Travis Reynolds and I, Dylan Haugen, were most of the way through reviewing every dunk from Shaq’s DunkMan League group stages when we went off on a tangent about Dan Gross. It was supposed to be a thirty second intermission. It turned into the part of the conversation I have thought about most since.

The reason it came up is that Travis is building something for him, and the reason he is building it is that right now there is nowhere to actually watch Dan Gross dunk.

One of the best dunkers alive, and almost no way to see it

If you want to watch Dan, your options are to scroll his Instagram one post at a time hunting for dunks, or to dig through Travis’s raw session videos on YouTube and find the clips where he happens to be in frame. That is it. There is no mix, no highlight reel, no single place you can send somebody.

Travis put it plainly: if prime Dan were in the DunkMan League, he would put his money on him. The league is built exactly for what Dan does. And yet a real chunk of the people watching dunking right now do not know who he is, which is a strange thing to be true about someone Travis calls one of the greatest dunkers on the planet.

He is not saying that loosely. Dan is a two-foot, left-right jumper whose signature is the 360 Inverter, and he has a Dunkademics dunker profile like most of the pros do. He just does not have a body of work anybody can find.

The timeline

Dan had serious bounce in high school. He was already doing 360s and Double Elbows before he had trained for any of it. He was playing college basketball into 2020 and quit later that year to focus on dunking full time.

2021 was his real prime. That was the first year he could put everything into it, and it is the year he went off. 2022 started with a few good sessions and then essentially disappeared, because he had to take most of the year off with a back injury. He came back for a second prime in 2023 and hit some genuinely insane things, including a 360 Scoop Elbow.

After that it slid. 2024 was a slow decline even though he was still landing dunks most people never will. By 2025 he would try and it just was not the same, and at that point it stopped being a training problem.

What is actually wrong with his knees

Travis explained it better than I could, so here it is as close to how he said it as I can get.

One knee had a piece of bone that had broken off and was floating around inside the joint. When you extend your leg all the way and bring it back in, the kneecap shifts slightly into its groove, and the loose bone would get caught in there. It would lock up on him while he was just walking around. You obviously do not want that happening in the middle of a dunk. It had been building for a long time.

The other knee had a very small separation of bone. Not a break exactly, but bone, and bone hurts. So it was both knees, and the reason it never resolved is that bone injuries do not warm up the way soft tissue does. Once it starts hurting mid-session, it is not going to loosen up ten minutes later. It just ends the day. Zach Velis went through something similar and spent close to two years being told it was tendonitis before anyone found the loose bone.

He had double knee surgery earlier this year.

Where he is right now

As of August, Dan is technically cleared to start doing things again, and he is taking it unbelievably slowly, which is the correct call. There is no version of rushing this that ends well.

The photo at the top of this article is from a session in North Carolina this year with Dan, Ben Hopkins, Travis and a few of the other guys. Travis had a session with him in July where Dan bounced the ball off the ground, off the backboard, caught it and elbowed it. For about five minutes it looked like nothing had happened to him at all. Then he had to stop.

Travis’s read on that was the part that stuck with me: what looked incredible to everybody standing there was nothing compared to what Dan used to do. He used to hit that same dunk with a Double Elbow, comfortably. When I was with him about a month before that, he put down one small dunk without really using his knees at all. It was all hips.

Both of us think he comes back. The condition is narrow but simple. If he can jump and the injuries stop causing pain, he is fine. That is genuinely the whole question.

What Travis is building

Travis is working with Dan to collect literally every dunk he has footage of. Two things come out of that.

The first is a long raw video where you can just sit and watch every dunk he has done, however long that ends up being. Nobody knows yet, because the footage is still being gathered.

The second is an all-time mix, Hoop Mixtape style. That is the one that matters, because a raw archive is for people who already care and a mix is what makes somebody care in the first place.

There is no release date on either. Travis has been going back and forth on putting the raw video out after the mix so the mix gets the attention it deserves, which I think is right. He also floated putting the raw one up unlisted for anyone who really wants it before then.

