Travis Reynolds and I, Dylan Haugen, sat down and went through every single dunk from all four group stages of Shaq’s DunkMan League. Twenty-four dunkers, four groups of six, and the winner of the finals takes home $500,000, which is the biggest prize in the history of dunking. We wanted this out before the championship, so we did all four in one sitting. In hindsight we probably should have done it week by week.

I competed in Group Stage D. Travis and I were also in the building for Group Stage A, which we recorded a whole separate episode about on the drive home. If you want the background on how I got into the league in the first place, that is episode 70.

The format, and the scoring people keep asking about

Each group stage is two rounds. First round is three dunks with two attempts each. They drop your lowest score and average your best two, and the top three advance. The final round is two dunks, two attempts, and only your single best dunk counts.

The judges are five working professional dunkers, not celebrities. They score across seven weighted categories, drop the highest and lowest judge, and average the middle three. Crowd reaction is a small slice of it, somewhere around three percent. Attempt number matters, so a second-try make scores below a first-try make, and a miss scores low but not zero.

For calibration: anything above an 8.0 is a very solid dunk and anything above a 9.0 is crazy. You also only get one prop dunk per round, which includes Dubble Ups, and there are no redos. If you make a dunk on the first attempt, you cannot use the second attempt to try to make it better.

Group Stage A: Cam Hazzard, in his first ever contest

Doug Anderson opened the entire league with a Windmill Elbow off a hand-off that he caught halfway up his bicep, first try, for an 8.36. He made all three of his dunks and still did not advance, which tells you how deep this group was.

Dengxing Chen went over six people on a Dubble Up Eastbay for a 9.31, the highest of the round. He is 39 and a legitimate 5’9″. Joel Henry put me on Avante Nichols’s shoulders for a Tetris that scored 8.85, then hit a Reverse 360 Eastbay off a lob for an 8.73, then in the final round jumped over me while I was sitting on a car for an 8.87.

Cam Hazzard opened with a Reverse 360 Windmill where the ball hit the ground before he did, missed both attempts on a 360 Eastbay after slipping on a warmup jump. In the final he did a 360 pump into a full Tomahawk down the middle for a 9.55, which took Dunk of the Night and the group. He went home with $35,000 on his first ever competition.

Group Stage B: Dillan McCarthy

This was the hardest group to call going in. Mason Baker opened with a slingshot for an 8.09 and later killed a cuff Windmill Elbow, the same dunk he went for on the original DunkMan show, and this time it stuck perfectly.

Jonathan Clark hit his Whirlwind, a 360 where he flips the ball off the backboard from his left hand to his right mid-spin. Watching it with my family, a couple of them asked what he had even done. That is the exact argument for having professional dunkers judging, because a general audience is not going to catch it. He later hit Jonathan’s Wall for an 8.94 and took Dunk of the Night and $10,000.

Tyler Currie brought out the dunk he calls the Ghost, which I have also heard called the Crystal Ball, for an 8.08. It is one of those dunks that reads better the closer you are standing to it.

Dillan McCarthy took the group. He jumps 52 inches, and the wild part is that he hit an Eastbay off the backboard on his off plant for an 8.75, on a pass that was not perfect, and it looked casual. He does almost everything right-left. In the final he punched an Underboth for an 8.9, a dunk he has gotten dramatically better at in the last six months to a year, and that won it and $25,000. He also went for an Eastbay Elbow, which nobody has landed in a contest yet, and got close enough that it is clearly within reach for him.

Group Stage C: Isaiah Rivera

New Williams hit a dunk off the backboard first try for an 8.71, and the timing on that one is much harder than it looks.

Hyrum Fechser took Dunk of the Night in this group and $10,000 with a brand new dunk over his wife. Darius Clark came from the free throw line and put down a Reverse 360 Eastbay with a hand on his hip, which made the whole thing look completely effortless.

Isaiah Rivera won it. In the final round he went behind the back over somebody, which scored very highly and secured the group. He had barely dunked left-right in the month before this, which makes that finish even more impressive. He took the group and $25,000.

Group Stage D: my own group

My group had three-time NBA dunk contest champion Mac McClung in it, which as far as I know is the first time we have seen an NBA player move into professional dunking like this. Jordan Southerland also came in last minute to replace Antonio Eaglan, which moved him to the two seed in the group and moved me down to three.

Brandon Ruffin opened with a Dubble Up tap reverse for a 7.45. Marlow Gilmore had been dunking for about an hour that same morning and then went and hit an 8.3 in the contest, which I could not do. If I took a one-hour session the day of a contest I would not be jumping anywhere near my best.

My three dunks were a Dubble Up X over somebody on a chair, a Hand-Off 180 Eastbay, and then the Inverted Scorpion Over Someone in the final round, which scored a 9.28. The reasoning on the first one was simple: I wanted something that was still tough and still looked good, but that I knew I would land, because getting a make on the board early does a lot for your confidence. The Inverted Scorpion is my dunk. Nobody else is doing it over a person.

Mac won the group and took Dunk of the Night. I finished with enough to take a wild card spot as the six seed, so I am in the championship.

The finals bracket

Seeds one through four are the group winners, ranked by their best score in their own final round. Seeds five through eight are the four highest-scoring dunkers who did not win a group.

Mac McClung is the one seed, Cam Hazzard is two, Isaiah Rivera is three, Dillan McCarthy is four, Jordan Southerland is five, I am six, Joel Henry is seven and Dengxing Chen is eight. First round is Mac against Chen, Cam against Joel, me against Isaiah, and Dillan against Southerland.

The whole thing runs in one night, head to head, single elimination. Two dunks, two attempts, best dunk wins the matchup. That format means people are going to try things they would never risk in a normal contest, because you only need to land one. Shaq also said at the Fanatics Fest press conference that as commissioner he can raise the prize money on the night if he sees something he has never seen before.

Where this leaves dunking

A few years ago there was no version of this. You trained, you hoped an event came along, and there was no guarantee it would. Now there is a night where somebody walks away with half a million dollars for dunking a basketball. Travis and I both went from being fairly pessimistic about where the sport was heading to being about as optimistic as it is possible to be, and it happened quickly.

We will be back to break down the finals once they air. If you want the version of Group Stage A from inside the arena, with what it looked like standing under the rim, that is the episode we recorded in the car, with Ben Hopkins along for the drive.

Out of all four group stages of Shaq’s DunkMan League, Group Stage A was the one I wanted to see most. Six dunkers, one night in Atlanta, and on paper it was the deepest group of the four. So Ben Hopkins, Travis Reynolds and I, Dylan Haugen, drove four hours from North Carolina to OTE Arena to watch it, and then recorded this entire episode on the drive back with three hours still to go.

I am in the league myself, which is how we ended up on the court instead of in the stands. I talked about signing with DunkMan back in episode 70, and Cam Hazzard came on the podcast right after he tested a 50-inch vertical and got his own invite, which is episode 71. Both of those were before any of this existed as a real event. This one is what it actually looked like from under the rim.

How the DunkMan League is set up

Shaq ran The Dunk King years ago, brought it back last year as a one-off DunkMan show, and this year turned it into the first professional dunking league. There are 24 dunkers from around the world, split into four group stages of six, one per week.

