Darius Clark Set The World Record for Max Vertical Jump of 51-Inches, Somebody Needs To Throw Him an Alley-Oop Immediately
FOX 40 – Top dunkers from eight nations gather in Farmington, Utah; Clark sets 51-inch world record, Kilgannon launches shoe line
The global dunking community took flight June 16–19 as Dunk Camp 2025 returned to the Salt Lake City area, bringing elite athletes, coaches, and future stars together for four days of vertical testing, technique training, and high-stakes dunk contests.
Hosted by Andy Nicholson, Dunk Camp drew participants from eight countries and featured contest divisions at 8-, 9-, and 10-foot rim heights. The highlight of Day Two was a World Dunk Association-sanctioned competition judged on flight, style, finish, and complexity
The man jumping impossible heights in that video is Slam Ball professional Darius Clark.
Before Slam Ball, he was a track & field star at both Florida State and Texas A&M. He set the Guinness World Record for highest vertical leap with a running start by jumping 50 inches in 2022. But last week at "Dunk Camp 2025" in Farmington, Utah, he set a new world record. The man jumped 51-inches in the air (4-foot, 3-inches for the mathematically challenged). I would classify it as comically high.
Darius Clark legitimately went nipples to rim. I've never seen a man go nipples to rim before.
But the crime of it all is that nobody threw him a basketball. Not that the jump wasn't plenty impressive in it's own right. I mean, just look at this screenshot (alternate angle)
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But now look at how much cooler the screen shot is with a basketball.
Thankfully, Darius Clark does have a handful of videos of him dunking floating around the internet.
They even held a dunk contest that Darius participated in at Dunk Camp 2025 in Utah, where he set the max vertical record the other day.
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But I can't find any footage of him going full vertical, fully outstretched for an alley-oop. Which is ridiculous. He's a perfectly fine contest dunker in his own right, but clearly the most impressive thing about him is his pure jumping ability. That should be what he's highlighting. After he gets a few uncontested highest alley-oop's possible on tape, I want to see Darius Clark get 9 of his friends for a game of pickup. Preferably find a few pro-level passers to play on his team. And just spend the entire game going for the craziest alley-oops overtop of the most defenders possible. If they keep the camera rolling, they're bound to get something incredible eventually. Even if he doesn't technically complete the dunk, we'll get the screen shot out of it. Posters are stationary.
Even though they didn't throw him a basketball, what the max high jumper community has figured out is that all jumping related events should be held on a basketball court. From high jump, to long jump, to that stupid fucking triple jump event that makes no sense at all.
Side Note: Seriously why does the triple jump exist? It makes perfect sense why we'd want to know who can jump the highest, and who can soar through the air the farthest. Pretty much every track & field event features a feat of speed or strength that one could conceivably use in the wild. They're all very natural things. Who's the fastest runner. Who can throw this heavy rock, or this long spear the greatest distance. But the triple jump is such a ridiculous and contrived event that doesn't in the slightest bit resemble anything a human would ever do in a real-life. Look how dumb this is.
Unless Yekaterina Sariyeva is walking along the Kura River, and she looks up to see a unconscious man wash up along the far shore, and she can't swim, but in the river bed are two perfectly spaced out stones, so the only way to get across the river to perform emergency CPR and save the man's life is by taking a running start and leaping from stone, to stone, to land, I just don't see why the triple jump ever become a thing.
Anyways… all jumping events should be held on basketball courts. Or at least next to a regulation sized basketball hoop. It's provides the perfect reference point. It's hard to appreciate how insanely impressive Olympic high jumpers and long jumpers are when competing in track & field events. They doing their events in a big open space jumping individually against a tape measure. But when you put them in the context of a basketball court, for me at least, it makes their jumps all the more impressive. Watching someone set the world high jump record at 8+ feet would look so much cooler with their entire body nearly clearing the bottom of the net. Or doing the long jump from the baseline and seeing a man fully clear the NBA three-point arch. Obviously you'd have to put a sand pit in the middle of court, but they could make it work. That would be awesome. Just something to think about, Olympics.