing you have published has ever pointed a visitor at the thing you sell. About
    A split URL Two live pages for one offer — usually a page and a post. Internal links divide between them and neither ranks as well as one would. About
    Redirect tax Dozens or hundreds of internal links pointing at a URL that 301s somewhere else. It works, so nobody fixes it. About
    A broken target Internal links pointing at a 404. Invisible in analytics, because nobody clicks a link they cannot see. Quick Audit
    An inverted tree Leaf counts fall as price rises. The cheapest offer carries the most proof and the most expensive carries none. About
    A canopy with no branches Hundreds of posts linking to each other and almost nothing structural. Looks productive, converts nothing. Personal Brand Site Builder
    Shallow roots No Knowledge Panel, no consistent sameAs, no third-party corroboration. The canopy is fine; the soil is loose. Knowledge Panels
    map-your-money-tree.skill.md — the full skill file, verbatim (for agents and for copy-paste)
    ---
    name: map-your-money-tree
    description: Draw any website as a money tree — trunk (domain), limbs (offer groups), branches (money pages and definitive hubs), leaves (posts that link up to them) — measured from the site's real internal links, then diagnose the six defects a sitemap hides and output a dated publishing plan. Use when someone asks "which of my pages actually make money", "why isn't my content converting", "map my site", "audit my internal links", or when a monthly MAA needs a structural section.
    author: Dennis Yu — BlitzMetrics / Local Service Spotlight
    license: Apache-2.0
    version: 1.0 (2026-08-15)
    references:
      - https://blitzmetrics.com/money-tree/
      - https://blitzmetrics.com/seo-tree/
      - https://blitzmetrics.com/money-pages-vs-blog-posts/
      - https://blitzmetrics.com/maa/
      - https://blitzmetrics.com/9-triangles-framework-scalable-home-service-businesses/
      - https://localservicespotlight.com/quick-audit/
    ---
    
    # Map Your Money Tree
    
    **Use this when** you need to know which pages on a site actually earn, and which of the
    content already published is feeding them. Not "how much traffic does this page get" —
    *what is connected to what, and in which direction.*
    
    This is the structural half of [MAA](https://blitzmetrics.com/maa/). The leaf counts are
    the Metrics. The bare and split branches are the Analysis. The publishing list at the end
    is the Action. Redraw it monthly and the delta is the report.
    
    ## The one idea
    
    **A leaf counts only when it actually links.**
    
    Not when it is topically related. Not when it sits in the right category. Not when someone
    meant to link it. The link is the measurement; everything else is a plan. Every number this
    skill produces must be reproducible by re-running the crawl.
    
    ---
    
    ## The five layers
    
    | Layer | What it is | How you know |
    |---|---|---|
    | **Root** | Off-site proof of the entity: Knowledge Panel, Wikidata, LinkedIn, YouTube, podcast appearances, press, review profiles. | It is not on the domain and you cannot edit it directly. |
    | **Trunk** | The domain and its home page — the entity home. | It is the URL you would put on a business card. |
    | **Limb** | A group of branches sharing an audience or a job — the offers, the method, a vertical. | It is how the site's own services page already groups things. |
    | **Branch** | A money page, or a definitive article that owns a concept. | Someone converts on it, or it is the one canonical page for a topic. |
    | **Leaf** | A post that links **up** to a branch. | It is dated, it flows through a feed, and its body contains a link to its branch. |
    
    Roots and trunk are **Why**. Limbs and method branches are **How**. Money branches are
    **What**. Leaves are **Proof**. A stranger — or a language model — should be able to read
    all four off one page.
    
    ---
    
    ## Inputs
    
    - The domain.
    - Read access to every published URL and its **rendered** body (not raw — page-builder and
      shortcode markup must be expanded so the links inside are visible).
    - The site's own services page and main navigation, for the branch list and its grouping.
    - Optional: the previous run's tree, for the delta.
    