Each group stage runs in two rounds. In the first round you get three dunks with two attempts each, they drop your lowest score, and the average of your best two decides who advances. Three go through. In the final round you get two dunks, two attempts, and only your best dunk counts. So technically you only need two good dunks in the first round and one great one in the last.

The winner of each group stage goes to the championship, plus the four next-highest scorers across all four stages as wild cards, which makes eight in the final. That format is a big deal, because dropping your lowest score means you can afford to swing at something you might miss. I am a fan of it for exactly that reason.

Doug Anderson opened it with a Windmill Elbow

First dunk of the entire league, first attempt: Doug Anderson took a hand-off and punched a Windmill Elbow so hard he got it halfway up his bicep. It barely qualifies as an elbow at that point. If you have ever caught the rim above your elbow you know that is a completely different level of pain than catching it on the forearm.

He followed it with an Eastbay and a J-Rich, and he punched both of them the way he punches everything. He made all three of his dunks and still went home. That is how stacked this group was.

Chen is 39, a legit 5’9″, and went over six people

Dengxing Chen is the one I had wanted to see in person for years. He is 39 years old and genuinely 5’9″. We stood next to him and he might even be 5’8″. Seeing someone that size take off from one foot the way he does is different in person.

His big one was a Dubble Up Eastbay over six people, which scored a 9.31 and was the highest of the first round. For him six is a low number. He normally goes over seven, eight, nine, and I am pretty sure I have seen him do ten. Travis compared his hand speed to Smoove, which is fair, and he covers distance on a double up better than anyone.

Joel Henry used me for two of his dunks

Joel Henry came over from the UK and I had never met him before that night. He walked up, greeted me like he already knew who I was, and by the end of the night it felt like we had been friends for a while.

He also put me in two of his dunks. The first was a Tetris, where I was sitting on Avante Nichols’s shoulders and Joel went over both of us. It felt sketchy up there and I was not balanced at all, but he cleared it with so much room he honestly could have crowned it. The second one, in the final round, was a Dubble Up over me while I was sitting on a car. That one was not on my list of things I expected to do that day. I was less scared for me and more scared for him, because if you catch a foot on a car that is a real problem. He had to twist his body sideways in the air to avoid landing on it.

My favorite dunk of his, and maybe my favorite of the night, was a Reverse 360 Eastbay off a lob that he caught one-handed and finished straight down. Lobs in a contest are much harder than lobs in a session because of the adrenaline and the crowd, which is exactly why most guys pick hand-offs and double ups where the ball is already sitting still. Going up off a lob with that much confidence and then doing a dunk that technical was the most impressive thing he did all night.

Cam Hazzard’s first ever dunk contest

The part that still does not fully make sense is that this was Cam Hazzard’s first dunk competition ever, and he did it at what was probably the biggest dunk event that has ever happened.

In warmups he walked up and did a Reverse 360 Eastbay like it was a layup, hand speed slow, dropped it in. Then a double elbow off a drop step. Then his first dunk of the night was a Reverse 360 Windmill where the ball hit the floor before he landed. He completed the whole motion on the way up, paused at the top, and threw it down from there.

His second dunk did not go down. He slipped on a jump that did not count as an attempt, then went for a 360 Eastbay twice. Coming back from a slip like that in the middle of a round is genuinely hard. He came back and hit a 360 Inverter first try, which is his go-to, and that was enough to put him in the final.

Then he closed it. A 360 pump into a full Tomahawk down the middle, starting from around the extended left elbow so it was really more than a 360. He pumped it all the way down like a reverse pump, brought it all the way back up, got full extension on the Tomahawk, and had about a foot of room to spare. It scored a 9.55, took Dunk of the Night, and won the group on the spot. Chen and Joel had already gone, and neither of their remaining dunks got close.

That dunk is the one Travis and I kept coming back to, because nobody does it. I have hit a pump Tomahawk a couple of times and the pump is the easy part. Getting full extension on the Tomahawk after a 360 is a different thing entirely.

How the scoring worked

The scoring got the most questions in the comments, so here is what it actually is. Five judges, all former professional dunkers, not celebrities. They drop the highest and lowest score and average the middle three. Crowd reaction is a small piece of it, around three percent. Attempt number counts, so a second-attempt make scores lower than a first-attempt make. Misses score low but not zero, which I think is right, because some misses are better than others.

Ben called it the best-scored event he has ever seen, and the closest to how he would score it himself. I agreed with basically every outcome. There were no perfect 10s all night, which sounds like a negative and is not. Once a contest starts handing out 10s early, nothing later in the night can feel bigger.

It is a detailed system, and the detail is the point. It rewarded difficulty and execution the way it should, and it stayed consistent from the first dunk of the night to the last.

Go watch dunkers in person

The thing all three of us kept saying on the drive back is that watching this in person is not the same as watching clips. Online you get desensitized. You see a dunk on a rim you cannot verify, on a phone screen, in between fifty other videos, and you scroll. Standing under the rim you get the speed and the power and how much room somebody actually had, and it lands completely differently.

Ben’s whole career comes from this. He loved dunking for years without thinking he could be a pro, until Isaiah Rivera and Jordan Southerland did a contest an hour and a half from him. He went, watched them in person, realized Isaiah is close to his own height and reach, and decided it was actually possible. He started training seriously a week before he turned 17 and has been a professional for a few years now.

The other half of it is meeting people. DunkMan did not have to put non-competing dunkers on the court, run a rehearsal that local dunkers could come to, or let fans walk up to Shaq afterward, and they did all three. Every dunker I have met in person has been a good guy, and you already have one thing in common with them before you say anything.

What’s next

Group Stage B is next week, then C, then D, which is the one I am in. The championship is eight dunkers: the four group winners plus four wild cards. If you want the full dunk-by-dunk with the scores, Travis and I went through every dunk from all four group stages separately.

Thanks to Ben and Travis for making the drive and hopping on the mic in the car, and to DunkMan for how they treated everybody who showed up.

If you have watched freestyle dunking on the internet at any point in the last fifteen years, you have watched footage Billy Doran of Dunkademics shot. He has been filming dunkers since 2007. He has produced for Ballislife, Hoopmixtape, Mars Reel and the Drew League. So when I got him on camera at The Dunk Camp in Salt Lake City, I asked the one question his whole career qualifies him to answer: out of everybody you have ever filmed, who was the most impressive?

He said it was hard. Then he gave four names, and the reasons he gave for each one say more about where this sport is heading than any highlight reel would.

The Full List

“My favorite of all time is probably T-Dub. Just his balance and his style was so good.”

Billy Doran, Dunkademics

T-Dub is the all-time answer. Not the highest, not the strongest. Balance and style. That is the frame Billy judges everything by, and he set it before he named anybody else.

The current answer was Cam Hazzard’s recent footage, which has been running on the Dunkademics page all year and which Billy summed up in two words: Cam is crazy. Cam films at Billy’s gym in Los Angeles, so that assessment comes from someone who has watched the entire arc up close instead of catching the finished clips.

Third came Kaodirichi Akobundu-Ehiogu, who Billy described as the freakiest athlete he has ever seen in person. Kao is 6 foot 10. Billy’s point was not that he is the most complete dunker on the list, it is that watching someone that tall get that far off the ground in a live gym does something to your sense of what is physically possible.

“Donovan’s a beast. He’s just like a dunking machine. He’s so big, so strong. His hand speed is so good, his technique.”