Why any of this is worth doing

This is the exact problem the podcast exists for. There are dunkers who are elite at what they do and almost invisible everywhere it counts. Years of work sitting as loose clips on a phone, nothing written down, nothing anybody can search. When that person stops dunking for two years, the record just quietly stops existing.

Dan is the clearest case of it I can point to. One of the best to ever do this, out with a real injury, with no highlight reel to his name and a generation of dunkers coming up who have never seen him at his best. That is fixable, and Travis is fixing it.

When the mix drops we will cover it. Until then, if you have not seen Dan dunk, go find the clips, and pay attention to what he is doing off two feet.

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.

Put the highest jumper in the world next to the best pair of hands under 20 and let them ask each other questions. That is the whole video, it runs about two minutes, and somewhere in the middle of it one of them gives away his entire training routine without being pushed.

The two dunkers are Ethan Pimstone and Piotr Zawiślak, and I filmed them at The Dunk Camp in Salt Lake City. The number gets stated in the first ten seconds, because it always does.

“that’s a world record holder. 52.5 inches.”

Ethan Pimstone

For anyone outside this community, 52.5 inches of max vertical is not a slightly better version of what good athletes do. It is a different category of human. Ethan tested 47.5 at this camp in 2025 and landed his first Eastbay in the same week, which tells you how fast the arc is moving.

The Matchup

Piotr is 18, he is from Poland, and he is the youngest black band the sport has produced. His edge is not altitude. It is what he can do with the ball between takeoff and the rim, which is the part of dunking that takes the longest to build and cannot be bought with a training block.

“this man was hitting dunks that I can’t even fathom hitting. And your age, that’s impressive.”

Ethan Pimstone

Ethan then laid out the gap using his own timeline, which is the most useful comparison in the video because it is honest about himself.

“I got my first dunk at 17, and this man is 18 years old doing 360 Underboth, 360 Eastbay, 360 inverter which I just turned 23, I still can’t even do all that.”

Ethan Pimstone

Every dunk on that list is a 360 with a second move layered inside it. Under both legs. Between the legs. Each one takes a full rotation plus a ball move plus a landing, and Piotr is doing all three of them at an age when most dunkers are still trying to make their first clean windmill look repeatable.

“he’s levels ahead of where most people are at, and he’s already close to the top of the game.”

Ethan Pimstone

Piotr’s answer about Ethan ran the other direction, and he found a way to make a compliment out of a criticism.

“His jumping ability probably because even though some people are saying that your technique isn’t perfect… you’re still jumping like 52 and a half.”

Piotr Zawiślak

That has been the take on Ethan in comment sections for two years. Piotr’s read is that the number happens regardless, so the form debate matters less than the training behind it. Coming from a dunker whose whole reputation is built on technical precision, that is a real concession.

Let Us Trade

“Let’s trade. We’ll trade some talents. And then we’ll both be top of the game.”

Ethan Pimstone

This is the line that will get clipped, and it is funnier than it looks because both of them are completely serious about the deal. Ethan wants the bag. Piotr wants the inches. Neither of them is confused about which side of the trade they are on, which is rarer than you would think among dunkers at this level.

The Part Worth Saving

Ethan then did something most people in these interviews forget to do. He stopped complimenting and started asking. How are you able to do all those dunks. Is it hand speed training or is it just reps. Rim or wall. How often.

Piotr answered all of it, in order, with no hedging. This is the full breakdown.

“So I used to be doing a lot of low-rim dunking.”

Piotr Zawiślak

At 15 and 16. That is the base layer, and it is the one everybody underrates. A low rim buys you air time, and air time buys you repetitions of a movement pattern that a full rim will not let you practice yet. He was building the bag years before his jump could support it.

“I’m having two dunk sessions a week… And I’m doing a lot of hand speed drills.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Two dunk sessions a week, with heavy lifting around them. Ethan reacted to the number in the video, and so did I. The community assumption about a dunker with that bag is that he lives at the rim. He does not. He protects the jumping and puts his volume somewhere that costs his joints nothing.

“I’ve seen some drill at Jordan Kilganon’s channel. And I started doing it a lot.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Free videos on YouTube. A ball, a wall or a rim, standing still, running the motion of the dunk without jumping. Then Ethan asked the question that turns a nice answer into a usable one.

