I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina, and this is the episode of the Dunk Talk Podcast I care about most. Dylan Haugen and I have both been making long-form content basically our whole careers, and on episode 69 we finally laid out the full case for it. The show’s article version lives at why dunkers should make long-form content. Here’s my side of the argument.
Dunkers Watch Dunk Videos. Let Us Watch Yours
When dunkers meet up, 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 time. That’s the test most short-form content fails. You cannot put a 15 second reel with a trending sound on the TV and watch it with your friends. If Isaiah posts a session, everyone watches. If Kilganon posts anything, everyone watches. The appetite for real sessions is there. The supply isn’t.
What the 2020 Dunk Community Had
Before Reels and TikTok took over, people posted carousel dumps and full sessions: misses, makes, new dunks they were chasing, attempts, training context. You saw what everyone was going for and how their training looked. When someone hit a milestone, you knew, because you had been following the whole build-up.
“The dunk community was just so connected back then. People were just always hyping each other up 24/7 no matter what time of the day it was.”
Travis Reynolds, Dunk Talk #69
Now the algorithm decides which posts you see, context gets stripped for trends, and keeping up with individual dunkers is nearly impossible. It stops feeling like a dunk community and starts feeling like content creators who happen to share a niche. Strangers, basically.
My Behind the Back Race With Tom Barnes
Here’s what that connection actually does. Back in the carousel era, Tom Barnes and I were in a race to land our first Behind the Back. Because we both posted our attempts and progress, the entire community was invested. People DMed me constantly, people DMed Tom, everyone knew the context. When I made it first and posted it, Nathan George woke up in the middle of the night in the UK, saw it, got hyped, liked it, and went back to bed. That’s a community. Tom went on to found JumpX, and his whole story is in his Dunk Talk episode. The program he built is at JumpX, which Dylan trains on today.
Competition like that makes everyone better. It’s also just more fun. If people can see what you’re close to, someone at your level can take inspiration and push you back.
The Isaiah Rivera Case Study
I’ve followed Isaiah Rivera since basically his first dunk. One of the main reasons the community loves him is that his entire journey is posted. The ups, the downs, the grinds for specific dunks, the bad sessions. Watching all of it is like building a relationship with somebody without ever interacting with them. Then think about why his training business works. There are guys with bigger verticals, and none of them have his reach, because nobody watched them become who they are. People don’t buy from whoever is technically the best. They buy from who they feel connected to. Dylan’s episode on how Isaiah became the highest jumper in the world covers the athletic side of that same story.
You Can Do Both
To be clear, I’m not telling anyone to stop making short-form. I post plenty of it, and it grows your following. The point is that it costs almost nothing to also post the long version. You’re already filming. You’re already editing clips. Change the aspect ratio, put the session in order, and upload it. Dylan has a whole tutorial on converting horizontal to vertical with keyframes in CapCut, and he runs something like 20 to 30 raw dunk videos a month across his own channel and the Minnesota Dunk Squad channel. If he can do that, you can post your most recent session.
And YouTube is the one platform that actually pays me every month. If you’re going to be posting anyway, you might as well be building the asset that compounds.
Document Everything, Even the Bad Days
I post almost every session, including the poor jumping days, and I have for the past two or three years. Bad sessions build the good ones. You can see me missing dunks that I make later, and that context is the whole story. Ten years from now, when we look back at this era of dunking, the dunkers who documented will be the ones people can actually watch. The rest will be a scroll through somebody’s reels tab, half a second per dunk, no context.
It’s also free storage. Before I organized my footage, YouTube was my archive. Every session, findable, in order.
Start This Week
Film your next session in horizontal, or just set up a second phone. Put the dunks in order, title it something simple, and post it. You don’t need talking segments, you don’t need fancy editing, and you don’t need to be one of the best in the world. I promise dunkers will watch it, because I’m one of them and I search for new sessions constantly. My own journey only reads the way it does because it got documented while it happened. You can trace the whole thing in my dunk journey story, right down to the seven weeks I spent dunking left-handed.
The full conversation is in the video above. I’m @TravisDunks on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Post your sessions. I’ll watch them.