Billy Doran, Dunkademics

Donovan Hawkins closed it out. Big, strong, elite hand speed, clean technique. Billy’s exact framing was that he is all around awesome, which is the compliment you give a dunker with no weak side. Billy wrote out his own long-form version of all four picks in the most impressive dunkers he has filmed.

Nobody on the List Got There for Vertical

Read back the words Billy used. Balance. Style. Hand speed. Technique. Four names, and the only one where raw athleticism is the headline is Kao, whose case is really about the ratio between his height and his hang time.

That is a real shift. Ten years ago the conversation in this community was almost entirely about numbers: how high, how many inches, whose head touched what. The person who has filmed more elite dunkers than anyone alive now grades on control and aesthetics first. The sport has moved from a jumping contest toward something closer to a judged discipline, where the shape you hold in the air matters as much as the altitude you reach.

You can see it in what wins now. A clean between-the-legs at a reasonable height reads better on camera than a violent one-hander that nobody can quite make out. The audience is more literate than it used to be, and the filming is better, and slow motion is unforgiving about sloppy technique.

The Sport Is Not American Anymore

The fifth name in the conversation was standing right next to Billy. Piotr Zawiślak is eighteen, he is from Poland, and it was his first time at this camp.

“He’s crazy. He’s young in the game and he’s already black band. That’s, it’s insane.”

Billy Doran, Dunkademics

Black band is the top of the band system dunkers use to rank each other, and holding it at eighteen is close to unheard of. Piotr told Billy that dunking in front of that camera used to be in his dream. A Polish teenager grew up on footage filmed in Los Angeles gyms, trained on outdoor rims, and showed up in Utah good enough that the person who shot that footage now rates him.

That pipeline did not exist in 2007. It exists because a media brand made this sport watchable from anywhere, and because camps like this one give the people who watched it a physical place to meet. I wrote about the first half of Piotr’s week in two 18-year-old dunkers meeting, and he told his side of this specific day in dunking in front of Dunkademics.

What Billy Told Him to Fix

I told Billy that Piotr’s goal is to be the number one dunker in the world and asked what stands between him and that. His answer was one variable.

“if he gains a few inches of vert… ’cause he’s already got the hand speed, the technique stuff like that.”

Billy Doran, Dunkademics

Which is the inverse of the advice most young dunkers actually need. The usual note is that you jump fine and your hands are slow. Piotr got told the hands and the technique are already elite and the jump is the last piece. Billy also flagged balance and polish earlier in the same conversation, which is exactly the criteria he used on T-Dub, so that note is not filler.

“Stay healthy, stay consistent. Work hard. You can definitely do it. You got it in you.”

Billy Doran, Dunkademics

Hyrum Said the Quiet Part

Hyrum Fechser, who posts as @hyt_check, was in the interview and gave the most honest line of the whole thing.

“I wasn’t at Dunk Camp until now, so this was the coolest part for me, seeing all these guys in person.”

Hyrum Fechser

He also said he wished he had caught Piotr’s Monday session live instead of watching the highlights afterward. That is the tension the whole community lives in. We know each other through screens, we rate each other through screens, and then once or twice a year everyone is in the same gym and it turns out the screen was underselling it the whole time.

This conversation only got filmed because Dennis Yu and I ran a session at camp on how athletes get found on Google and in AI tools, then offered to interview anyone who wanted one. The system behind it is written up in the repurposing system from Dunk Camp. Dunker Spotlight argued that this footage is a credential, Athlete Spotlight took it to athletes in every other sport, and BlitzMetrics covered the search side in coverage from the category authority.

Ask Billy this question in 2031 and the list changes. That is the healthiest sign this sport has.

Nathan “Hoopin Nate” Kenney walked into The Dunk Camp in Salt Lake City this year with no idea he was about to rank #1 out of 76 dunkers on a live personal brand leaderboard. We ran every camper through an audit before the session even started, posted the full ranked list publicly at dunkerspotlight.com/dunkcamp26, and Nate came out on top. That’s the kind of thing that only happens when you get a room of dunkers actually thinking about their digital presence, not just their vertical.

This year I had the chance to run a full personal branding and AI session at The Dunk Camp alongside Dennis Yu, one of the sharpest digital marketers I know and someone I met through dunking. Andy Nicholson, the camp founder, put it well when he introduced us:

“to watch where he’s gone and now to be part of Dunkman is really cool. So we’re very proud of him.”

Andy Nicholson, The Dunk Camp founder

That meant a lot. I first showed up to this camp in 2022 when I was 14. To come back and actually teach something this time felt like a full-circle moment. If you want to hear more about what that experience meant personally, I wrote about it over at Dylan’s reflection on returning to camp.

What We Actually Did in the Room

The session was roughly 30 minutes. Before it started, Dennis and I had already audited all 76 campers. We looked at their online presence, their Google footprint, how they show up in search and in AI tools like ChatGPT. Every audit is available as a downloadable PDF on the camp leaderboard. The point wasn’t a verdict on anyone. It was a starting point.

The leaderboard reveal got the room going. Nate landed #1. Brooke Lance landed #2. She is my girlfriend, but that’s not why she ranked that high. She ranked that high because we’ve actually done the work. Wikidata entity, personal brand site, consistent content. I said it directly on stage:

“Brooke is my girlfriend, but it’s because I’ve actually done a lot of this stuff for her. We’ve got like her Wikidata and website and all that stuff.”

Dylan Haugen

That’s the whole point. The gap between #1 and #50 on that leaderboard isn’t athletic ability. It’s digital infrastructure. And most dunkers don’t know that gap exists until someone puts a number on it.

Why This Room Specifically Needed to Hear It

Dunkers are some of the most talented athletes in the world, and most of them are invisible online. They post constantly. The problem is that posting without structure doesn’t build an identity that Google or AI can recognize. Before I had any of this figured out, I was in the same position:

“if you Google my name, it was just randomness. If you asked ChatGPT who I was, again, it was just confusion.”

Dylan Haugen

I had content. Hundreds of videos. But without a Knowledge Panel, a Wikidata entity, or a personal brand site, none of it was compounding the way it should. Dennis has worked with the Golden State Warriors, Nike, Adidas, Red Bull, and Starbucks. He’s run close to a billion dollars in ads for major brands. When he walks into a room of dunkers and tells them the same frameworks apply to them, people listen differently.

DunkMan is Shaq’s dunk league, and 2026 is a breakout year for the sport. Several athletes in that camp room are in DunkMan or trying to get there. The visibility playbook that gets a dunker found, followed, and sponsored is the same one that works for any athlete building a public profile right now. Dennis made that clear.

The Knowledge Panel and Why It’s Not a Vanity Metric

A big chunk of the session covered the Knowledge Panel and what Dennis calls the confidence score: a measure of how well Google understands who you are and what you do. Anything above 400 is celebrity tier. Jordan Kilganon’s is around 1,700. Mine is over 3,000. Shaq’s is around 40,000. Dennis walked the room through why being verified on Google is different from a blue check on social:

“A lot of people think that being verified on Google, which is necessary to claim your Knowledge Panel, is like a vanity thing, like being verified on TikTok or verified on YouTube, but it’s actually deeper.”

