The story they ran is High school YouTuber wins local and national contests as pro dunker. I was 17. I was 5’11”. I had walked away from organized basketball after my sophomore year so I could treat dunking like the job. They did not come to watch a tryout. They came because I was already winning contests for prize money and building the content around it.

That clip is the KARE 11 segment.

Read the original KARE 11 story. KARE 11 also keeps the station video page for the segment. That is the source. This page is my side of that day.

That day in the Spring Lake Park gym

The dateline on their story is Spring Lake Park, Minnesota. They filmed in the school gym I already knew.

KARE 11 wrote that I was not preparing for basketball tryouts. That line is the whole setup. A local crew walked into a high school gym and found a kid working on dunks instead of a team offense.

I went to school in that building and I played basketball there. By the time the cameras showed up, the gym was a place to train, film, and talk about a career with no Friday-night roster spot. It is the first local TV story.

Why I quit basketball after sophomore year

KARE 11 said it plainly: I quit playing organized basketball to focus on dunk contests and content creation.

Basketball is a team sport with a season, a coach, and a role. Dunking is an individual sport hiding inside that game. I wanted the second one enough to leave the first one.

I had already been dunking for years by then. I had already been posting. I had already seen that contests paid, that clips traveled, and that the work I wanted sat closer to a rim and a camera than to a playbook.

The KARE 11 crew gave that choice a local news frame: a 17-year-old senior, 5’11”, who left the team after sophomore year because the contest circuit and the content were the actual plan.

First dunk at 13, then five contest wins

KARE 11 used the first dunk as the origin point, and they got the numbers right. I first dunked at 13, at 5’8″. I am 5’11” now. At my height, a regulation dunk is not a casual milestone. It is the thing that hooks you and keeps you in the gym.

They also wrote that dunk contests used to live as a halftime attraction, and that I was now entering them for prize money, local and national. On the day they filmed, they said I already had five contest wins against some of the best team basketball players my age.

That five is the number for that story. My site now lists six contest wins. That sixth one is later. When I describe the KARE 11 day, I keep their count.

They used my latest win at the time as the picture of the job. In Waconia I put my brother on a chair, turned him into a 7-foot assistant, and jumped over him to take first prize. KARE 11 called it a viral moment I was prepared for, because I was already a content creator, already earning money from videos, and already getting brand inquiries.

I told them what that dunk felt like in the room:

And you could immediately see the energy in the crowd shift. It’s the best feeling in the world. I mean I plan these things out for weeks, maybe even months.

That is still how I build a contest dunk. I do not invent it on the floor. I plan it, I rep it, and I save it for the right night.

The two lines I still stand behind

KARE 11 let me talk about the business side, not only the bounce. Those are the lines I still mean.

I’ve got a podcast, I’ve got YouTube, Instagram, you name it. All the social medias. I feel like I’m very entrepreneurial and I’ve kind of realized that to get to where I want to be, I have to do a ton of different things.

That was true at 17 in a school gym. It is true now. Dunking is the sport. The career is the sport plus the shows, the podcast, the posts, and the brand work that keeps the sport visible.

The second line is the goal I was willing to say on local TV:

I do want to, and think I have a chance to be the best dunker in the world, at some point in time.

I did not say I was the best dunker in the world that afternoon. I said I want it, and I think I have a chance, later. That is the honest version. You do not get there by winning one high school contest. You get there by stacking years of dunks, nights, and work that does not fit in a single highlight.

KARE 11 also noted that I started by sharing trick shots from the driveway as a kid, and that I now share tips and training for other kids plus the highlight reels. The driveway clips came first. The contests came next. The TV crew showed up after both were already real.

The content stack I was already running

When I said podcast, YouTube, and Instagram, I was not listing hobbies. I was listing the job.

I host the Dunk Talk podcast with Hunter Castona. I started it to put other dunkers on a mic, not only myself. The show has passed 70 episodes. Guests have included Jordan Kilganon, Isaiah Rivera, Jordan Southerland, and Donovan Hawkins. On the KARE 11 day, the podcast was already part of the sentence I gave them.

I also founded the Minnesota Dunk Squad. That is the crew at home: sessions, shows, contests, and the people who train beside me. KARE 11 did not need the whole roster. They needed the fact that I was already building something around dunking in Minnesota, not only collecting personal clips.

The YouTube and Instagram side started as driveway trick shots and training tapes. By the time the crew arrived, those channels were paying and brands had started to write. That is why they framed me as a high school YouTuber and a pro dunker in the same headline.