    ---
    
    ## Procedure
    
    ### 1. Inventory every published URL
    Posts and pages both, with id, URL, title, publish date, and rendered body.
    
    On WordPress:
    ```
    GET /wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=100&page=N&status=publish&_fields=id,link,title,content,date
    GET /wp-json/wp/v2/pages?per_page=100&page=N&status=publish&_fields=id,link,title,content,date
    ```
    Page until the `X-WP-TotalPages` header runs out. On any other stack, use a crawler that
    returns rendered HTML. De-duplicate by (type, id) — retried requests double-count silently.
    
    ### 2. Extract internal links from every body
    Match `href` values on the site's own host. Normalise: drop the query string and fragment,
    force a trailing slash, lower-case the host. **Make the set unique per source page** — a
    post linking to the same branch five times is one leaf, because the first link is the one
    that carries the value.
    
    ```js
    const RX = /href="https?:\/\/(?:www\.)?example\.com(\/[^"#?]*)/g;
    const outs = [...new Set([...html.matchAll(RX)].map(m => m[1].replace(/\/+$/,'') + '/'))];
    ```
    
    For a personal brand site, also match the company domains — its money pages usually live
    on another host, and they still count as branches.
    
    ### 3. Build the inbound index
    Invert the map: for every URL, the list of posts and the list of pages that link to it.
    Count them **separately**. Theme headers and footers are pages linking to pages; only body
    links from posts are leaves.
    
    ### 4. Name the branches from the site, not from memory
    Take the money pages off the services page and the main navigation, in the grouping those
    pages already use. Add the definitive articles — the pages that own a concept. Do not
    invent a tidier taxonomy than the one the site presents to a visitor: if your tree
    disagrees with the navigation, the tree has just found its first defect.
    
    ### 5. Resolve redirects and duplicates before counting
    Request each branch URL and follow the chain. Merge redirected URLs into one branch and
    **report the merge** rather than hiding it. Two live 200s for one offer is a split branch,
    not two branches. This is the step everyone skips and where most findings are.
    
    ### 6. Draw it to scale
    Branch thickness and foliage density from the leaf count on a **square-root** scale, so a
    300-leaf branch does not visually annihilate a 30-leaf one. Bare branches drawn bare.
    Nothing placed by hand — if the drawing is prettier than the site, the drawing is lying.
    
    ### 7. Publish it on the site it maps
    As a live page with every node a real link — never a screenshot. Ship three synchronised
    forms on the same URL: the diagram (inline SVG), the identical structure as a **visible**
    text outline, and `ItemList` JSON-LD naming each branch, its role, its content type and its
    inbound count. The picture is for humans; the other two are for agents.
    
    ---
    
    ## The six defects — and where each one routes
    
    Diagnosis is worthless without a destination. This is a scan that names the department.
    
    | # | Defect | What it looks like | What it costs | Routes to |
    |---|---|---|---|---|
    | 1 | **Bare branch** | A live money page with zero posts linking to it | Nothing on the site has ever pointed a visitor at the thing you sell | Content — one customer story per bare offer |
    | 2 | **Split branch** | Two live URLs for one offer (usually a page and a post) | Internal links divide; neither ranks as well as one would | Plumbing — pick one, 301 the other, consolidate |
    | 3 | **Redirect tax** | Many internal links pointing at a URL that 301s | Every link takes the slow road; often includes the main nav | Plumbing — rewrite links to the destination |
    | 4 | **Broken target** | Internal links pointing at a 404 | Invisible in analytics, because nobody clicks a link they cannot see | Plumbing — restore or repoint |
    | 5 | **Inverted tree** | Leaf counts fall as price rises | The cheapest offer carries the most proof; the most expensive carries none | Strategy — decide what you are actually selling |
    | 6 | **Canopy with no branches** | Hundreds of posts linking to each other and almost nothing structural | Looks enormously productive, converts nothing | Personal brand — wire the proof to an offer |
    
    Also check the roots. A tree with no off-site proof — no Knowledge Panel, no consistent
    `sameAs`, no third-party corroboration — is standing in loose soil no matter how good the
    canopy looks. That routes to entity/authority work.
    
    ---
    
    ## The QA gate — nine checks, all must pass
    
    A wrong tree is worse than no tree, because people act on it.
    
