Donovan Hawkins is a 6'4" dunker with a 48" vertical who had a breakout 2024. He goes up off two feet from a right-left plant, his signature is the under-both-legs, and he is known for punching home nearly everything he attempts without ever needing props or a push-off to make an impression.
His route into the sport is one of the strangest in dunking, because it does not run through basketball at all. He never played organized basketball. He played hockey from the age of five until he was sixteen, and started dunking purely for fun on an adjustable hoop his dad bought for the driveway. There was no team, no coach and no pipeline behind any of it.
What turned it serious was a single Dunkademics video featuring Tyler Currie. That one clip set his entire trajectory, and years later Currie is still the only dunker whose technique he actively models. From there the progression was fast enough to be genuinely difficult to explain: first dunk at fifteen, first Eastbay at sixteen, first under-both-legs at seventeen. Most amateurs spend years chasing any one of those.
He did all of it on minimal jump-specific training, which is the part other dunkers find hardest to accept. His bag now leans on under-both-legs and scorpion combinations, and the reason he gets called underrated as often as he does is that the raw numbers and the clean finishes have arrived without the usual decade of gym work behind them. He is proof that athleticism plus relentless creativity can take someone from a driveway hoop to the top of the sport without ever playing the game it came from.