I told them I had realized I had to do a ton of different things to get where I wanted to be. That stack is what I meant. Dunk the ball. Film the work. Talk to the people in the sport. Put the crew on a schedule.

What changed after that hit

I keep KARE 11 on the site because it was the first time a Minnesota newsroom wrote the career down in public.

After that day I kept competing. The site now lists six contest wins, one more than the five KARE 11 had on the night they filmed. I kept hosting Dunk Talk. I kept running the Minnesota Dunk Squad. I started speaking with my mentor Dennis Yu. Off the court I co-founded Local Service Spotlight with him.

I also went back to The Dunk Camp. I first walked into that camp at 14. In 2026 I taught there. I wrote that night in my Dunk Camp recap.

KARE 11 wrote that I planned to continue marketing and brand-building after high school, with my focus remaining on my favorite skill. That is what I did. The dunks are the center. The rest of the work is how people find them.

The next TV hit was FOX 5 Atlanta

The next time a news camera pointed at me for dunking, it was not in Spring Lake Park. It was the FOX 5 Atlanta hit on August 7, 2026.

Eric Perry had me on the Friday 3pm hour to talk about Shaq’s DunkMan League. I was 18. I was the youngest person in the league. I took the same career KARE 11 had filmed in a high school gym and I explained it to Atlanta, where the league actually plays.

KARE 11 is the local story of the choice. FOX 5 is the league story of where the choice went.

Read the original KARE 11 story. The next camera was FOX 5 Atlanta.

Eric Perry had me on the Friday 3pm hour on August 7, 2026. I am 18. I am the youngest person in the league. He had sat in the stands earlier that week and wanted a straight answer for people at home: what this thing is, how you train for it, and why Atlanta should care.

That clip is the hit. The rest of this page is what I said on it.

What DunkMan actually is

Perry opened by teasing a dunk league in Midtown around Atlantic Station, then brought me in as one of the youngest league members. He asked me to describe DunkMan for someone who had never heard of it.

I told him it is the first professional dunking league. Not a one-off contest in a high school gym. A league built for professional dunkers.

DunkMan is the first ever professional dunking league.

There are 24 dunkers in it. Guys from the United States, plus Brazil, the UK, and China. Shaquille O’Neal commissioned it with Authentic Brands. The prize is $500,000, the biggest prize in dunk contest history. Group-stage nights have been Tuesdays in Atlanta at OT Arena, around Atlantic Station, and you can stream them on TNT and HBO Max.

People still treat dunking like a halftime stunt. This is a tournament-style league with group-stage events and a world championship at the end. I also said this week’s group stage was Group Stage D at Atlanta OT Arena on Tuesday at 8:00 p.m.

How a Minnesota dunker ended up on Atlanta TV

Perry had already done the homework. He told viewers he came earlier in the week, Tuesday night, and was blown away by the talent. He did not need me to sell the dunks. He needed someone inside the league to put language on what he had just watched.

I am from Minnesota. I went to Spring Lake Park. KARE 11 came to that gym when I was 17, after I had already quit organized basketball to go all-in on dunking. That was the first local TV hit. FOX 5 was the next one, because the league I signed with plays in Atlanta.

Short version: I started on low rims as a kid, I built a career out of contests and content, and I signed as the youngest athlete in the field. On FOX 5 I kept the focus on the league itself. That was the question Perry asked.

What Eric Perry asked me

Perry walked the segment in a straight line: the league, the prep, the crowd scoring, what the sport means, and how a kid starts.

I answered in that order, with no script. The longer answers are in the sections below. Two things sat outside those questions.

He had B-roll rolling while I talked. The screen showed a dunk on a car, and I said that was me. Before the segment ended, he said FOX 5 should bring me into the station, put a rim up, and have me teach some of their people. I thanked him. Then I told him I would be there Sunday.

How I prepare when the prize is $500,000

Perry wanted the training answer. People see a Windmill or a dunk over a person and assume it is all bounce. Bounce matters. The week-to-week work is more boring than that.

I told him I started young, messing around on low rims and learning dunks there. You learn the trick where you can finish it, then you take it up. Most of the year I do whatever dunks I feel like doing. Once it is competition time, I pick the dunks I want and I rep them.

I also told him I was at the gym during the hit.

I’m actually at the gym right now. I’m about to go do some dunks. The TV hit is a short window in a day I still have to train. A league with a $500,000 championship, group stages, and TNT is a season. You pick fewer dunks and you hit them cleaner.