“Daily… when I’m before a important contest or event I’m bringing my ball to the gym. And I’m spending like one hour just doing it.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Daily. One hour of nothing but hand path before a contest. No weighted ball, ever, though he said he wants to try one. That is the entire program that produced the best hands under 20 in this sport, and there is not a single piece of equipment in it.

“And it shows. It’s crazy. It really shows.”

Ethan Pimstone

The Kilganon Loop

Here is what makes this specific week at camp unusual. Piotr says on this video that he trains daily off Jordan Kilganon’s drills. On a separate video at the same camp, he meets Kilganon in person, tries those same drills in front of him, and cannot get them while Kilganon does them with ease.

Kilganon explained on that video why the drills exist at all. He can only jump so much, so he went looking for a way to keep improving without adding vertical. The full conversation is in Kilganon on running out of rivals.

So the chain runs like this. Kilganon hits his jumping ceiling and invents a way around it. A kid in Poland finds the videos and runs them daily for years. The kid becomes the youngest black band in the sport, flies to Utah, and gets beaten at the drills by the person who made them. Both halves are on camera, filmed three days apart. That is not a story anybody would have caught if the two conversations had not both been recorded and written down.

What This Says About Where the Sport Is

Ten years ago, an 18-year-old with this bag would have been a rumour on a forum. Piotr learned from a free channel in another country, built his hands on a low rim, and arrived at an American camp already at black band. The pipeline is now open in both directions, and the tools that produced him cost nothing.

Ethan’s side of it matters too. He got his first dunk at 17, was coached by his brother Jordan, and is now the world record holder at 23. Neither of these guys came up through anything resembling a traditional path, and they met in the middle at a camp in Salt Lake City.

They each wrote their own version of this conversation: Ethan on trading talents and Piotr on the craziest jumper. Dunker Spotlight covered why opposite superpowers work on camera, Athlete Spotlight took it to athletes outside dunking, and BlitzMetrics broke down why the routine travels.

This got filmed because Dennis Yu and I ran a session at camp for 76 campers on how athletes show up on Google and in AI tools, then offered to interview anybody who wanted it. The method is documented in the repurposing system from camp.

Go do the drills. That is the takeaway. The world record holder heard the answer and said he was taking it, and he already jumps higher than you.

Ninety seconds, two dunkers, one camera, and no host questions that anybody rehearsed. I put Polish dunker Piotr Zawiślak and Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney next to each other at The Dunk Camp in Salt Lake City and asked them what they thought of each other. What came back is the most useful ninety seconds of tape I got all week, because these two are good at almost completely different things.

Piotr is an eighteen-year-old from Poland who just won the camp’s ten-foot contest. Nate is a 5’7″ creator from Omaha who won the low rim title at this camp in 2025 and is widely considered the best mini hoop dunker who has ever lived. They do not compete for the same slots. Which is exactly why their opinions of each other are worth something.

Nate on Piotr: The Youngest Black Band Ever

“Piotr is the youngest athlete to ever get a black band, which is the most prestigious level of dunking, and he’s the youngest to do it.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

Band ranking is how this community has sorted itself for years. Black is the top of it and the list of people who hold one is short enough to name. It normally arrives late in a career, after a decade of sessions and a couple of knee problems. Piotr got there at eighteen.

Nate did not stop at the credential. He went straight to the receipts from that week.

“He just won the ten foot contest at Dunk Camp. He went crazy. His style’s nuts. He hit a 360 Underboth, which is one of the most elite dunks in the entire world.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

A 360 Underboth is a full rotation with the ball passing under both legs mid-spin. It is a two-part dunk where the second part begins while you have no idea where the rim is. Very few people on earth throw it in a contest setting. Piotr throws it as his signature.

Piotr on Nate: Nobody Better on a Low Rim

“That’s the best low rim dunker I’ve ever seen. He can do everything. Every dunk you can imagine, Hoopin Nate can do.”

Piotr Zawiślak

This is a ten-foot specialist grading a low rim specialist, which is the part I want people to notice. The community argues about low rim constantly. There is a permanent comment section debate about whether a lowered goal counts. A guy who just won the ten-foot contest saying nobody is better than Nate on a low rim settles more of that argument than any of us shouting at each other online.

