Justin Darlington – a.k.a. "Jus Fly" – is used to making great leaps on the basketball court.
The question is whether the 20-year-old slam-dunking wizard from Ajax, Ontario can make an even greater leap – becoming Canada's superstar high jumper.
Daniel St-Hilaire, an extremely passionate, if not a quirky, veteran coach from Montreal, is convinced he can.
St-Hilaire's scouting methods aren't exactly conventional. It started on the Internet when he punched "slam dunk basketball" into Google. Among other things, he came across hundreds of videos of the 6-foot-4 Darlington in action.
"He was like a lost jewel," said St-Hilaire, who once coached Canadian sprint star Bruny Surin.
What he saw left him awestruck: A kid who could do a cartwheel on the court and dunk in one fluid motion. But, even more impressive, Darlington could get his head above the rim when he took flight.
"My mouth opened for five minutes and my eyes went big and I just froze," said St-Hilaire. "I kept playing the video and going in slow motion and freezing it where his head went above the rim. I thought `I never saw a guy jump that high.'
"And I said to myself `Wow, I wonder if this guy can do high jump.' I became a headhunter. I was like `Where could I meet that guy?'"
It turned out St-Hilaire didn't have to go all that far. He located Darlington on Facebook and found out he was from Ajax. They met for two hours at Pearson International Airport when St-Hilaire was flying home from a track meet in Saskatoon in February.
It turns out that a man cannot live off dunking alone. Darlington has travelled throughout Europe and is currently traveling in Shanghai with Team Flight Brothers, a sort of Harlem Globetrotters of the dunking world, but there isn't a huge amount of money to be made.
"He had no incentive, no target," said St-Hilaire. "I said `Here's your target – 2012 (London Olympics). Jump for Canada, make it big and your life will change. Because now you're recognized as one of the best dunkers, but who cares, nobody knows you.'"
At the end of their airport meeting, St-Hilaire said Darlington had only one question for him: "When do we start, coach?"
The education of Darlington as a high jumper has begun, partly under St-Hilaire in Montreal and also here in Toronto under Gary Lubin, who developed Brampton's Mark Boswell, a two-time world championship medallist. They plan to share the coaching duties.
This has all been a whirlwind for Darlington.
"I wasn't even thinking about the Olympics a year ago," he told The Gazette in Montreal recently. "I was hoping that maybe they would make dunking an Olympic sport."
Darlington is planning to enrol at McGill University for September – his mom, Ann-Marie, wants him to put emphasis on his studies – and train in Montreal under St-Hilaire. His regimen will include two dunking workouts per week so he can maintain that skill.
It's a talent he discovered only two years ago. He never really stood out playing basketball at J. Clark Richardson Collegiate in Ajax, but entered a dunk contest in his last year and wowed everyone with his high-flying skills. Things have taken off since then.
"It sort of snuck up on us," said Ann-Marie Darlington, who was a high jumper in high school. "He was trying to match what the others could do in the gym and he realized he was above most of the guys. It was amazing."
Adds St-Hilaire: "He's a born leaper. The legs are like a mutation."
Darlington has a wide array of videos on You Tube under his nickname "Jus Fly," including some with more than 200,000 views and comments like "That last dunk was absolutely sick!"
Former world hurdles champion Perdita Felicien agrees it will be a neat story if Darlington can pull it off, but adds it won't be easy in such a technical event.
"You can have the raw goods, but to have the discipline to study the event and the sport and to be great that way – that's kind of different," Felicien said. "That's probably the hardest part of it."
St-Hilaire said the key will be teaching Darlington the right technique so that he can develop into a true high jumper and not just a leaper.
St-Hilaire notes Darlington has already jumped 2.01 metres after six technical workouts – equal to the height achieved by the sixth-place finisher at last year's Olympic trials in Windsor (the world record is 2.45 metres.) The coach believes he can get up to 2.10 or 2.20 metres this summer.
St-Hilaire already has a golden glint in his eyes as he thinks toward the 2012 London Olympics. He points to Donald Thomas of the Bahamas, who won at the 2007 world championships, less than two years after switching to track from basketball.
"I feel Justin has more potential," said St-Hilaire.
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