Dennis Yu

The same structured data that produces a Knowledge Panel is what makes you show up accurately in ChatGPT and Claude. These AI tools pull from the same information sources. If your entity isn’t built correctly, you’re either invisible or misrepresented. For athletes trying to get sponsorships, coaching clients, or spots in paid contests, that matters.

Dennis also laid out how the AI tools themselves work and how to actually use them. The framing that landed best in the room was this: you don’t need to be technical. You direct the AI like a coworker. I said it this way on stage:

“you just talk to the thing like it’s a team member or a coworker and just direct it.”

Dylan Haugen

We showed the room that we had built and given away 10 AI agents by the end of the session. Agents they could actually use. The tools Dennis uses are the same ones he has trained on clients like Adidas, Nike, and the Warriors. The cost to access them is around 20 dollars a month. The barrier is not money. It’s knowing how to start.

One Video Into a Network of Content

The live demonstration on stage was the cross-site repurposing system. I showed how one video of Cam Hazzard became articles on five different sites, each written from a different angle, each cross-linking to the others, each building Cam’s entity authority from a different direction. Cam is a DunkMan athlete with a 50-inch vertical. He now ranks for nearly his entire first three pages of Google on his own name. His site, camhazzard.com, was built in about 20 minutes from a single 20-minute interview, the day before he spoke at a conference. You can read how the repurposing system behind that works at the one-video repurposing system on BlitzMetrics.

The goal for every camper in that room is the same thing: take the content you already have, your real stories, your real competition footage, your real training, and structure it so it compounds. Not complicated. But most dunkers haven’t done it because nobody showed them the system. This session was the system, live, in 30 minutes, in a room full of people who actually care about where dunking goes as a sport.

What Comes Next for the Community

The full audit leaderboard from the camp is public at dunkerspotlight.com/dunkcamp26. Every camper has a downloadable PDF with their personal brand snapshot. That’s the starting point. The playbook for what to do with it, step by step from audit to Knowledge Panel to sponsorships, is laid out at the full dunker visibility playbook.

The same problem dunkers have (real work, real proof, invisible to Google and AI) is the same problem that local businesses face. If you want to see how those two worlds connect, the team at Local Service Spotlight published that angle at the same playbook for local service businesses. And if you want Dennis Yu’s read on the knowledge gap this session exposed, that’s at Dennis Yu on the creator knowledge gap.

The full session is in the video at the top of this article. Watch it, check where you land on the camp leaderboard, and use the audit as a starting point. This is our Dunk Camp branding session documented in full, and the whole point is for the community to actually use it.

This is episode 71 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, 5’11” professional dunker from Minnesota and one of the 24 athletes in Shaq’s DunkMan League this summer, and my guest is another one of them: Cam Hazzard, a 20-year-old from Dallas who tested a 50-inch vertical three weeks after coming back from a shattered hand, has never won a formal contest because he’s barely been in any, and might be the biggest sleeper in the entire league. This is his full story, told publicly for close to the first time, which is exactly the point of this podcast.

How we met (the Dallas session)

The backstory: Dennis and I were in Dallas teaching a volleyball conference how to use AI in their clubs, and the moment I knew I’d be in town, I knew I had to meet Cam. We rented out a massive facility, and while I had a mediocre day, Cam went berserk: 360 Underboth, 360 Scoop, 360 Inverter, essentially every 360 variation that exists, in one session (the full session is on my channel; his angles are on his). Since then, Dennis and I have been working with Cam on the digital marketing and personal-branding side, and the two of us are presenting on exactly that at Dunk Camp this year, so come find us there.

The kid who thought dunking was CGI

Cam’s origin is my favorite detail of the episode: he grew up watching Dunkademics with his cousin, who convinced him the dunks were CGI: that the things on screen weren’t physically possible. He believed it for years. The college-basketball dream consumed his adolescence instead, until life intervened twice: sophomore year of high school he tore both hamstrings weeks after his first Windmill (a sweat patch on the floor mid-warmup sent him into the splits, and rather than tearing muscle, he avulsed bone off the attachment, too small a chunk for surgery, so he waited a full year for his body to reabsorb it). When he returned he’d grown six inches, his coach moved him to the post, the college path was dead, and dunking quietly took its place: senior year he’d scare opposing teams with a 360 Windmill in warmups, then sit on the bench.

The first dunk came in November 2021 at 15 (we discovered live that I beat him to mine by a few months in the same year, at 13, a fact I will retire on), filmed on a phone propped against a basketball at his local rec center, in the grand tradition of pre-tripod camera setups (mine lived inside a shoe). And the Instagram only exists because of Donovan Hawkins: Cam sent clips to Donovan’s subscriber-reaction video, and Donovan personally replied that he jumped “way too high not to start an Instagram.” The account just passed 10,000 followers this year. Remember that number when you watch him this summer.

The progression nobody measured

Cam’s timeline, reconstructed on the call: Back Scratcher two months after the first dunk; first Windmill in May 2022; the hamstring year; the 2023 return where, in a couple of weeks, every dunk came back (post-injury athleticism is real; I’ve lived a small version of it). Watching the Dunk Camp 2023 show as a spectator lit the fuse: within two weeks he hit a 360 Windmill, Pump Reverse, and Reverse Windmill. Through 2024 he simply played and dunked four to five hours a day, every day, Dillan McCarthy-style, with inexplicably zero knee pain, and never once measured his vertical until 2025, when his first test ever read 47 inches. The elite dunks arrived in the summer of 2025, and by January he was hitting 360 Underboths consistently. Which is exactly when the hand happened.

The hand: shattered in January, a 50-inch vertical by spring

Second week of January, college intramurals (his words: the only reason he’s at college), playing deliberately light to protect his spring dunk events. He went up for a lob in full arm swing and smashed his hand into the bottom of a descending player’s heel: the metacarpal shattered horizontally, a knuckle broken completely off, his finger pointing the wrong direction before he registered any of it. Significant surgery, permanent plates and screws, tendons his surgeon openly worried wouldn’t heal right, and the arm strapped to his chest.

One week after surgery, Chuck Millan called and offered him a DunkMan League spot. Cam, immobilized, with no idea whether his hand would ever work properly, committed on the spot. Then: two and a half months of near-total inactivity (he couldn’t even do leg extensions without his hips lifting out of the seat), clearance to jump again, two to two-and-a-half weeks of training, and a retest: 50 inches. From shattered hand to the 50 club in roughly three months, and as of May the hand limits nothing. He calls it a blessing; I call it the most ominous warmup any league competitor has ever done.

Three shows in London, zero contests, total confidence

Cam’s competitive resume is hilariously thin for someone this dangerous: a study-abroad month at Oxford put him a 30-minute train from London, where an organization that found him online ran him through a community contest (he shocked a field including Cas and JumpLikeJay), a FIBA 3×3 halftime show (didn’t miss a dunk, which he learned is the European gold standard), and a Jordan Brand “Jumpman 23” event. That’s it. No formal contest win, because no formal contests. His self-scout going into the league is the right mix: not cocky, openly confident, and motivated by a specific thing that should worry everyone: whenever he hears a dunker say “I’d never try that dunk in a contest, too risky,” something sparks in him and that dunk goes on his contest list. He intends to bring the dunks other people are afraid to attempt. And, for the record, I’m in this league, and I’ve said publicly he can go far in it. That means something.