Then Piotr added the detail that actual dunkers care about.

“he’s got right hand, left hand. Everything, so I think in the future… Right now he’s crazy, but I feel like in a few years, you are gonna be one of the best dunkers.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Ambidexterity is the most undervalued trait in this sport. Nearly everybody has a dominant side and a side they hide. Nate throws the same trick both directions and it looks identical either way, which doubles his contest list and makes his practice hours worth twice what mine are.

Piotr Also Watched Him on the Regulation Rim

“So I’ve seen Nate jumping with me on ten feet. He was going crazy.”

Piotr Zawiślak

He listed an Eastbay, a 360 windmill and a reverse windmill, all on ten feet, in the same session. That should reset how people file Nate. The public still thinks of him as the mini hoop guy because that is where a billion views came from, and the work has moved on without the label.

He trained with Isaiah Rivera in Florida in 2025 and came back with six new ten-foot tricks. He put down a 360 windmill and a 9 foot Eastbay Hide and Seek at this camp. Somebody who is 5’7″ doing full windmill variations on a regulation rim is a different athlete than the one in the kitchen clips, and it takes the audience a few years to catch up to that.

The Answer That Actually Separates Pros

I asked both of them what they found most inspiring about the other’s technique. Nate’s answer had nothing to do with a specific dunk.

“The most inspiring thing is he can hit everything within like one or two tries, and that’s so important in the dunking world, especially with contests and to be exciting in shows.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

Every dunker reading this just nodded. Attempts are the hidden variable in the entire sport. A clip proves you did it once. It says nothing about whether you did it on the second try or the sixtieth, and the internet has trained an entire audience to think there is no difference.

There is an enormous difference the moment money is involved. A contest gives you two attempts and a shot clock. A halftime show gives you one run and a crew that needs the floor back. If your best dunk takes fifteen tries, you cannot sell it, you can only post it. Nate backed that up with the specific number.

“He hits 360 inverter first try almost every time.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

That is a bookable athlete. Every promoter in this sport is buying the same thing, which is the confidence that the guy will land it while the lights are on.

Two Specialists, No Overlap, No Reason to Lie

Dunkers rating each other usually comes with an asterisk. If two guys are chasing the same contest checks, praise gets careful. These two are not in that position. Nate is the reference point on low rims and mini hoops. Piotr is a ten-foot power and creativity guy who just beat a deep field on a regulation goal.

So each of them is grading a discipline they do not own, out loud, with a camera running, and neither one hedged. Nate said the sky’s the limit for this kid and said it twice. Piotr said Nate will be one of the best dunkers in a few years and said it directly to his face rather than about him.

Piotr flew to a FIBA event one week after camp with that on tape behind him. Nate flew home with a black band dunker on record about his low rim work. Both of those are worth more than another highlight reel.

Where the Rest of This Lives

Both guys wrote their own versions. Piotr’s is at the best low rim dunker he has ever seen. Nate’s is at why Piotr is the youngest black band ever. Their sites now link to each other, which is the point of doing it this way.

The first time I met Piotr in person is covered in two of the best 18-year-old dunkers meeting. Dunker Spotlight broke down why mutual endorsement works, Athlete Spotlight ran it past dunking in vouching for each other on camera, and BlitzMetrics covered the search mechanics in reciprocal credibility between two experts.

This footage exists because Dennis Yu and I taught a session at camp on how athletes show up on Google and in AI tools, then offered to film anyone who wanted it. That system is documented in the 76 athlete repurposing writeup.

Get the two people in your gym who are good at different things in front of one camera and ask them about each other. It takes ninety seconds and it beats anything either of them could say about themselves.

I filmed a lot of conversations at The Dunk Camp this year. Record holders, black bands, guys who have been in this sport since before some of the campers were born. The most interesting thing anybody said all week took about fifteen seconds, came from Jordan Kilganon, and was aimed at an eighteen year old who had never heard it before.

“eventually, there’ll be no more dunkers to compete with. So it’s gonna be competing with yourself.”