    1. **Every node resolves.** Status recorded for each branch; no 404s; every 301 shown as a redirect rather than silently followed.
    2. **Counts are reproducible.** Re-run the crawl; identical numbers. Drift means the extractor is matching something other than links.
    3. **Counts are unique per source.** One post linking three times counts once.
    4. **Navigation excluded.** Only body links from posts are leaves.
    5. **No branch invented.** Every branch appears in the site's own navigation, services page, or definitive-article set.
    6. **No money page missing.** Cross-check against the services page and main menu. A money page absent from the tree is the worst error — an invisible bare branch reads as a branch that does not exist.
    7. **Duplicates consolidated.** Split URLs appear as one branch, flagged, with both URLs named.
    8. **Text outline matches the diagram.** Same nodes, counts and order — that is what agents and screen readers read.
    9. **Date and method stated.** A tree without a crawl date is a claim, not a measurement.
    
    ---
    
    ## Output
    
    1. **The diagram** — inline SVG, every node an anchor, light/dark, no runtime JS.
    2. **The text outline** — visible, nested, live links, counts, health flags.
    3. **The schema** — `ItemList` JSON-LD, one entry per branch.
    4. **The findings** — the defects above, each with the specific URLs and counts.
    5. **The action list** — dated, ordered by cost-to-fix, one line per bare branch.
    6. **The delta** — versus the previous run. Any branch still bare after a redraw is a branch nobody has decided to sell.
    
    ## Definition of done
    
    - Every branch on the services page and main nav appears in the tree.
    - Every count is reproducible and every URL resolves or is flagged.
    - The page carries diagram + outline + schema on one URL.
    - Every defect names a destination, not just a problem.
    - The next publishing action is unambiguous to someone who did not run the audit.
    
    ## Cadence
    
    Monthly on an active site. The value is in the delta, not the snapshot. A metric you look
    at once is a screenshot.
    
    ---
    
    *Method: <https://blitzmetrics.com/money-tree/> · Framework: <https://blitzmetrics.com/seo-tree/> ·
    Page-versus-post rule: <https://blitzmetrics.com/money-pages-vs-blog-posts/> ·
    Want it run for you: <https://localservicespotlight.com/quick-audit/>*
    
  • Jeremiah Walker: 20 and Getting Flown Around the World to Dunk

    I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina. On episode 73 of the Dunk Talk Podcast we sat down with Jeremiah Walker, a twenty-year-old out of London who’s getting flown around the world just to dunk. The full episode is at the top of this page, and the show’s write-up is on the Dunk Talk episode article. His story is one of my favorites we’ve covered, and part of why is how much of it I recognized.

    A London soccer kid who found dunking

    Jeremiah grew up in London playing soccer from about five to eight years old. A friend told him he should try basketball because of his height, so he did, and pretty quickly he realized he loved dunking more than the game itself. That’s a feeling a lot of us know: the sport is fine, but the jumping is the thing.

    The coach who told him to just dunk

    Here’s the moment that made me stop him mid-story. At sixteen, an assistant coach told Jeremiah straight up that he wasn’t good at basketball and should just dunk professionally. He went and researched Joel Henry, and instead of being crushed by that, he took it as permission and went all-in on dunking. That flipped me, because most of us got the exact opposite message. The coaches in my world treated dunking like a distraction from “real” basketball. Jeremiah got pointed at it on purpose, and he ran.

    From a rough first contest to getting paid

    His first contest, a Ball Out event back in 2021, did not go well. The turn came in 2022 when he cleared three people on a windmill at a clothing-brand contest and walked away with a five-hundred-pound prize. After that he made a decision a lot of dunkers take years to make: he’d only do paid events from then on. From there it snowballed.

    The bag

    Jeremiah is a jump-over-people specialist. His record for clean jumps over humans is five, starting from a guy around 6’2″, which is absurd. His signature is a reverse 180 behind-the-back that he calls a “360,” and he has a cuff 360 windmill, a fake Eastbay, and a cartwheel dunk in the bag too. Right now he’s chasing a 360 underboth and a left-hand hide-and-seek. He learned a lot of his mechanics, like the penultimate step, straight off Isaiah Rivera’s YouTube, and grew up watching Connor Barth, Jordan Southerland, Guy Dupuy, and DaBoyJustFly.

