Victoria Agyin's first basketball hero measured 6'4" and dunked for a living. Candace Parker, and a family of tall women behind her — "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." She stopped at 5'6". Her second hero ran the opposite direction entirely: Russell Westbrook, all speed and violence off two feet. "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." One archetype she was built for. The other, she'd have to build herself.
A Division 1 career built on jumping
Long before any dunk attempt, Victoria was already one of the best jumpers Georgia had produced. At McEachern High School in Powder Springs, she took three straight Georgia state basketball titles (2015–2017) and two state triple jump championships (2017, 2018), ranking #1 in the state. That resume bought her a Division 1 track and field scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where she won Ivy League team championships in the jumps, then carried the career forward as a graduate student at San Jose State — until a torn meniscus ended her final collegiate season in 2024, mid-sentence, with no natural next chapter written.
The dunk project
She wrote one herself. Recovering from the injury, Victoria started publicly documenting an attempt at something her height was never supposed to allow: a regulation dunk on a 10-foot rim, which by her own account takes a vertical leap north of 50 inches to clear cleanly with the ball in hand. The climb went public from the first miss — barely grazing the rim, then 10 feet 6 inches and climbing — and it's since pulled in more than a million views and tens of thousands of followers. None of it airbrushed. "For like a month's worth of training, I gained more inches," she says of one stretch — the same unpolished honesty about the grind runs through the whole series.
Track speed, rebuilt as vertical power
The training didn't start from scratch — it's the same machinery that made her a Division 1 jumper, repointed. Heavy strength work paired with explosive movement to teach the nervous system to fire faster, and the horizontal speed built for the long jump and triple jump, converted, rep by rep, into vertical lift aimed at a rim instead of a sand pit.
Beyond the dunk journey
There's more running underneath the highlight reel than track and basketball. Victoria's own SJSU athletics bio lists her as related to rapper Remy Ma. She spent the summer of 2024 interning on Adobe Express's product management team, working on user behavior and feature engagement. And she's since been recruited by USA Rugby to chase a roster spot for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics — an entirely new sport, taken on with the same blunt, public persistence she brought to the rim.
Watch the full conversation for more from Victoria.