Jordan Kilganon

“I was always scared of that moment.”

Jordan Kilganon

The most famous dunker alive just told the room that the scariest part of the career is not losing. It is winning until there is nobody left to line up against.

Who He Was Talking To

Polish dunker Piotr Zawiślak is eighteen, already black band, and was at this camp for the first time. He has said in every interview I have done with him that Kilganon is his inspiration for dunking and everything. That is not a media answer. You will see why in a minute.

So this is the version of the meet-your-hero video that usually goes nowhere. Kid meets legend, legend says nice things, everybody claps. That is not what happened. Kilganon gave him about ninety seconds of career philosophy that most dunkers never get, and he gave it in the order that actually matters: assessment, warning, then the thing he is afraid of.

The Assessment

“He’s 18 and he’s doing dunks that took me forever to make, so I’m excited to see what he’s got in the future.”

Jordan Kilganon

Read that again with the source in mind. Kilganon is the person whose dunks became the benchmark for what is possible in this sport. Him saying a teenager is already hitting dunks that took him years is not a compliment you hand out casually, and he doubled it later in the same conversation.

“There’s nobody that’s been this young that’s doing the stuff that he’s doing.”

Jordan Kilganon

Piotr’s answer on camera was two words: it’s gonna be scary. He meant his own future. Which is a fun line, and it is also the exact word Kilganon used sixty seconds later about something completely different.

The Warning Came Before the Philosophy

Before he got to the interesting part, Kilganon gave the boring part, and the boring part is the one that actually ends careers. He said the only thing Piotr has to focus on is staying consistent with his focus and appreciating what he has got. Then he acted out the failure mode: travelling all the time, doing crazy dunks, being one of the best dunkers in the world, and treating all of it as normal.

“No. You can’t have that kind of attitude.”

Jordan Kilganon

“You need to appreciate every moment and keep earning it.”

Jordan Kilganon

Everybody in this community has watched someone go through that arc. They get good, they get flown places, the shows start paying, and about two years in they stop training like the person who earned the invitation. The dunks do not get worse right away. The appetite does, and the dunks follow about eight months later.

Now the Part I Cannot Stop Thinking About

Kilganon told Piotr that right now he is aiming and competing mentally, in his head, with other dunkers. That is how this whole sport runs. You watch a clip, you decide you need to have that dunk, you go get it. Everybody in the top fifty is running on that fuel whether they admit it or not.

His point is that it is a fuel with a bottom. Get good enough for long enough and the list of people ahead of you empties out. There is no rival left to be annoyed by, no clip that makes you angry, no name you are quietly measuring yourself against. What is left is you and whatever you decided your standard is.

Then he admitted he was always scared of that moment, which is the most honest thing I have heard a dunker say on camera. Nobody talks about that. We talk about vert, about hand speed, about who is the best right now. Nobody talks about what motivates you after the leaderboard stops being interesting.

His Answer Was to Change What He Was Improving

He did not leave it as a problem. He explained what he did about it, and it is the origin story for the drills half of this community has copied.

“That’s why I invented the ball handling drills, is I can only jump so much, but I wanna keep getting better. How do I do that without jumping?”

Jordan Kilganon

That is a man hitting a physical ceiling and refusing to accept that the ceiling applies to everything. Vertical has a limit. Your jump caps out, and past a certain age the honest answer is that it caps out downward. Ball control does not work that way. There is no known top end on how fast and how clean you can move a ball around your body in the air.

So he stopped trying to win the jumping argument and invented a second argument he could keep winning. Half the trick bag that exists in freestyle dunking today traces back to that decision.

The Detail That Makes This Video Better Than It Looks

Here is the part I only caught after I sat down with all eight camp interviews. In a separate one, world record jumper Ethan Pimstone, who tested at 52.5 inches, asked Piotr where his hand speed comes from. Piotr said he found a drill on Jordan Kilganon’s channel and started doing it a lot. Ethan asked how often. Daily. Before an important contest he brings his ball to the gym and spends an hour on it.

So put the timeline together. Kilganon hits his jumping ceiling and invents the drills. A kid in Poland finds them on YouTube and does them every single day for years without ever speaking to him. The kid gets good enough to be flown to Utah. He meets the guy. He tries the drills in front of him.