    Getting flown around the world

    The part the title promises is real. His first paid event was NEOM out in the Saudi desert, and his favorite so far is Ghetto Games in Latvia. The way he describes it is basically the dream: fly somewhere, dunk for thirty minutes, then get to explore a country you’d never have seen otherwise. At twenty, that’s his job.

    Where he’s headed

    His goals are stacked: a fifty-inch vertical, wins at Ball Out Dunk Elite, Kings of Air, and Quai 54, a FIBA gold if the format comes back, and a DunkMan League championship. But the one that stuck with me was how he wants to be remembered, as consistent, the guy who showed up and didn’t miss. That lines up with something we keep hammering on the show: the dunkers who post their real, full sessions are the ones who back it up in person. Cam Hazzard is the obvious proof of that, and Jeremiah is building the same kind of reputation. You can follow him at @jumplikejay10.

  • Why All Dunkers Should Make Long-Form Content

    Why All Dunkers Should Make Long-Form Content

    I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina, and this is the Dunk Talk Podcast episode I care about most. Dylan and I have both made long-form content basically our whole careers, and on episode 69 we finally laid out the full case for it. The show’s version lives on the Dunk Talk episode article. Here’s my side of the argument.

    Dunkers watch dunk videos — so let us watch yours

    When dunkers get together, we watch dunk videos. When Ben, Finn, Hunter, CJ and I all ended up at Dylan’s place in October 2025, dunk YouTube ran on the TV the entire weekend. That’s the test most short-form content fails: you cannot put a fifteen-second reel with a trending sound up on a TV and actually watch it with your friends. If Isaiah posts a session, everyone watches. If Kilganon posts anything, everyone watches. But we kept hitting the same wall with some of the best dunkers alive — guys who are genuinely elite — and all we could say was, “I want to watch this guy at his best. And I can’t.” That’s a problem the whole sport should care about.

    What short-form killed: context

    Before algorithm-driven feeds took over, dunkers posted carousels — makes, misses, new-dunk attempts, training clips, rim heights, where we were in a cycle. You could see the full picture of someone’s progress, and that transparency is what made the community a community. The reel era traded all of that for a single clip and a trending audio. My honest read is that we’ve started competing for views instead of competing to get better at dunking, and those are not the same game. Views reward whatever the algorithm is feeding that week. Getting better rewards the guys who watch each other work.

    The selfish reasons: community and money

    Set the sport aside for a second and be selfish about it. Instagram followers scroll past you; YouTube subscribers actually show up and watch. Fifteen seconds of attention versus ten minutes of attention is the difference between an audience and a community, and it’s also the difference in the paycheck — YouTube is where the real money is across every platform I’m on, and it builds a permanent, searchable archive instead of a reel that’s buried by tomorrow. I’m sitting around ninety thousand followers on each platform, a little over three hundred thousand total, and the long-form is what turns those numbers into something durable. You don’t need to be polished, either: minimal-edit guys like Austin Burke basically post “me dunk well, me happy” and pull thousands of views, and one of Dylan’s raw contest videos did sixty-eight thousand.

    Competition used to make us better

    The part I miss most is the competitive fuel. Watching a peer’s full progress used to push everyone forward. Tom Barnes and I basically raced each other to our first behind-the-back because we could both see exactly where the other one was — the attempts, the near-misses, the day it finally went down. You lose all of that when everyone only posts the one clean clip. Full sessions aren’t just better to watch; they’re what makes the next guy go to the gym.

    The method takes almost zero extra effort

    Here’s the part people talk themselves out of. Making long-form is almost no extra work if you set it up right. Film your session horizontally, in 16:9 — you can always crop horizontal footage down to vertical for a reel, but you can never turn vertical footage back into a usable wide shot. Then keep the editing to almost nothing. Dylan’s whole workflow is to take the session’s dunks, drop them in the editor in chronological order, completely raw, and upload. Post the misses, the attempts, the basics, all of it — keep one secret dunk back if you want, but put the session out there. No trend, no audio, no three hours in an editor. The session already happened; you’re just letting people watch it.