The fans hold up 7s through 10s

The part people at home notice is the scoring. After a dunk, the audience holds up cards: 7, 8, 9, and 10. Perry called it out because he had sat in those seats.

I told him dunking in an empty gym and dunking in front of people who are scoring you are not the same thing. If the room is quiet, you feel it. If the room is in it, you feel that too. The dunkers feed off that.

I also told him I had already been in that building as a fan. A couple of weeks before the hit, I went to a night just to watch. People were meeting Shaq after. People were meeting the dunkers after. The city was in it.

Dunking has been a small sport with loud gyms and almost no mainstream stage. When a local news anchor can describe the scoring cards from his own night in the stands, the sport is starting to look like a league. I want fans to leave thinking this is a real night, on TNT and in the building, not only a viral clip.

The advice I give kids who want to dunk

Perry closed with beginner advice. I gave him the same answer I give in a gym.

If you have a lower rim, that is the best way to start. I called it the law of specificity on air: the more you do something, the better you get at it. Start on 7-foot and 8-foot rims. Learn the dunks there. Move up as the bounce and the technique catch up.

That work trains bounce and dunk technique at the same time. That is what I did. That is what a lot of the guys in this league did. It is a lower rim and a lot of attempts.

I teach that same progression when I am back at The Dunk Camp. I first walked into that camp at 14. In 2026 I stood at the front of the room with my mentor Dennis Yu and taught 76 dunkers the brand side of this sport. I wrote that night in my Dunk Camp recap. The on-court advice has not changed since I was the kid in the back of the room. Get a low rim and do the dunk.

Why this league matters for the sport

I said on air that DunkMan means everything to me. I am 18 and the youngest person in the league. Plenty of dunkers older than me have been hoping for a stage like this for a long time.

You can win contests and post clips and still not have a league, a $500,000 championship, or a weekly night on TNT. This is the first professional league, tournament style, and everyone is going for crazy dunks because the format and the money ask for it.

I am excited to be in it, and excited for the dunkers who put their whole lives into this. Perry closed by talking about the world dunk championship and the $500,000 grand prize. Then he said he would stay in the audience. That is the right split. He covers it. I dunk it.

Where to watch, and what I said I would do next

Watch the YouTube upload at the top of this page. That is my recording of the hit, titled Fox 5 Atlanta - Dylan Haugen DunkMan (8/7/2026). FOX 5 also posted the station’s DunkMan clip under “Shaq launches $500k dunk league at Atlantic Station.”

I host the Dunk Talk podcast with Hunter Castona and I run the Minnesota Dunk Squad. Off the court I co-founded Local Service Spotlight with Dennis Yu.

I told Perry I would be there Sunday. Watch the clip at the top, then find the next night on TNT or HBO Max.

I searched my name recently and my Google Knowledge Panel was gone. Not smaller. Gone. My entity had split into a bunch of scattered, conflicting versions of me, with really low confidence scores, 24 in the case of the one that should have been me. For reference, I had been sitting above 200. And nothing on my end had changed. If anything I was doing better than ever, repurposing all my videos into articles.

The fix came from a Facebook post

That’s when I came across a Facebook post from Dennis Yu about fixing your Wikidata to improve your Google Knowledge Panel. He wrote a full article on the fix as well. I implemented it, and I’m back up to a 208 confidence score. The highest I think I’ve ever been is around 250, so that’s pretty much where I was before everything fell apart. The panel itself is back too, with the overview, my age, and my social profiles. It’s still missing a little bit, but it’s in a way better place.

What Wikidata actually is

Wikidata is a giant database of entities and facts. Google and the other search engines pull from it when they build Knowledge Panels. Every entity gets its own Q number; mine is Q138557395. Every fact on an entity is stored as a subject, a property, and a value, which is what makes the whole thing machine readable.

Going through every single claim

If you don’t have an entity, you create one. I had to create mine originally, and that’s the case for a lot of the people we work with. If you do have one, you go through every statement on it and make sure each claim points to the right thing and has a reference backing it up. One example from mine: the Minnesota Dunk Squad, the dunk squad I created, is on my entity as a sports team, and the claim references the Dunk Squad website.

Then you fill in the missing properties. I’m a human male in the United States. My name is Dylan Haugen. My birthday is on there. My occupations are on there. I actually speak Spanish, which I don’t think I had said publicly before this video. The goal is to get every fact about you into that machine readable format, each one with a reference showing it’s real. And the cool thing is you can have Claude do essentially all of it.