The advice section: be so good you can’t be ignored

For everyone watching DunkMan and wondering how to get there, Cam’s playbook, validated by his own arc:

• Keep posting; one video changes everything. His raw clips did 1-2k views for ages. Then a goofy jump-competition video with a friend, edited (his words) in a bathtub with zero effort, did 1.5 million views, and recognition compounded from there. You cannot predict the video; you can only make sure it exists.
• Build the connections deliberately. Comment on bigger creators’ posts, talk to everyone at Dunk Camp (or to people who went), know that Chuck and Billy sit at the center of the map. Cam cited me as the example: by the time DunkMan formed, everybody already knew me, and the invite was a no-brainer. That wasn’t luck; that was years of documented work and public relationships.
• Be so good you can’t be ignored. His closing thesis: he hit the same elite dunks for months to no views, kept obsessing, kept posting, and eventually the work became impossible to overlook, and the league called. The recognition lags the ability; keep building anyway.

We also talked honestly about the economics: strip out training programs, and the number of people earning a real full-time living purely from dunking is maybe two (Chen and Kilganon, roughly). Cam’s approach to the league reflects that maturity: all-in on DunkMan, walking through every door it opens, and not betting his entire life on a sport that can end on one rolled ankle. The league is the chance to change that math, for him and for everyone.

Find Cam as “Hazzardous Dunks” on every platform, at camhazzard.com, or honestly just ask ChatGPT about him; we’ve organized his Google presence properly, and there’s more Cam content on my channels, Dennis’s, and our company channel, Local Service Spotlight. More DunkMan athlete interviews are coming all summer, Chuck included. Thank you, Cam; see the rest of you in the next one.

This is episode 70 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, and it’s the announcement: as of today’s Instagram post, I, Dylan Haugen, have officially signed with Shaquille O’Neal’s DunkMan League. This summer I’ll compete against 23 of the best dunkers in the world, 24 athletes total, for a $500,000 grand prize with more money beyond it, on TNT, with Shaq as commissioner. The signing makes me the youngest professional dunker in the league and, arguably, the world (Piotr in Poland, who is absolutely insane, is two days younger than me, so the title comes with an asterisk and a rival, which is how I like it).

Before anything else: thank you. The texts, the comments, the reshares since the post dropped have been overwhelming, and if you engaged at any level, I’m genuinely grateful. And thank you to the DunkMan team, Chuck, Shaq, all of them, for taking the risk on an 18-year-old early in his career. I intend to make that bet look smart.

From a mini hoop to a signing, in one paragraph

The journey, compressed for new readers: I started dunking at 11 or 12 on a mini hoop, not knowing professional dunking existed. The first pro I ever saw was Chris Staples, through Josh Horton’s videos, and I read him as a content creator, not a dunker. Jordan Kilganon was the first dunker whose dunks I actually studied, and he’s been a huge influence on my dunking and on me since. First dunk at 13, the slow drift away from basketball, and the sophomore-year decision to drop it entirely and go all-in on dunking, a choice I wasn’t sure about at the time and can now certify at 100 percent. I’ve referenced God’s plan skeptically my whole life; that decision was the first time I genuinely felt pulled in a direction I hadn’t chosen, and watched it work out beyond what I’d planned. Since then: youngest person to hit a Hide-and-Seek, among the youngest ever to hit an Underboth (17 years old, and definitively the youngest under six feet), and six wins in roughly eight contests, including two fly-outs to Maryland.

What the DunkMan League actually is

The lineage matters: there was Dunk League, there was Dunk King, there was last year’s DunkMan TV show (which I talked with them about; my age killed it, I wasn’t 18 yet). Then Chuck called me late last year about this, and everything aligned. What I know and can say: 24 signed athletes, $500,000 to the winner, a new scoring system unlike previous formats, with push-offs likely penalized or treated differently (a change this podcast has been campaigning for since episode 25), and names like Mac McClung in the field bringing mainstream attention.

The part that moves me as a fan rather than a competitor: when I truly entered this scene at 13 or 14, there was no career path in dunking. You dunked, you hustled shows, you hoped. Now there’s a league with a commissioner named Shaq, a TNT deal, and a half-million-dollar season. This is the infrastructure arriving, the thing every “how does dunking grow” episode on this show has been asking for, and it showed up at the exact moment in my career when I’m finally good enough to compete in it. A year ago this didn’t exist and I wasn’t ready. The timing is a gift.

Congratulations to Chuck (a history lesson)

When Chuck Millan called to congratulate me, I spent half the call congratulating him, because this league is the culmination of one of the great careers in dunking. Chuck founded Team Flight Brothers, the original dunk collective with T-Dub and that whole legendary era, and TFB was among the first sports channels, possibly the first, to get a YouTube ad partnership. He became the NBA’s dunk coach, the guy who preps Mac McClung for the contest every year. And now he has dissolved Team Flight Brothers and rolled its socials into the DunkMan League, which is why the league’s Instagram starts life with 1.2 million followers. He has put everything on this. Decades of building this sport are converging into one league, and being part of his payoff means almost as much as being part of mine.

How to put yourself in position for the next one

People will see this league and want in, so here’s my honest accounting of how an 18-year-old from Minnesota got a call, beyond getting lucky (which I did) and getting good (which is mandatory): I’ve been deliberately building for this since I was 11. Social media since middle school. Relationships built at Dunk Camp and through Kilganon, then made public and compounding through this very podcast, interviewing the top pros in the space. The long-form YouTube infrastructure (literally last episode). A personal-brand website almost nobody else has. None of this is accidental, and I’m planning a full content-strategy breakdown video soon. The formula for the next dunker: bet on yourself (fly to the sessions, enter the contests, go to camp), build the social infrastructure before you need it, leverage every relationship publicly, and be undeniable when the call comes.

What’s next

Coming on this channel: an interview with Chuck on his full career and everything we’re allowed to know about the league, plus interviews with as many of the 24 athletes as I can book (I know some well, like Cam Hazzard, and the league now connects me to the rest); tell me who you want first. And one more thing I told Chuck the day after signing: since the ink dried, my bounce has gone insane. I’m jumping higher than ever and hitting dunks I haven’t even posted yet. The buildup to this league is going to be documented everywhere, this channel for the talking, my main channel (Dylan Haugen, linked below) for the training and dunks.

Youngest pro in the league, $500,000 on the line, the best summer of my life ahead. Subscribe and come watch it happen. Thank you all, again, for everything. See you in the next one.

This is episode 69 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, and Travis Reynolds is back for the episode we promised: two professional dunkers who have made long-form content essentially our whole careers, making the full case for why every dunker should. This is the practical sequel to the social media episode and the Dennis Yu episode: less theory, more “here is exactly what to do and why almost nobody does it.”

The TV test

Here’s the scene that motivates this whole episode. When the guys came to my house in October (Travis, Ben, Finn, Hunter, CJ), we did what dunkers always do at meetups: put dunk YouTube videos on the TV for hours. And you immediately discover the problem: some of the best dunkers alive are unwatchable, because their entire catalog is fifteen-second reels built around trends, where the dunk you want to see flashes for half a second mid-edit. You cannot put Instagram on the TV. Travis said it perfectly: “I want to watch this guy at his best. Okay. I can’t.” If you don’t make long-form content, the people who care most about your dunking, other dunkers, literally cannot consume it.