“I was trying to do some of his drills, and I just couldn’t get it, and he was doing it with ease.”

Piotr Zawiślak

The student who trains the material daily still cannot match the author on his own exercise. I love that ending. It is also a reminder that the ceiling Kilganon hit on jumping is nowhere near where he is on hands. That whole conversation is up in Ethan Pimstone’s full camp interview.

Be Desperate

The closing instruction was five seconds long and I would put it on the wall of any gym.

“Be desperate to get better all the time with all your time possible.”

Jordan Kilganon

Desperate is a strange word to choose. It is not disciplined, not consistent, not any of the words that show up on training accounts. Desperate is what you are when you have not got the thing yet and you cannot stand it. Which is exactly the state he is telling Piotr to protect, because the danger of getting to the top is that you finally feel fine.

Piotr also said the part that made the whole interview land differently. He said Kilganon was hyping him up while he dunked, and that it was a pleasure to meet him not as a dunker but as a person. He wrote his own version in meeting the reason he started.

This got filmed because Dennis Yu and I ran a session at camp on how dunkers show up on Google and in AI tools, then offered to interview anyone who wanted one. The mechanics are in our repurposing system for athletes. Dunker Spotlight took the framework angle in his advice to young dunkers, Athlete Spotlight applied it to athletes in every other sport, and BlitzMetrics turned the drill origin into a lesson about hitting a ceiling.

Piotr is eighteen and the list of people ahead of him is still long. That is the good part of his career, and nobody ever tells you it is the good part until it is over.

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.

Two years. That is the whole distance between a kid throwing dunks on outdoor rims in Poland and a dunker with a FIBA podium finish and another FIBA event booked for the following week. This is the longest interview we filmed at The Dunk Camp in Utah, and it is the one where Piotr Zawiślak, the Polish dunker, actually gives up the numbers.

Joe Kenney ran this one, not me. Joe is Hoopin Nate’s dad, and he asks the questions a parent asks rather than the questions a dunker asks, which is why it goes somewhere the usual camp interview does not. He opened with the timeline.

“Two years ago, I was just a kid who was doing all his dunks outdoor. I used to dream about doing FIBA, and everything.”

Piotr Zawiślak

The Record He Built in 24 Months

Here is what is already on the board. Piotr competed in a FIBA contest in Croatia and finished third. He is 18. He had a second FIBA event in France sitting one week after camp, meaning he flew from Salt Lake City into a European contest week with basically no reset. He also holds the Black Band, one of 13 in the world.

“I already did a FIBA contest in Croatia. I came third, but I’m proud of it.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Joe’s read on that is the emotional spine of the whole clip, and I think he is right. Most people carry a dream around for decades and never get within sight of it. Piotr said the words out loud two years ago and is now standing in the middle of them.

“People go a lifetime without achieving their dreams… Two years ago, you dreamt of FIBA… You’re living your dream already.”

Joe Kenney

44 to 45, Chasing 50

Joe asked the question every dunk fan actually wants answered. Piotr says he wants to be the best dunker alive, so how far is he from it? The answer came back as a number, not a speech. He is at 44 or 45 inches. He thinks the version of himself that wins needs to be around 50.

“I think I need to improve my bounce more just to get around maybe 50 inches.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Five or six inches sounds small until you have chased them. At 44 you are already past the point where general training moves the needle. Every inch after that is a fight with the weight room, your tendons, your body weight, and your calendar. He is not guessing at the number either. He knows exactly where he stands.

The Hole in the Bag

The most useful thing he said had nothing to do with vertical. Piotr is a dribble dunker. That is his whole identity on tape, and it is a real strength, because setting your own timing off the bounce is harder than it looks. But he named the gap himself: he needs dunks off the lob, and he needs to start working off the backboard.

Anyone who has been in a contest bracket knows why that matters. Rounds get short, the rim gets loud, and a judge who has already seen you put the ball on the floor three times starts scoring the fourth one lower. Lob dunks and board work are how you keep a bag from being predictable. He is 18 and he has already diagnosed his own tape.