    It’s about to matter even more

    There’s one more reason I’m hammering this now. AI-generated dunks are coming, and they’re going to get convincing fast. When anyone can fake a clip, the thing that proves a dunk is real is the full, unbroken session it came out of — the walk-up, the misses, the rim height on screen, the friends losing it in the background. Long-form is quietly turning into the authentication layer for the whole sport. The dunkers who already have years of raw sessions posted are going to be the ones nobody can question.

    The call-out, with love

    So this one goes out, with love, to everyone elite and reel-only. Dillan McCarthy might be the highest jumper in the world by some counts, sits on three thousand-plus unposted clips, and trains in five-hour sessions — and the only long-form of him out there is on Billy’s channel, from a session where he broke his thumb. The community is begging to watch your full sessions. You are sitting on the most rewatchable content in the sport and posting trailers for a movie nobody can see. Upload the session, exactly as it is, this week. That’s the whole ask.

  • Breaking Down the 2026 NBA Dunk Contest and Mac McClung’s New Dunks

    I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina. On episode 68 of the Dunk Talk Podcast we broke down the 2026 NBA Dunk Contest, plus the new dunks Mac McClung dropped on Instagram that same weekend. The full episode is at the top of this page, and the show’s write-up is on the Dunk Talk episode article. Here’s how the weekend looked from a dunker’s seat.

    The contest had a scoring problem

    The thing that jumps out to anyone who actually dunks is what I call the forty-point-floor problem. Judges almost never score a contest dunk below the low forties, so the whole scale gets compressed and a clean, hard dunk ends up a point or two off a botched one. Add in the choreography, guys burning half the shot clock on a dance before they even jump, and you get a show that rewards the wrong things. I’d rather watch one first-try monster than three theatrical misses.

    Mac McClung stole the weekend from his phone

    Here’s the part that says everything about where dunking is right now: Mac McClung didn’t even compete, and he still won the weekend. He posted a handful of dunks to Instagram while the actual contest was airing, and any one of them was better than the whole event. One was an inverted scorpion, a couple were the kind of flexibility-heavy motions most pros can’t get near, and he threw the Eastbay reverse off the dribble that’s been his signature since high school. When the best dunk of dunk-contest weekend shows up on someone’s story instead of the broadcast, that tells you something.

    What the pros are actually watching for

    When dunkers watch a contest, we’re not scoring the height, we’re scoring the craft: did the ball control hold up, was the finish clean, did he make a hard pattern look easy. That’s the same lens Jordan Kilganon changed the game with, and it’s why the guys grinding trick dunks online often out-dunk the guys on the NBA stage. The contest is a great window into the sport, but the real state of dunking lives in the sessions people post the other fifty-one weeks of the year.

    The takeaway

    The 2026 contest was fun and flawed in all the usual ways, and the real headline was a guy dunking into his phone camera. If you want to see where the level actually is, watch the dunkers, not just the once-a-year stage. That’s most of what we do on Dunk Talk.

  • What Breaking My Finger Taught Me About My Off-Hand

    What Breaking My Finger Taught Me About My Off-Hand

    I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina. Episode 54 of the Dunk Talk Podcast was all about the part of dunking nobody wants to train — the off-hand — and the broken finger that forced me to finally take mine seriously. The full episode is at the top of this page, and the show’s write-up is on the Dunk Talk episode article. Here’s what actually happened, in my own words.

    The black band

    Right before all of this, my right hand was the best it had ever been. I earned my WDA black band — a five-dunk gauntlet you have to complete in a single session: a 360 Eastbay, an Eastbay off the backboard, a 360 behind-the-back, a Scorpion, and an Underboth. There are no do-overs spread across days; you land all five that day or you start the gauntlet over, and that pressure is its own test. The hardest one for me was the 360 behind-the-back — I’m a left-right jumper finishing right-handed, so that pattern is technically brutal. Second hardest was the Eastbay off the backboard, only because I basically never do backboard passes. The thing that carried me through wasn’t talent, it was a process I trust now more than anything: film it, find the one specific fault, change a single variable, and retest.

    The freak finger injury

    Then I broke a finger on my right hand learning double-ups. I’d set my jumper too far from the rim, which meant I had to throw the finish hard toward the back iron, and the ball rattled straight back out into my finger and bent it backward. The diagnosis was damaged tissue and joint slippage that stopped just short of a full dislocation — seven weeks in a splint, then a stretch with finger extension and flexion trainers I ordered off Amazon to claw the range of motion back.