Person schema ties it to your website

Once the Wikidata entity is solid, the last piece is on your own site. We added Person schema to my personal brand site with a sameAs property pointing to my Wikidata URL, my LinkedIn, my Instagram, and the rest of my profiles. Claude handled that through Rank Math on my site, and there are multiple ways to do it. The point is that Google can now see the website, the Wikidata entry, and the social profiles as one entity instead of fragments.

I didn’t change anything else, which is what makes this a clean result. The Wikidata repair and the schema are the whole difference between a 24 and a 208. We’ve implemented the same thing for a lot of our clients, giving them Wikidata and applying it as schema on their websites, and seen some very good improvements, like the builds we documented for Trenton Sandler and Brooke Lance. The full case study version of this fix is on BlitzMetrics.

Look yourself up

We built a tool called the Knowledge Graph Explorer that searches Google’s Knowledge Graph and shows you the entities on your name, with the confidence score and your KGMID, which is kind of like your Social Security number on Google. If your panel has ever disappeared, or never showed up at all, start there.

From there, you can literally hand this article, or the video above, to Claude and say: check if I have a Wikidata entity, optimize it if I do, create one if I don’t, and then apply it as schema on my site. That prompt is basically the whole fix. It’s the same reason my whole article pipeline runs through Claude now. This stuff used to take weeks of manual work, and now it doesn’t.

When I met Dennis Yu about a year and a half ago, the first thing he told me to do was claim my Google Knowledge Panel. The second was to repurpose every one of my YouTube videos into articles. The panel part happened. I claimed it, I’ve since helped some of the world’s best dunkers claim theirs, and my confidence score on Google is sitting at 208 right now. The repurposing part is the one I quit on, and it took me until now to fix that.

Why I stopped the first time

Back then the workflow was ChatGPT and custom GPTs writing the drafts, then me going into WordPress by hand to paste everything in, set the slug, write the meta description, and do all the Rank Math optimization. I was trying hard to make every article actually good, and each one took me about an hour. That pace works for two or three articles. It does not work for a library like mine.

My main channel has 1.9K videos on it. The Dunk Talk Podcast channel has another 141, and 69 of those are full episodes. My digital marketing channel, the one this video lives on, has 44 more. Then there are the 8 podcasts I’ve been on as a guest. None of it was organized in a way that made repurposing easy, so after a while I stopped. There was higher value work in front of me, and an hour per article was a price I wasn’t willing to keep paying.

The inventory sheet came first

The system starts with a Google Sheet that Claude built by going through every channel and pulling every video into one place. Four tabs: Personal Videos, Dunk Talk Episodes, my digital marketing videos, and Guest Appearances. Each row has the video title, the YouTube link, the article link once it exists, and a QA’d column. The podcast tab also gets episode numbers, which makes it a lot easier to look at.

Out of everything, I marked 143 personal videos as worth repurposing, plus all 69 podcast episodes, the 44 marketing videos, and the 8 guest appearances. That’s 264 articles that are going to exist because of this system. I walked through how the tracker itself is structured in a video on the Local Service Spotlight channel if you want to copy the format, but honestly, you can just ask Claude to build it.

Teaching Claude to sound like me

The first two episode articles on dunktalks.com didn’t go straight to publish. I read them and talked to Claude about every section I didn’t like: this part isn’t how I would say it, this section should lead differently, this quote matters more than that one. Those corrections got saved as skills, so there’s now an actual knowledge base describing what my articles should look like.

That’s why the QA’d column exists. Early on I check everything. After enough reps, Claude already knows how to write them properly, and that column will matter less. The newest articles are already starting to look and sound like me, with the embedded episode, the meta description, the slug, and real quotes from the guests pulled straight out of the transcript.

Claude Code and an application password

More recently I moved this into Claude Code, the same setup I used when I built a prospect finder tool in 20 minutes. It takes all the feedback I’ve given it and edits the posts directly on WordPress through an application password, so nothing gets pasted by hand anymore. I’m also working on Google API access so it can update the tracker sheet on its own. This has been way faster and way better, and it’s a long way from the days when I was stitching automations together one tool at a time.

The part that matters: it has to be real

Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines have a second E for experience, and they added it because they knew AI tools would let people mass generate content. That’s exactly what this system doesn’t do. Claude isn’t making up what I would probably say about a topic. It takes the actual transcript from each video and repurposes it, pulling out the key details, the names, the numbers, and even direct quotes from the people in the video.

