SlamBall Nation Podcast Season One Episode Eight Drops December 22

The eighth episode of SlamBall Nation landed on December 22, 2023, bringing together two ESPN-seasoned coaches and the sport's foremost aerial specialist for a 70-minute conversation that covered everything from player safety at 15 feet in the air to early projections for Series 7.

Mob coach Brendan Kirsch and Buzzsaw coach Hernando Planells Jr. host the biweekly podcast, and for this installment they brought in Pat Graves, officially designated the SlamBall Flight Instructor. Graves was brought in by the league specifically to teach players how to be comfortable operating at elevation, but his role extends beyond pure technique: he was also tasked with teaching safety protocols, including how to bail out and land without injury. The hosts introduced him as "the aerial guru" and "the aerial acrobatic instructor extraordinaire," stopping just short of calling him a flight attendant before Hernando corrected course.

Off the court, Graves goes by "flipp a day" across his social media platforms, a handle the hosts acknowledged makes him more recognizable to a certain segment of the audience than two coaches with ESPN credentials. "People are not going to know you as well as they know coach Hernando and I," Kirsch said on the episode. "I mean we're Big Time slam ball coaches that have coached on ESPN. They're like who's this guy with the backwards hat." The self-deprecating bit landed the way it was intended: Graves' profile in aerial acrobatics circles clearly precedes him.

The episode centers on three substantive threads. Safety evolution in SlamBall is the primary focus, examining how the sport's approach to protecting players working at that kind of altitude has developed over time. The second thread is a technical breakdown of the sport's aerial repertoire, with Graves providing the kind of insider perspective on specific maneuvers that neither coach could offer from their sideline vantage point. The third segment, titled "Way Too Early Series 7 Projections," rounds out the episode with projected standings and team-by-team analysis from Kirsch and Planells Jr.

The episode is available on both Apple Podcasts and YouTube through the SlamBall Nation channel. It carries a kid-friendly age rating and fits into the show's biweekly release schedule as Season 1, Episode 8. The YouTube upload had logged 94 views at the time of the channel snapshot, with the SlamBall Nation channel sitting at 32 subscribers, numbers that reflect the sport's focused but passionate core audience rather than mainstream crossover reach at that stage of the show's run.