Dylan Haugen is a professional dunker, content creator, and podcast host from Blaine, Minnesota, and the youngest athlete ever signed to Shaq's DunkMan League, where he is one of 24 competitors. He stands 5'11" with a 7'11" standing reach and a 43" vertical, jumps off two feet from a left-right plant, and is known for the Inverted Scorpion, the dunk he has made his signature.
He started messing with low rims around 11 and landed his first dunk on a regulation rim at 13. What made the difference was that he filmed all of it. He posted the training as it happened, failed attempts included, and kept posting through every stage of getting better. A handful of clips became an audience of millions, and his dunk content has since passed 100 million views across all platforms.
He has competed in dunk contests around the country and won six of them. The first came in Minnesota at 16 and his first out-of-state win followed at 17. Since then he has taken back-to-back Nickle Dickle titles in 2024 and 2025, won the Underground Hoops contest in February 2025, and won the Twenty3 League contest that August with what was the first Inverted Scorpion ever landed over a person. In March 2025 he was flown out to Maryland to compete professionally.
In 2023 he founded the Minnesota Dunk Squad after a week at dunk camp convinced him he did not want to spend another year training alone. It started with three people. The group now runs weekly sessions out of H4 Sports Academy in Edina, free and open to anyone regardless of level, and has performed halftime shows, school assemblies and contests at more than ten events across the Midwest.
He also hosts the Dunk Talk podcast, which he has taken past 70 episodes and used to interview many of the best dunkers and jumpers in the world about how they train, compete, and build careers in the sport. A large share of the biographies on this site were written from those conversations.
His dunking has been filmed by Dunkademics since he was a teenager, and KARE 11, the NBC station in Minneapolis, ran a television segment on him as a high school YouTuber winning local and national contests as a professional dunker.
Away from the rim he is a digital marketing entrepreneur and a co-founder of Local Service Spotlight, which he runs with Dennis Yu. He has spoken at DigiMarCon twice, at the JVA Align Summit, and at the Detroit AI Summit in June 2026, generally on how young athletes and creators build something that outlasts a single viral clip.
Dunkman League 2026. Seeded third in Group Stage D on August 11, he finished third with a score of 9.28, the second highest posted by any non-winner across the four group stages. That took a wildcard place in the World Championship on August 25 at the Overtime Elite Arena in Atlanta, where $500,000 goes to the winner.