The 720 Is the White Whale

Joe asked which dunk still gets away from him. No hesitation.

“So 720. Yeah, 100%… because I already did 540 a few times. But I want to do 720 so bad.”

Piotr Zawiślak

He has landed 540 several times, which means the rotation mechanics are not the wall. The wall is air time. That extra half turn has to happen inside the same hang, so the 720 loops right back to the 50 inch goal. His dunk list and his jump goal are the same project described two different ways.

Why Isaiah Rivera

Piotr’s answer on who he looks up to is the most technical part of the clip, and it is not hero worship. Isaiah Rivera jumps off the same approach he does. Isaiah is right handed. The dunks are built out of the same components. So Piotr is not studying a style he cannot borrow from, he is studying his own style five years down the road.

“He’s pushing his limit in the weight room… All of my dunks are really similar to him.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Joe added the part that anybody who has been around Isaiah will confirm.

“The best thing about Isaiah Rivera is that he treats people with dignity and respect.”

Joe Kenney

The second name he gave was Lipek, the Polish dunker, who is a doctor now. That one matters differently. Seeing somebody from his own country finish school without quitting the sport is why Piotr says he is planning on college and possibly physical therapy school. A role model who proves the exit ramp exists is worth as much as one who proves the ceiling is high.

Monday at Camp

If you want the receipts on where his bag is right now, he gave them.

“I hit almost all of my dunks. 360 Underboth, 540, 360 J reach, 360 behind the back, Eastbay.”

Piotr Zawiślak

That is a full session, in one night, in front of a room of dunkers he had only ever watched on a phone. The 360 Underboth is his signature and the reason a lot of us found him in the first place. Hitting it at camp, in America, on his first trip here, is the closest thing to a stamp this sport hands out.

Who Takes the Reins

Joe pointed out something the community avoids talking about. There was a 38 year old jumper in that building who was still incredible, and a lot of the names that built modern dunking are on the back nine. So he asked who takes over.

His answer named the low rim generation first, then listed me, himself, and Hoopin Nate. Joe added Dillan McCarthy, and then Cam Hazzard, who was not at camp that night.

He said Dylan Haugen, which is me, first, and I am not going to pretend that was not nice to hear. He named himself second, correctly. He named Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney for the low rim work and the Eastbay windmills on ten feet, then added Dillan McCarthy. Joe put Cam Hazzard in the conversation too. Both of them said they hope Isaiah and Jordan Kilganon stick around, because the next group still needs them in the gym.

Piotr wrote his own version of this at outdoor rims to the FIBA circuit. There is a longer look at what those two years actually took, an athlete side of it in living the dream on schedule, and the reason we film these at all in documenting the climb while it happens. All of it started with the session we taught at camp.

Watch the whole thing at the top. Five minutes, one dunker, and the clearest map anybody in this sport has given us of exactly what they have, exactly what they are missing, and exactly what they are chasing.

One of my favorite things that happened at camp this year had nothing to do with a rim. Dennis Yu, a longtime digital marketer, pulled Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney aside for two minutes and asked him the questions nobody in our community ever asks. Not vertical. Not what shoes. Not how many attempts on the make. He asked about the hard days, about one specific night with his family, and about what Nate would be doing if dunking never existed.

If you follow dunking, you know Nate. Omaha, 5’7″, a billion plus views, widely called the best mini hoop dunker who has ever lived, low rim title winner at The Dunk Camp in 2025. What you probably have not heard is him talking about any of it in his own words for longer than a caption. That is what this clip is.

A Million Jumps Is Not a Marketing Number

Nate’s dad Joe told Dennis that Nate has taken about a million jumps. Dennis brought it up on camera and Nate basically shrugged and said somewhere around there. Anybody who trains knows why that answer is so flat. You do not count. You just show up.

Then Dennis asked what a million jumps taught him, and Nate gave the answer that made me want to write this up.

“That you should never give up. There’s been a lot of hard times in that million jumps, but as long as you persevere, you’re gonna keep making progress.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

Every dunker reading this knows the hard times he’s talking about. The month where nothing feels right. The session where you land the trick once and then can’t repeat it for six weeks. The clip you were sure would pop and it does nothing. That is most of dunking. The one second everybody sees is a rounding error against the hours nobody sees.

