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.