What short-form killed: context

Travis’s history lesson hit hard because I lived the tail end of it. In the 2020-era community, before reels conquered everything, people posted carousel dumps from sessions: makes, misses, new-dunk attempts, training clips, rim heights, and cycle status in the caption. You could follow everyone. You knew who was close to their first behind-the-back, who was mid-deload, who was hurt. When somebody hit a milestone, you’d been watching the whole climb. Today the algorithm shows you the trendiest fraction of a flood, captions carry no rim heights and no training context, and even I, a person whose actual job involves watching dunkers, don’t know what most of the community is up to anymore.

And the loss isn’t sentimental; it’s competitive. Watching peers’ full progress is fuel: Travis and Tom Barnes literally raced each other to their first behind-the-back back in the day, and the dunker at your height and vertical who’s suddenly close to a dunk you haven’t tried is the best training stimulus money can’t buy. Travis’s sharpest line of the episode: the community has started competing for views instead of competing to get better at dunking. Long-form is how you compete at dunking in public.

The selfish reasons (community and money)

The altruism aside, here are the self-interested arguments, from our own accounts (Travis sits around 90k per platform, roughly 300k total; I’m around 150k):

• YouTube builds your real community. Instagram followers scroll past you; YouTube subscribers who watch every session genuinely know you. Fifteen seconds of attention versus ten minutes of attention is the difference between an audience and a community, and the community is what buys the program, joins the paid group, and shows up when you launch anything, ever.
• YouTube is the money. I’ll say it as plainly as I’m allowed: of every platform I post on, YouTube is my biggest monthly payout, by far, and essentially the only one that pays meaningfully at all. Yes, monetization takes time. That’s the argument for starting now.
• It’s your archive. Your reels disappear into the feed; your session videos become the permanent record of your career, the thing people (and, per episode 59, Google) can actually find later.

The method: it takes almost zero extra effort

The objection we hear constantly is effort, so here’s the entire workflow, which costs you nearly nothing beyond what you already do:

1. Film horizontal (16×9). This is the key trick: a horizontal video converts beautifully to vertical for reels (CapCut: change the project aspect ratio, drop a keyframe on yourself at the start, keep keyframing as you move; my full tutorial is linked in the description), but a vertical video can never become a good horizontal one. Film wide once, publish everywhere. Or just set up a second phone; you’re already filming anyway.
2. Edit nothing, basically. My long-form workflow, in full: take the session’s dunks, drop them in the editor in chronological order, completely raw, upload. Travis’s is the same. Austin Burke titles his videos things like “me dunk well, me happy” and they do thousands of views. My latest, a contest video with a short talking bit at the end, did 68,000. The bar is on the floor. Step over it.
3. Keep your one secret dunk secret if you must; post everything else. The misses, the attempts, the basics. That’s the content dunkers actually want.

The call-outs (with love)

We named names, because we want this content to exist. Dillan McCarthy: the highest jumper in the world by some counts, 3,000-plus unposted clips, five-hour sessions, and the only long-form video of him on the internet is on Billy’s channel, from a session where he broke his thumb halfway through. The community is begging to watch your full sessions, Dillan. Everyone elite and reel-only: same message. You are sitting on the most rewatchable content in the sport and posting trailers for a movie nobody can see.

One teaser before we go: Travis and I are filming an episode soon on AI-generated dunks, because the day is coming when extraordinary dunk clips will need proof, and we half-seriously concluded that the endgame is livestreaming your sessions. Long-form content, it turns out, may eventually be the authentication layer too. Get the channel started before you need the alibi.

Travis is “Travis Dunks” everywhere; my channels are linked below; the keyframe tutorial is in the description. Upload the session, exactly as it is, this week. Next episode is the biggest announcement in this show’s history. See you there.

The structure here isn’t mine. It’s pulled from Dennis Yu and BlitzMetrics, specifically The 4 Stages of The Content Factory: Produce, Process, Post, Promote. Dennis came on the show in Ep 59 to talk about how dunkers can build a personal brand on Google, and most of what he laid out applies pretty directly to running a podcast. So instead of treating the checklist as one big to-do list, I’m grouping every step into one of those four stages, and then walking through a real episode (Ep 60, my Dunk Camp 2025 recap) with the actual links we ended up shipping for each item.

Stage 1: Produce

• Film the episode.

Stage 2: Process

Clean up the recording first, then run almost everything else off the YouTube transcript. Pull the transcript once, then feed it into every item below.

• Descript audio enhancement (Studio Sound) on the recording.
• Descript trim: cut the dead space off the front and back. Takes seconds in Descript.
• YouTube metadata (have AI optimize using the transcript):
  • Title that ranks on the guest’s name, picks up the search-relevant terms in the conversation, and stays consistent with the other titles on the channel.
  • Description with the standard CTA, links to the rest of the podcast’s socials, plus Spotify for Creators and Apple Podcasts, and a link to the blog post for the episode.
  • Tags pulled from the actual transcript.
  • Thumbnail.
• Blog post draft for dunktalks.com with the YouTube video embedded at the top. Follow the BlitzMetrics blog post guidelines. Interlink to the hosts, the guest, and other related episodes in a way that actually helps the reader, not just jamming links in. Real, relevant connections that benefit the reader and the people being linked to.
• Descript podcast clips: pull the best stories and the most authoritative short moments out of the YouTube version.
• Social posts (AI drafts from the transcript):
  • LinkedIn-style long-form post with a CTA at the bottom to watch the full podcast on YouTube, plus a “read more about the episode” link to the blog post dropped as the first comment.
  • X post: shorter version of the LinkedIn one.
  • Instagram caption: same as the LinkedIn-style post.
  • LinkedIn Company Page copy: the LinkedIn-style post.
  • LinkedIn Personal Page copy: same content, rewritten as a more personal reflection.
  • Facebook Personal: same personal-reflection version.
  • YouTube Community post: shortest version of the LinkedIn post.

Stage 3: Post

• YouTube: publish the video with the title, description, tags, and thumbnail drafted in Stage 2. Sort into the right playlist.
• Spotify: publish with the title and description, and add the season number and episode number. Spotify cross-syndicates through the RSS feed to Apple Podcasts and other podcast platforms automatically.
• Instagram Post from the brand account (auto cross-post to the Facebook Page turned on).
• X (Brand): post the X copy from Stage 2.
• Facebook (Personal): post the personal-reflection copy.
• LinkedIn (Company Page): post the LinkedIn-style copy.
• LinkedIn (Personal Page): post the personal-reflection version.
• YouTube Community Post: schedule a few days after release so it re-surfaces the video to subscribers.
• Blog Post: publish on dunktalks.com.

Stage 4: Promote

• IG Story + Highlight (Brand).
• IG Story (Personal).
• RT (Personal): retweet the brand X post from the personal account.
• Ask guests and dunkers from the episode for a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Important caveat: only ask after they’ve actually watched or scrolled through the episode. Empty reviews get pulled and they hurt more than they help.

Worked Example: Ep 47, How Jordan Kilganon Became the Greatest Dunker of All Time

One full pass through the checklist on a real episode. This is Ep 47 with Jordan Kilganon, the biggest interview the show has done. Embedded video, real links for every item.

Produce

• Filmed in studio with Jordan on the line.