What makes Nate’s version of that grind different is how long the runway was. Nerf hoop on a kitchen cabinet door, then mini hoops, then low rims, then real ten foot rims. Each of those is a full rebuild of your mechanics. He didn’t skip a step, he just kept adding rim height for years.

The Night SportsCenter Posted Him

Dennis asked when he realized he was famous. Nate wouldn’t take the word.

“I would never consider myself famous, first off. But the first night I got posted by SportsCenter. I remember my brother came into my room screaming ‘Oh, my goodness.'”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

This is the guy who has been on Jimmy Kimmel and shot a Gatorade spot with Michael Jordan. He still corrects the premise before he answers. Then he described what actually happened that night, and it’s the best line in the whole interview.

“my entire family sat on my parents’ bed and just watched the video and looked at the comments.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

Brother sprinting down the hall screaming. Whole family piled on the bed in Omaha reading a comment section together. If you’ve ever had one clip take off, you know that exact feeling of the house going insane over something that was, twelve hours earlier, just you and a hoop. He called it his first little bit of fame and then went back to training.

Golf and Editing

Dennis asked what people might not know about him. Nate said golf and editing, which I did not see coming. If he weren’t dunking, he’d want to play professional golf. That was the immediate answer, no thinking about it.

He used to be a Jordan Spieth guy and has drifted into being a Scottie Scheffler fan. He even called himself out for picking the best player in the world, then gave the real reason.

“He’s got a good faith, and I think he’s a good role model.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

Dennis added the part about not getting too high and not getting too low, which honestly is the whole skill in this sport. Nate and Dennis agreed to go play a round together in Omaha, so that’s happening at some point.

The editing answer is the one that stuck with me, because a lot of dunkers treat editing as the chore after the fun part.

“It just allows you to be creative and tell a story in a way that most people might not see it as.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

That’s a filmmaker’s answer from a guy people think of as a jumper. And it explains a lot about why his stuff hits. The edit is where you decide if people see a trick or a story. Show the misses or hide them. Keep the rim sound or bury it under music. Cut on the take-off or on the landing. Those calls are why one dunker’s clip gets shared and another’s doesn’t, with the same dunk in both.

Hoopin Nate, But Soon Dunking Nate

Dennis wrapped the interview with a line that turned into the whole point.

“Guys, Hoopin Nate, but soon Dunking Nate.”

Dennis Yu

Dennis said it as a joke and it landed as a real observation. The name Hoopin Nate comes from mini hoops. That’s the origin story and it’s what built the audience. But the guy is on ten foot rims now, and the name is starting to describe where he came from rather than where he is.

That’s a genuinely tricky spot for any dunker with a following. Your handle is your equity. Nate has 210,000 people on Instagram who found him through mini hoop content. You can’t just change the sign on the door. What you can do is let the work move first and let the perception catch up, which is what he’s doing.

He’s already got the receipts. At camp he put down a 360 windmill on the ten foot rim, and a 9 foot Eastbay Hide and Seek, which Dennis described on camera as an under the leg behind the back. He trained with Isaiah Rivera in Florida in 2025 and came out with six new ten foot tricks. The mini hoop king label is running out of road.

Why Dennis Was Even Holding a Camera

Dennis and I ran a session at camp on how athletes show up on Google and in AI answers. We audited all 76 campers first and posted the results publicly on the Dunk Camp 2026 audit leaderboard. Nate came out first, which surprised him more than it surprised us. Then Dennis offered to interview anyone in the room and turn it into something permanent, which is exactly what this became. The full method is in the 76 athlete repurposing writeup.

These two minutes went six directions. Nate wrote his own version in his SportsCenter night story. Dennis pulled out the persistence lesson underneath it. Dunker Spotlight explained why the numbers are not the story, there’s a version for athletes in other sports on why a highlight reel isn’t enough, and the marketing side sits in the story behind the numbers.

Go follow Hoopin Nate. And in a year or two, when the name has changed, remember it started on a Nerf hoop stuck to a kitchen cabinet.

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.