Isaiah Edwards, known as Zeus, is a 6'5" professional dunker from Albany, Oregon who walked away from college basketball to chase dunking full time. He played guard for the Western Oregon Wolves, a Division II program in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference, before deciding to put everything into the part of the game he actually loved.
It was not a small call. Edwards had every tool you would want in a college guard, the handles, a smooth jump shot and the drive to keep improving. Dunking won anyway. He describes the first one he ever got down as feeling like "a superpower," the sense that he could suddenly fly, and says he has been chasing that same feeling on every jump since.
In 2024 he won the Salem Radiology Consultants Slam Dunk Contest at Oregon Hoopla, closing the night by going over a friend who was standing on a couch holding a ball. His stated goal is to be one of the best dunkers in the world and to compete at Quai 54 in Paris, which has grown into one of the biggest stages the sport has to offer.
Edwards goes up off one foot, planting on his left, and for someone who came to dunking from a playing background he is unusually technical about it. He argues that approach, angle, speed and even the first step can be worth roughly six inches on a single jump, and that most people badly underrate how much of dunking is mechanics rather than raw athleticism. Dunkademics has filmed him at The Dunk Camp alongside dunkers from across the professional circuit, and his sessions there have become a regular part of the footage from those trips.