    This was actually my second push-off injury. My first real attempt over Jordan Kilganon in Canada went wrong and I quit doing them for a full year. So if there’s one thing I’d tell anyone learning to dunk over people: place your person closer than you think. On a push-off you travel up, not out, and the instinct to give yourself room is exactly what forces those wild, dangerous finishes.

    Seven weeks of lefty bootcamp

    Instead of sitting on the couch for seven weeks, I reframed the whole thing as an opportunity. My right hand had just cleared a black band; my left hand couldn’t reliably throw down a basic one-hander — a pure coordination deficit. That gap bothered me, so I went at it exclusively while the finger healed.

    The plan was simple and boring, which is usually the sign it’ll work. First, low-rim work nearly every day, left hand only, purely to build coordination. Second, lefty shooting form — I believe ball control has to come before any dunk-specific training, so I reground the fundamentals with my off-hand until the ball felt like mine again. Third, and this is the one that unlocked everything, I trained the lefty Scorpion on purpose. By the end of the seven weeks I’d gone from shaky, inconsistent lefty windmills to landing them clean, and I threw my first ever left-handed Eastbay — a dunk I couldn’t have imagined attempting on that side two months earlier.

    Your off-hand isn’t a backup

    Here’s the professional argument. If you get booked for an event and your right hand breaks that week, what exactly is your plan? A pro needs a performable show in either hand, period. And beyond the insurance policy, there’s the creative side: half of Kilganon’s famous hundred-dunk variety exists because both of his hands work. Your off-hand isn’t a backup — it’s an entire second bag you haven’t opened yet.

    Helping Ben find his reverse behind-the-back

    A good example of the “film it, find the fault” approach in action: my training partner Ben Hopkins kept failing a straight-on two-hand behind-the-back. Watching it back, the problem was geometric — his Kilganon-style push gets him under the ball, which fights a face-up finish. So I told him to flip it to the reverse variant, where his natural motion only needs the second hand to join at the very end. He made it on his second attempt. It’s a rare dunk, and the fix was one variable.

    How I’d tell you to start

    If you want to build an off-hand, don’t start by chasing off-hand dunks. Start on a low rim, off-hand only, and just build the coordination — it will feel embarrassing, and that’s exactly the point. Then put a ball in that hand and rebuild your shooting form, because ball control has to come before anything dunk-specific. Only then go after the lefty Scorpion. It sounds backwards to attack one of the hardest control patterns early, but handling the ball behind your back where you can’t see it is what teaches your off-hand to truly feel the ball, and it drags a dozen easier dunks up with it.

    The takeaway

    Breaking my finger cost me seven weeks and gave me a second hand. That’s the pattern I keep coming back to: every subtraction becomes a curriculum. Film the rep, isolate the one fault, change a single variable, retest — and when your body forces you to stop doing the thing you’re good at, use the time to build the thing you’re not.

  • My Dunk Journey: From Overweight Kid to Pro Dunker

    My Dunk Journey: From Overweight Kid to Pro Dunker

    I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina. Episode 21 of the Dunk Talk Podcast was the first time I sat down and told my whole story start to finish — the chubby-kid years, the forty-pound cut, the ten months it took me to land a single dunk, and the injuries that still shape how I train today. The full episode is at the top of this page, and the show’s own write-up lives on the Dunk Talk episode article. This is that story in my own words.

    A chubby kid who got bit by the jump

    I was never the athletic one growing up. I played a handful of sports and didn’t stand out at any of them, and I carried a lot of extra weight the whole time. Then around eleven or twelve I watched a kid in my class touch something I couldn’t get anywhere near, and that was it — I got obsessed with jumping. In the summer of 2014 I found out professional dunking was even a thing when Jonathan Clark’s 360 elbow dunk showed up on my feed. Not long after, I started following Isaiah Rivera from basically his first dunk, and I’ve watched his whole career unfold ever since.