Process

• Descript audio enhancement (Studio Sound) on the recording.
• Descript trim: cut the dead space off both ends.
• YouTube title (from the transcript, ranks on Jordan’s name + “greatest dunker” search terms, matches the channel’s title style): How Jordan Kilganon Became the Greatest Dunker of All Time | Dunk Talk #47.
• Description: AI-drafted from the transcript, then cleaned in my voice. Standard CTA, links to the rest of our socials, links to Spotify for Creators and Apple Podcasts, plus the link to the blog post for the episode.
• Tags + thumbnail: tags pulled from the transcript, thumbnail with Jordan.
• Blog post: dunktalks.com/jordan-kilganon-greatest-dunker-all-time. Embedded YouTube at the top. Interlinked to Jordan’s Ep 62 follow-up on his signature shoe and to Dennis Yu’s Ep 59 where relevant. Links chosen to genuinely help the reader, not just stuffed in.
• Descript clips pulled from the episode and posted as Shorts: Jordan Kilganon on the Importance of INTENT and Pro Dunkers Decide Their Own 2K Rating (ft. Jordan Kilganon).
• Social copy: AI-drafted LinkedIn-style long post (with the YouTube CTA and a “read more about the episode” comment link to the blog post), shorter X version, IG caption, LinkedIn Company + LinkedIn Personal (personal reflection rewrite), Facebook Personal, and the YouTube Community shorter version.

Post

• YouTube: live on @DunkTalkPod, sorted into the Dunk Talk Podcast playlist.
• Spotify: The Dunk Talk on Spotify, tagged with Season 1 / Episode 47. Auto cross-syndicated to Apple Podcasts via the Spotify RSS feed.
• Instagram + Facebook Page: posted from @dunktalks, auto cross-posted to the Dunk Talk Podcast Facebook Page.
• X (Brand): posted from the Dunk Talk account.
• Facebook (Personal): personal-reflection version on my profile.
• LinkedIn Company + Personal Pages: LinkedIn-style post on the Dunk Talk page, personal reflection on my personal profile.
• YouTube Community Post: scheduled a few days after release.
• Blog Post: live at dunktalks.com/jordan-kilganon-greatest-dunker-all-time.

Promote

• IG Story + Highlight (Brand): brand story with Jordan tagged, saved to a Highlight.
• IG Story (Personal): my personal account, tagging @dunktalks and Jordan.
• RT (Personal): retweeted the brand X post from my personal account.
• Reviews: asked Jordan and the dunkers around the episode for honest 5-star reviews on Apple and Spotify after they’d actually watched.

If you want the framework all of this is grouped under, read the full BlitzMetrics 4 Stages of the Content Factory article and Dennis’s episode on Dunk Talk (Ep 59).

The full picture

Stack the four stages back-to-back and one Dunk Talk episode runs through: Produce (film + B-roll), Process (Descript, AI metadata, blog draft, short-form cuts), Post (YouTube, Spotify, IG/FB, X, LinkedIn, YT Community, blog post, short-form), and Promote (IG Stories + Highlight, RTs, Threads, review asks). You don’t have to hit every box every time. We honestly don’t. But having it mapped to the four stages makes it obvious where we’re slacking. No blog post? Stage 2/3 miss. No reviews? Stage 4 miss.

If you’re doing this for your own podcast, read the BlitzMetrics 4 Stages article in full, then watch Dennis Yu’s episode on Dunk Talk where he walks through how a dunker can apply it. Running example all in one place: Ep 60 — My Experience at the Dunk Camp 2025.

Dennis Yu and I were in Dallas this week to speak at the Align Volleyball Summit, and before the conference the Texas Flight Crew and I rented out a court for a session. Eight of us got reps in. The session went off. And then I pulled Cam Hazzard aside for a mini Dunk Talk episode while we still had the lights on.

If you haven’t heard the name yet, you will. Cam is one of the 24 dunkers Shaq hand-picked for the new DunkMan League this summer. He is 20 years old, out of Little Elm, Texas, has a 50-inch verified vertical, and is one of fewer than 10 people on the planet who can land a 360 under both legs.

The Session That Set Up This Mini Episode

I asked Cam how he felt the session went.

“Honestly I hit some things I wanted to hit. I didn’t hit everything though. I was probably around 85%. I played some basketball yesterday. I was a little bit sore, but not too sore. So I’m happy with the result, but know I could do better.”

Cam came in a day after a basketball game and still threw down a 360 under both, a 360 inverter, a 540, and a long list of other dunks on a legit ten-foot rim. He graded himself at 85%, which lines up with what I saw in person.

How Cam Got Into Dunking

One of the things I try to do on every episode of Dunk Talk is get the actual origin story instead of the resume. Cam’s is short and clean. He was obsessed with dunking as a kid, tried random tricks for hours, hit nothing crazy. Then he landed his first 360 windmill and the obsession turned into a plan.

Right after the windmill, he went to Dunk Camp in 2023, where he met Isaiah Rivera, Jordan Kilganon, Jordan Southerland, and Donovan Hawkins for the first time. As Cam tells it, Donovan was the one who really pushed him over the edge:

“He did an episode on his YouTube channel reacting to my subscribers’ dunks. I sent in some of my stuff, he reached out to me and was like, ‘You have to start an Instagram.’ He was like, ‘You’re jumping too high not to post.’ So he’s the one who got me started, and then from there on I just kept posting, kept getting better.”

Every dunker I have interviewed on Dunk Talk has a version of that moment. One veteran sees the vertical, tells them to start posting, and the rest is reps.

The 2K to 19K Content Shift

Cam went from 2,000 to 3,000 followers in November to 10K by the end of Christmas break, and is at almost 19K now.

I asked him what changed:

“I had about 2,000, 3,000 followers back in November, and I was just posting my dunk clips with some gym bro music. Just see what the most popular is, put it over it. And then over Christmas break I had nothing to do. I got back from college and I was like, ‘Let’s just see where I could take this.’ So I posted daily, started putting more effort, and by the end I got 10,000 followers.”

The bigger insight is the kind of content he shifted to:

“I found that if I just make more relatable content, less one-off cool trick dunk stuff, make it more relatable, I would get more followers.”

Contextless one-off clips are the easiest thing to scroll past, and they don’t build a connection with the audience. They might pick up views, but they don’t grow a following. It took me three years on my own channel to land on this. Cam figured it out in one Christmas break. He wrote about a separate interview with Dennis Yu from the same Dallas trip too.

Getting the Call From Shaq

The timing on Cam’s DunkMan League selection is wild. He had just had surgery on his broken hand when Shaq called. Three days post-op.

“I was reached out to. I was, It was random. I just broke my hand. I got surgery literally three days after getting the call from Chuck. So I was just starting off with my injury. Chuck called me, put me in the league, and I’m ready for it.”

Cam got the call mid-rehab and his first thought was getting ready for the summer. He rebuilt the hand and kept posting through the whole rehab window.

Top 24 and the Competitive Reality

I asked Cam how it felt being announced in the top 24, knowing he is going up against guys he watched as a kid:

“I mean it’s definitely surreal. Getting posted on Shaq’s account is just like, man, just now seeing this. But I’m always like refreshing the page, seeing who’s on DunkMan next ’cause I’m wanting to see some big names out there so I can really show who I am.”

