Victoria Agyin's first basketball hero was Candace Parker — 6'4", dunking, and part of a family of tall women. "My grandma's tall, my mom's pretty tall, my great grandma too," Victoria says. "So I thought I'd be at least 6 feet. I ended up stopping at 5'6"." Her other hero ran the opposite way: Russell Westbrook, all speed and explosion. "He's my goat, personally. Just watching how explosive he was — everything — I wanted to be like him. He's what made me want to hoop."
A Division 1 career built on jumping
Long before the dunk attempts, Victoria was one of the top jumpers to come out of Georgia. At McEachern High School in Powder Springs, she was a three-time Georgia state basketball champion (2015–2017) and a two-time state champion in the triple jump (2017, 2018), ranking #1 in the state. That earned her a Division 1 track and field scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where she won Ivy League team championships in the jumps. She later competed as a graduate student at San Jose State University — until a torn meniscus ended her final collegiate season in 2024.
The dunk project
Recovering from that injury, Victoria started documenting an attempt to do something her height was never supposed to allow: dunk a basketball on a regulation 10-foot rim, which by her own account takes a vertical leap north of 50 inches to clear cleanly with the ball. She's posted the climb in public — from barely grazing the rim to touching 10 feet 6 inches — earning more than a million views and tens of thousands of followers in the process. Getting there hasn't been about hiding the misses. "For like a month's worth of training, I gained more inches," she says of one stretch of progress — the same honesty about the grind shows up across the whole series.
Track speed, rebuilt as vertical power
Her training leans on the same tools that made her a Division 1 jumper: pairing heavy strength work with explosive movement to teach the nervous system to fire faster, and converting the horizontal speed built for the long jump and triple jump into vertical lift for the rim.
Beyond the dunk journey
Victoria's path runs through more than track and basketball. Her SJSU athletics bio also lists her as related to rapper Remy Ma. She interned on Adobe Express's product management team in the summer of 2024, working on user behavior and feature engagement. And she's since been recruited by USA Rugby to train toward a roster spot for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics — an entirely new sport, taken on the same way she took on the rim.
Watch the full conversation for more from Victoria.