Isaiah Rivera gave an 18-year-old three rules for making it in pro dunking, and only one of them was about jumping. I had the camera on for the whole thing at The Dunk Camp in Salt Lake City this summer, standing about four feet away, and I knew halfway through the second rule that we were going to have to publish this one.
Piotr Zawiślak is the kid asking the questions. He’s 18, he’s from Poland, he’s one of only 13 people in the world with a Dunk Camp Black Band, and Isaiah has been his favorite dunker since before anybody in the dunk world knew Piotr existed. So when Piotr got the chance to ask, he didn’t waste it on small talk.
“So Isaiah what’s your advice to, for example, me, like a person who wants to jump higher and to be one of the best dunkers like you?”
Piotr Zawiślak
Isaiah paused, said “if I were in your shoes,” and then laid out three things. Here they are in his order.
Rule One: Never Stop
“There’s gonna be bad days, there’s gonna be good days. Especially on the bad days, keep going.”
Isaiah Rivera
Every dunker reading this already knows what a bad session feels like. You warm up fine, the first few go down, and then something in your run-up disappears and you spend an hour missing dunks you’ve hit a hundred times. Isaiah’s point is that those days are the actual job.
He went further into injuries, which is the part I think people underrate. He said getting hurt is part of the game, and that the move isn’t to stop, it’s to find a way around it. Then he dropped the line that stuck with everybody who’s watched the clip: “The obstacle is the way.” That’s a pretty heavy thing to say casually at a dunk session, but he’s earned it. He’s been doing this professionally since he was 18 himself.
Rule Two: Master Marketing Yourself
This is the one that made me stop breathing behind the camera.
“Second thing, it’s not just about your physical abilities.”
Isaiah Rivera
“The pro dunking game, you gotta get good at social media. You gotta get good at marketing yourself. That’s a skill in and of itself, so master that.”
Isaiah Rivera
Two days earlier, in a classroom at that same camp, Dennis Yu and I stood in front of 76 campers and told them a version of the same thing. We’d audited all 76 of them beforehand and put the results on a public leaderboard at the Dunk Camp 2026 audit leaderboard. The whole session is written up at the repurposing system we taught 76 athletes.
Nobody has to take my word for it, because Isaiah has no idea that session happened. He wasn’t in the room. He just answered a question honestly, and then he named names.
“all of us, myself, Jake Clark, Jordan Kilganon, 1FootGod, we all mastered the social media game as well.”
Isaiah Rivera
Look at that list. Those are four of the most recognizable names in dunking, and the thing Isaiah picked out as common to all of them wasn’t vertical, wasn’t contest wins, wasn’t a signature dunk. It was that they all figured out the distribution side. Then he said “it goes hand in hand,” which is the cleanest summary of the whole thing I’ve heard from a dunker.
If you’re a young dunker with a good vertical and 400 followers, that’s the sentence to write on your wall. The jumping is the entry fee. Getting people to know you exist is the actual game, and the guys at the top treated it like a skill they had to train.
Rule Three: Enjoy It
“Enjoy the moments, man, ’cause we’re not gonna be able to dunk forever.”
Isaiah Rivera
Coming from a guy who’s been at the top of the sport for years, that lands differently than it would from anyone else. Dunking has a shelf life. Knees have opinions. Isaiah’s telling an 18-year-old with a 44 or 45 inch vertical to actually be present for it, because the window closes whether or not you noticed it was open.
“He’s the Future, Man”
After the advice I asked Isaiah what he thought of Piotr and what he’d seen at camp. He didn’t hedge.
“He’s the future, man. He is the future.”
Isaiah Rivera
Then he backed it up with a specific, which is what separates a real compliment from a polite one.
“I missed 360 Underboth a bunch of times. You hit it second try at a session.”
Isaiah Rivera
That’s the detail that makes the clip. Isaiah Rivera, one of the highest jumpers on the planet, was missing a 360 Underboth at that session. Piotr hit it on his second try. And Isaiah said it out loud, on camera, about himself, unprompted.
“I can’t fathom even doing the stuff you’re doing at 18 years old.”
Isaiah Rivera
He talked about barely hitting his first 360 Eastbay, said his vertical back then was nowhere near 44 or 45, joked that the whole thing made him feel old, and then gave the read I think is actually the most important line in the video.
“it also shows me how much the dunk game’s evolving.”
Isaiah Rivera
That’s a guy at the top of the sport publicly saying the next generation has moved the bar. The last thing he told Piotr was “I’m excited to see what you’re doing when you’re our age.” Piotr’s answer to how it felt was short and honest: “It was my dream, and I’m happy to be able to achieve this dream, and to make it happened.”
Where to Go From Here
Piotr wrote his own side of this in first person at Isaiah Rivera called me the future, and it’s worth reading because he explains what Isaiah meant to him before any of this happened. We broke down why a public co-sign like this is worth more than a highlight clip at when your idol co-signs you on camera.
The same idea applies well outside dunking, and that version is at the endorsement you cannot buy. If you want the technical side, meaning what a co-sign like this actually does to how Google and AI tools understand a person, that’s at why an expert co-sign is an entity signal.
Three rules, about two minutes of tape, one of the best dunkers alive telling an 18-year-old exactly what the job is. Watch it at the top of the page.