The dunk community has historically been collaborative. Everyone shows up to each other’s sessions and pushes each other higher. Cam wants to see how that holds up when $500,000 is actually on the line:

“I’m interested to see how this acts when there’s money on the line. See how people are.”

That is the question I am most excited to see answered this summer. Does a sport that has been collaborative for years stay collaborative when the prize pool is real. I also wrote up my personal takeaways from filming this session on my own site, and Dennis covered the marketing-lens version of the same trip.

What’s Next for Cam

Goals for the year are simple. Top five in DunkMan, ideally first. After that, more sponsorships, more international contests, and turning the publicity from the league into a long-term brand. Cam is also a sophomore at Abilene Christian University on a 4.0 GPA, triple-majoring in Information Systems, Accounting, and Finance, so the business side is being built in parallel. He has a Summer 2026 internship lined up at Treaty Oak Financial in Austin between dunk sessions.

We are going to do a full longer episode soon to go through Cam’s entire story. The signature 360 under both, the Dunk Camp journey, the academic side, and what the DunkMan League looks like as it kicks off. If you want to make sure you do not miss it, subscribe to Dunk Talk on YouTube and follow Cam on the platforms linked above.

Who do you think takes the $500K? Drop a comment with your pick, and tune in to DunkMan this summer on TNT to find out who is right.

Update (June 2026): the full long-form Dunk Talk Podcast episode with Cam is now live. Watch the full sit-down here, covering the hand surgery, the 50-inch vertical test, his dunk influences, and what he is bringing into Shaq’s DunkMan League this summer.

This is episode 62 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, and history is on the desk in front of us. I’m Dylan Haugen, and Jordan Kilganon is back, this time holding the thing he teased in episode 47: his signature shoe with Serious Player Only, making him the first professional dunker ever to have one. Mine is on my feet as I write this; half the community’s pairs are already in the mail. This episode is the whole story: the decade of shoe frustration behind it, the design DNA, why everything he owns is that exact blue, and the number 12 hiding a prophecy.

A career of almost-right shoes

Kilganon’s shoe obsession predates his dunking: his dad spoiled him so thoroughly that his school locker was famously stacked floor to ceiling with pairs. The pro-career tour of compromises: Adizeros at the St. Mary’s show (good traction that wore away fast, hurt his feet), the LeBron 10s (bouncy, but a heel so tall he couldn’t run full speed into approaches, and rumored to wreck knees), a K1X sponsorship era, thirty-something Jordans, and a long Kobe phase defined by the Kobes’ signature feature: breaking constantly. (Public service announcement from the episode: apparently you can super-glue them.)

The search turned systematic when he decided, before retirement, to chase the childhood dream of his own shoe. His analytics made the business case obvious: the two things people click on him for are jump programs and what’s on his feet. So he spent thousands of dollars buying every top-rated shoe across Western and Chinese brands, auditioning them all, and landed on Serious Player Only’s Game One as the almost-perfect winner: everything right except grip that was “almost there.” For a dunker whose approach speed punishes any traction deficit, almost wasn’t enough, but it was the best candidate to build on. He reached out; SPO replied that they were already developing a version better in every way; and in China (the windmill-over-the-car trip), they handed him a sample finished days earlier. His test notes: very good, not perfect: lateral twist under his plant, grip that wore fast, foot slipping inside. They fixed every item on the next sample. That iteration loop is the difference between an athlete colorway and an actual signature shoe.

The designer who became the dunker

Here’s the part of Kilganon’s biography that makes this shoe feel fated: he studied industrial and product design for three and a half years, and his mandatory sketchbooks were 90 percent shoes, to the point that his teachers begged him to draw literally anything else. He dropped out to chase dunking, the choice everyone called a less-than-one-percent dream. So the man who abandoned shoe design for pro dunking has now returned to shoes through pro dunking, with a hand in the improvements, the colorway, and every mark on the upper. He told me that when it released on the last day of Dunk Camp, he found a moment alone and got genuinely emotional: fulfilling the dunking dream and the shoe dream in one lifetime felt, in his word, unfair.

Why everything is that blue

The colorway story is an accidental-branding masterclass. In design school, Kilganon noticed he involuntarily picked the same cyan for every project; his teacher started calling it “the Jordan blue.” Years later came the hair: inspired by Tito (his favorite dunker, whose flying dreads added motion to every dunk), he started growing dreads, and dyed them blue specifically to avoid copying another white dunker who’d gotten dreads first. The blue dreads debuted in the Gary Payton lost-and-found video, which became the NBA’s most-viewed video ever at 100-plus million views, then Dunk King, and suddenly the world knew “the blue hair guy” even when it couldn’t pronounce Kilganon. The accidental brand became the deliberate one: Jump Master’s logos, his shorts, everything, and now the shoe. His marketing self-review is correct: a hard-to-spell name needs a color you can’t forget.

The details on the shoe

• The Scorpion logo: his signature dunk, now his redesigned personal logo, on the side.
• His signature on the back, over a hologram heel panel that shifts as it moves, a detail he’s never seen on another shoe, added by a company simultaneously chasing the lightest shoe of the year.
• “ACT” printed on the upper: his first tattoo, inked on his hand precisely in the line of sight of a phone screen, so that every doom-scroll is interrupted by the instruction to get up and do something. Now it disciplines everyone who wears the shoe too.
• The number 12: his favorite number and his dad’s, with a derivation he delivered deadpan: MJ’s favorite number was 45, his brother took it, half of 45 rounds to 23, half of 23 rounds to 12. And the real meaning: Kilganon has never touched 12 feet. The 12 is foreshadowing. Touching 12 feet means a vertical in the 50s, and he’s declaring he’ll do it in these shoes. To the growing comment section informing him he’s past his prime: he finds you hilarious, and now he has it in writing.

The performance review (from its harshest possible tester)

Kilganon’s favorite thing about the shoe is none of the above: it’s that the shoe is genuinely the best he’s ever worn, which spared him the nightmare of promoting a mediocre collab. His non-negotiables and how they landed:

• Traction: the lifelong bottleneck. He claims, plausibly, that he’d have tested 50 multiple times already if max-effort attempts didn’t keep ending in slips. In these, slipping is “literally impossible”; his only logged complaint is that they may be too grippy, the greatest problem a speed jumper has ever had. Dusty courts stopped mattering.
• Containment: no blow-through on the plant, achieved without the bulk that containment usually costs.
• Weight: the lightest shoe of the year, and a convert’s testimony from a guy who claimed not to care about weight: on between-the-legs transfers the leg feels unloaded, and overall it “feels like running around barefoot.”
• Cushion: bouncy, not memory-foam mush, via SPO’s new foam.
• Durability: the pair on his feet during the episode is roughly eight months old, absorbing Kilganon-grade forces weekly, and still pristine. As I said on the call: if Jordan hasn’t broken them, you will not break them.

The bigger meaning is the one he opened with: he hopes this is the beginning, not the exception, and that other dunkers get shoes too. A sport produces signature shoes when its athletes become brands; that’s the whole personal-brand thesis from episode 59 wearing laces. First the camps, then the leagues, now the shoe. The infrastructure of a real sport keeps arriving piece by piece.

The shoe is available through Serious Player Only; Kilganon is everywhere as himself, blue hair first. Next episode: the most underrated dunker in the world, Bishop Ukata. Peace.