PHOENIX - Jack Allard’s path back to basketball didn’t end with leaving college. It just changed shape.
The Tucson native, who stands 6-feet with a 44-inch vertical, has turned his attention to dunking full time, training for Shaquille O’Neal’s DUNKMAN league and chasing a world championship in a sport that has spent years living in the shadows of the game it grew out of.
Allard’s route to that point started after a brief run at Eastern Oregon University in the 2021-22 season. He was 20 then, a guard headed back home to Tucson after stepping away from the traditional 5×5 game.
A three-year varsity letterman at Ironwood Ridge High in Oro Valley, he wasn’t ready to walk away from basketball altogether. He just needed a different lane.
That lane turned out to be dunking.
The sport’s artistry hit him through the style and creativity of dunkers like Canadian professional slam dunker Jordan Kilganon, who, in Allard’s words, “flipped a switch” in his head. From there, the game became something more personal and stripped down: just him, the rim and the work.
Allard built more than a skill set along the way. While studying at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, he also shaped a brand around the idea that “Anyone Can Dunk.”
“Women can dunk (and) men can dunk,” Allard said. “Everybody can.”
That message carried even more weight when Allard was forced to rebuild after knee surgery. For nearly a year through most of 2023, he dealt with a knee issue that involved a piece of bone, disguised as cartilage, being lost and affecting his movement. It was one of the lowest stretches of his life, but the comeback came faster than expected.
“(After three months of recovery) I came back and like a week later, I was probably just as good as I was before the injury,” Allard said. “That helped.
That was great. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Jacob Glassford, a hometown friend, saw the whole thing unfold. He watched Allard go from a player who trains to “stay ready all the time” to someone battling through injury and struggling just to get off the couch.
For Glassford, the return stood out immediately.
“It was really hard to watch and I was doing it all with him,” Glassford said. “We both were in a bad place. It was crazy to watch him just grab himself up by the bootstraps and come back.”
Since then, Allard has put his name on some of the sport’s bigger stages, including Dunk Camp in Salt Lake and filming sessions with Dunkademics. Now he has a bigger target ahead: DUNKMAN, O’Neal’s new league that calls itself the world’s first professional league in dunking.
In its inaugural season, eight of the “world’s best dunkers” competed for the title of first-ever Dunkman World Champion, a crown that came with a $500,000 prize, the biggest in dunking history.
The idea of dunking as its own event didn’t appear overnight. Kadour Ziani, known as “the dunkfather,” was part of the “Slam Nation” generation that helped separate the dunk from the game. In 2007, after his own career as a professional dunker, Ziani helped create the World Dunk Association, an online database designed to connect dunkers around the world and give a visible home to a community that had often been overlooked.
“(Slam Nation) demonstrated something that seems obvious today but wasn’t obvious then,” Ziani said via email. “The dunk itself could become the event. Basketball gave birth to the dunk, but the dunk gradually developed its own language, movements, specialists, culture and audience.”
Ziani said the bigger question has always been how far that culture could go once it had structure.
“How far can something born in street culture go when you give it structure?” he asked.
His answer comes down to the people carrying it forward.
“One generation was feeding the next,” Ziani said. “One person opened a door.
Somebody else pushed it further. Another generation walked through it.
That’s how a culture grows.”
With DUNKMAN, O’Neal has opened another door, one that brings production, visibility and compensation to a space that has long operated as a sideshow. Ziani sees that as a major shift.
“The dunkers are finally the main event,” Ziani said. “That is huge.
For years, we were the halftime show. We were the entertainment inside somebody else’s event.
We brought the spectacle, but the event belonged to somebody else.”
Now the next chapter is waiting for Allard. DUNKMAN is set for season two, and he is aiming to be part of it, still chasing the chance to go up against the best.
“I have no doubts that we’ll be seeing Jack Allard on the Dunkman,” Glassford said. “I really have no question about that.
I think it’ll be fun for him. I just hope he acknowledges himself and celebrates himself.
He’s always so focused and stays so serious, that he never takes a second to smell the roses.”
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