By Jim Shimabukuro (assisted by Claude)
Editor
A video of Alicia Tournebize, an 18-year-old, 6’7″ freshman from Vichy, France, who joined Dawn Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks in January 2026, is going viral on YouTube. She had already made history before setting foot on a college court. She became the first Frenchwoman to perform a dunk in an official game in September 2024, during an NF2 contest between Bourges and Beaumont, with that milestone only formally recognized after video of the dunk was published in March 2025. That first dunk was followed by a two-handed slam at the 2025 FIBA U18 EuroBasket tournament that went viral worldwide.
What made the two-handed dunk particularly impressive was not merely the power involved, but the athleticism preceding it — Tournebize went over a screen near the top of the key, picked off a short pass, and converted a clear-lane dunk, the kind of sequence that requires more than height alone. She is also the daughter of French basketball legend Isabelle Fijalkowski, suggesting that elite physical tools for the sport can run in families. South Carolina’s previous French-speaking international star, Laeticia Amihere, was the first Canadian woman to dunk in a game — and Tournebize became the first French woman to do so, a coincidence that speaks to how the Gamecocks have become a destination for elite dunking big women from abroad. [sports.yahoo, on3.com]
To understand how extraordinary — and how rare — dunking remains in women’s professional basketball, one need only look at the WNBA’s historical ledger. As of the end of the 2024 WNBA season, there have been only 38 dunks recorded in league history, with Brittney Griner accounting for 27 of them — twice in her very debut with the Phoenix Mercury in 2013, making her the first player to dunk twice in a single WNBA game. Lisa Leslie authored the first-ever dunk in WNBA history on July 30, 2002; other players who have done it in the league include Michelle Snow, Candace Parker, Sylvia Fowles, Jonquel Jones, Liz Cambage, and Awak Kuier. As remarkable as Griner’s dominance of this statistical category is, the more striking figure is that the entire rest of the league has accounted for barely a handful of dunks across nearly three decades. Griner herself has acknowledged the difficulty: “It’s hard to dunk in the WNBA. I feel like it’s easier in the NBA. I mean, I’m no fool, the mechanics of our bodies are different,” she said, adding that no one in the WNBA wants to get dunked on, so defenders don’t give opportunities away. [sports.betmgm, wikipedia.org, espn.com]
So are we approaching a turning point? The most persuasive argument that we are comes not from any single athlete, however spectacular, but from a structural trend in the women’s game: players are getting taller, and they are getting taller faster. Analysts attribute a five-inch climb in average WNBA player height over three decades to an influx of tall international talent and advanced training, nutrition, and development opportunities. Some projections suggest the average WNBA player height will eclipse 6’3″ by 2030, given the pipeline of 6’6″ to 6’7″ phenoms still growing through youth ranks. WNBA teams are increasingly looking for taller players who can shoot threes, as well as taller guards who bring the quickness, ball handling, and playmaking of a smaller athlete, a positionless trend that rewards versatile big women who are also explosive.
The 2024 WNBA draft reflected this directly, with over a third of the first-round picks standing at 6’5″ or taller. As the player pool trends upward in height and athleticism, the simple physics of a 10-foot rim become more forgiving for elite-level women’s players, and dunks — still exceptional — will almost certainly become less exceptional. Whether routine dunking in the WNBA arrives by 2030 or takes another generation beyond that depends on several variables: how many more Tournebizes and Griners enter the pipeline, and whether training culture in women’s basketball actively encourages the vertical development and above-the-rim mentality that has long been central to the men’s game. [hsportnexgen.com, highposthoops.com]
The physiology of why dunking remains so rare for women also helps explain why any shift will be gradual rather than sudden. The dunk is an expression of power — specifically, of lower-body explosive strength, standing reach, and vertical leap. Sex differences in athletic performance, particularly those driven by strength, speed, and power, exist before puberty and increase dramatically as puberty progresses, primarily due to the direct and indirect effects of sex-steroid hormones. Men benefit from higher testosterone levels that build greater muscle cross-sectional area and more fast-twitch muscle fibers, both of which are essential to generating the burst required for an above-the-rim finish. This is not a gap that training or willpower can fully close. However, for the subset of women who are exceptionally tall — Tournebize at 6’7″ reaches the rim with relatively modest vertical effort — height can compensate substantially for the lower average explosive output, which is precisely why every woman who has dunked in the WNBA has stood at 6’4″ or taller. The pipeline of extremely tall women entering the elite game is therefore the most consequential variable in predicting whether dunking becomes more common, and that pipeline is genuinely expanding. [journals.physiology.org]
Meanwhile, women athletes are breaking long-standing performance ceilings across a range of sports simultaneously, suggesting the dunking trend in basketball is part of something broader. In May 2024, 14-year-old Australian skateboarder Arisa Trew became the first female skateboarder to land a 900 in a half-pipe — a trick long considered a near-impossible frontier for women. That same year, Cole Brauer became the first American woman to sail solo, nonstop, and unassisted around the world, and Shanda Hill became the first woman to complete the Triple Deca Ultra Triathlon.
In distance and endurance sports, the gender performance gap is narrowing most dramatically of all. In traditional endurance events like marathons, men consistently outperform women by about 10%, but in ultra-distance competitions the disparity can be as small as 4%, and in some cases women have actually outpaced men — a shift explained by women’s higher proportion of slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are more resistant to fatigue, and their substantially higher fat oxidation rates during prolonged exertion. Tennis was the first major sport to guarantee equal prize money at its four Grand Slams, and the Professional Squash Association and World Surf League have since equalized prize money as well, changes that reflect and reinforce the growing recognition that women’s athletic performance merits parity of investment, training resources, and visibility — all of which, in a compounding cycle, tend to produce even higher performance ceilings in the next generation. [open.edu, theconversation.com, unwomen.org]
What does all of this mean for a realistic timeline on routine dunking in women’s basketball? No responsible analyst would put a precise year on it, but the convergence of trends points toward meaningful change within the next decade or two rather than the next generation. If the WNBA’s average height does reach 6’3″ by 2030, and the player pipeline continues to produce athletes like Tournebize — extreme in height, trained in elite European academies from youth, incentivized by growing NIL opportunities in American college basketball — then the next Brittney Griner or her equivalent may not be a once-in-a-generation anomaly. The cultural dimension matters as well. Griner noted that many WNBA players can dunk in practice, but choose not to attempt it in games because the risk of failure or foul is not worth it. As more players develop the muscle memory, confidence, and game-situation awareness to commit to dunking under competitive pressure, the rate will climb independently of physical development alone. The ceiling is not disappearing, but it is, without question, getting lower. [espn.com]
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