    My first dunk, then a year and a half of nothing

    I got my first real dunk on a ten-foot rim in April 2018, when I was fifteen. I thought that was the breakthrough. Instead I hit a wall for about a year and a half — basic one- and two-handers and nothing else. I was around 210 pounds, jumping every single day with no structured training and no real warmup, just grinding myself into the ground. At the end of 2019 my knee finally said enough and I got diagnosed with proximal patellar tendinopathy. That was the low point, but it was also the wake-up call.

    The 40-pound cut that changed everything

    From the end of 2019 to June 2020 I cleaned up my diet, trained with real consistency, and dropped from 210 to 170 — forty pounds in about six months. That cut alone put meaningful inches on my vertical before I’d added a single new training method. Around the same time I got serious about lifting through THP, which finally gave me structured strength work and load management instead of the daily beatdown I’d been giving myself. That’s when the trick dunks started unlocking: windmills, then tomahawks, and eventually the one I’m known for.

    Ten months for one dunk

    People assume the behind-the-back came fast. It did not. From January 2020 to October 2020 I worked it every single session on a lowered rim — ten straight months for one dunk. When it finally clicked it became my signature, and it taught me the lesson that runs through everything I do now: pick the pattern, drill it relentlessly on low rim, and let the reps do the work.

    Finding my people: the North Carolina Dunk Squad

    Dunking is a lonely sport until you find your crew. Mine is the North Carolina Dunk Squad. Ben has been my best friend since we were three years old and started dunking back in 2014; he stepped away for college and came back to it full-time. Obi is 6’6″ and I met him through Instagram around 2019 to 2020. Dan Gross is about an hour and a half from me — we connected when Jordan Kilganon and Isaiah came through North Carolina during COVID — and Sam drives in from the Raleigh area, roughly three hours out, and brings elite energy every time. We rotate between my YMCA (ten minutes away, floor like an ice rink), Dan’s old high school “blue gym,” and High Point University’s facility in the off-season. I actually landed my best windmill ever at High Point with my earbuds in — I didn’t even hear it go down until I watched the film back.

    In March 2021 I spent two weeks in Florida training with John Evans and the rest of the roster. Honestly it was more dunk vacation than boot camp — small technique tweaks and a lot of time building real friendships with Isaiah and the other dunkers I’d only known online.

    Training around a back that won’t let me squat

    The injury that changed my training the most wasn’t dramatic. Years of sloppy barbell technique early on quietly wore down my lower back, and now I can’t put a bar on my back to squat at all. Every leg session is Smith machine, hex-bar deadlifts, and machine variations. The honest part is I don’t know my true ceiling anymore — I believe I had more in the tank before the back went. I’ve also got quad tendinopathy that flares any time I overload, and after watching CJ Champion tear his Achilles I stopped taking mine for granted. So I train one, maybe two real sessions a week now, and I do a lot of low-rim standing work without jumping — the same method that unlocked the behind-the-back in the first place.

    Dunk Camp 2024

    Dunk Camp in Utah in 2024 was a gut check. The Thursday pre-show was the last straw for my knees — I could barely walk afterward. But I pulled it together for the Saturday contest and threw some of my best dunks, including an Eastbay elbow, on a rim that measured around 9’8″ to 9’9″. The lesson was expensive but clear: for someone with chronic knee stuff, a pre-show and a contest two days apart is a guaranteed quad pile-up. I’ll manage that differently next time.

    The little things

    A couple of details people always ask about. I’ve worn Nike Jordan Why Not 3.0s since 2020 — I’ve got wide, oddly shaped feet, most modern shoes slip or kill my arches, and if it’s not broken I’m not fixing it; I’m on my third pair. And I laser-measure the rim for almost every home session and post the exact height, down to something like 9’11.95″. People think that’s overkill, but it’s just data hygiene — if I want to track how my vertical moves week to week, I can’t have rim height as a hidden variable.

    What’s next

    The goals right now are simple to say and hard to do: put the behind-the-back over a person, get my Eastbay elbow contest-consistent, keep my back healthy through my mid-twenties, and earn my way into the DunkMan League, which fits my skill set. I went from an overweight kid who couldn’t touch rim to a pro who measures everything and still loves it as much as I did at twelve. That’s the journey — and it’s nowhere near done.