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. Not because they don’t post, but because 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. Michael Jordan’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.