The NBA has normalized the in-game dunk, but anyone who knows their basketball knows that we can’t just take dunks for granted. In some of the other pro leagues around the world, or even your local Canadian university or high school, dunks are still a big deal! It’s one thing to gather the seven-foot men of the world and hone them into athletes worth millions, but for the rest of the regularly-sized population, life’s a little harder.
So, it’s certainly no small feat that 6-foot-1 Fran Belibi managed to cram this alley-oop dunk at just 17 years of age — and out of nowhere, too! Her teammate looked to have an easy layup, but she chose to make the rather audacious decision of lobbing that thing up.
According to her team’s Twitter account, it was also the first in-game alley-oop in girls’ high school history.
Belibi has been on the women’s basketball radar for some time already; she's ESPN’s third-ranked recruit in the country and a Stanford commit, as well as a FIBA gold medal champion with the U17 USA national team. It stands to reason that the WNBA is likely in her future — although even there, dunks are a relative rarity, with only a handful of players having ever performed them in-game.
She still has a ways to go before then, of course, but it would certainly be cool to see more of these at the professional level, right?