That’s also why this feeds my Knowledge Panel. Every article is corroborating information about me on a site I own, and it makes my relationships public. I interviewed Jordan Kilganon, the best dunker of all time, back on episode 47 of Dunk Talk. Google should be able to see that. When my panel recently disappeared, fixing my Wikidata brought it back, and we published the case study of that repair for anyone who wants the exact steps. The long game is this: hundreds of real articles all pointing at the same entity.

Do this with your own library

If you have videos sitting around, this is the best time there has ever been to do this. Have Claude inventory everything into a sheet, train it on your first few articles, and then let it run. It’s the same playbook we ran for Paul Ryazanov’s content pipeline. You can check your own confidence score with the Knowledge Graph Explorer we built, and the company-side breakdown of this whole build, the full pipeline on BlitzMetrics, walks through it step by step. And if you have a podcast, hit me up. I’d love to get on some more soon.

For about a year now I have been telling people about a dunker out of Poland named Piotr Zawiślak. I usually explain him with a movie reference, because it is the fastest way to get people to understand what watching him is like.

“if you guys know the Rocky movie where there’s that really insane Russian dude… he comes and just beats the crap out of Rocky. That’s how I always think about this guy.”

Dylan Haugen

That is genuinely how his dunks look. I first found him on Instagram when he was 17, doing 360s off both legs and combos most people never land in their life. I am 18 now, he is 18, and it turns out our birthdays are two days apart. In America I am probably the best 18-year-old dunker going right now, and then this guy pops up on the other side of the world doing things that make you sit up. So when he told me he was flying to The Dunk Camp in Utah this year, I was genuinely excited to finally meet him in person.

We are pretty different as dunkers. Different styles, different builds, different countries. But we are the same age and both good for 18, and there is a mutual respect there that does not need a lot of words. I asked him how his week at camp went, and his answer said everything about why this trip mattered to him.

“It was crazy, man. That was one of the best weeks of my life. I’m very grateful to having opportunity to dunk with all of you guys.”

Piotr Zawiślak

He earned it. He told me Jordan was hyping him up and the whole room was going crazy after his dunks, and I saw it happen. He also got to session with Nathan “Hoopin Nate” Kenney and the rest of the crew. If you want the whole thing in his own words, Piotr wrote about it in his first post about the week, and it is worth reading from his side.

Connecting Across Two Countries

The part I keep thinking about is how far apart our paths are and how much they still overlap. I compete in American contests and I am in DunkMan, Shaq’s league, which is an American thing right now that keeps expanding. Piotr is out in Poland and around Europe doing contests all over the world. Two completely different lanes, same sport, same age, both chasing the same thing.

“So super cool to always connect with people, who’s just different, man. The life, the things you do are super cool.”

Dylan Haugen

That is the whole reason I love this sport growing internationally. You get to meet someone from a completely different background who lives and breathes the same thing you do. Piotr put it simply at the end, and it summed the trip up for both of us.

“I’m just happy to finally meet you, dude.”

Piotr Zawiślak

We talked more about what it means to have two of the best young dunkers on earth link up like this in our Dunk Talk conversation about the meeting. And here is something most American dunk fans do not realize: Piotr is one of the best in the world and most people over here have never heard his name. I got into why that gap exists over in the Dunker Spotlight feature on him.

After meeting him, I did what I do for dunkers I believe in: we started building his real presence online, including his own site. If you want to see how one short interview turns into an actual personal brand foundation, that is broken down in how we built Piotr’s site from one interview, which is one example of the system we taught at The Dunk Camp. Watch the clip at the top, and go give the best 18-year-old dunker in Europe a follow.

I first walked into The Dunk Camp in 2022 when I was 14 years old. I had no clue that four years later I’d be standing at the front of the room alongside my mentor Dennis Yu, teaching 76 dunkers the exact system that turned me from a random kid posting trampoline dunks into someone with a Google Knowledge Panel and a verified presence in AI search results. That camp in Salt Lake City this year was a full-circle moment I genuinely didn’t see coming.

I want to be honest about where I was before any of this happened. Before Dennis and I started working together, if you searched my name online, it was just noise. No clear identity, no structure, no signal.

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

That’s me on stage at the camp, quoting my own situation from not that long ago. The fact that I can now say the opposite is true is not something I take lightly. I have a confidence score over 3,000 on Dennis’s scale (Jordan sits around 1,700; Shaq is around 40,000). I’m verified on Google. I have a Knowledge Panel. And I got here through a specific, repeatable process that Dennis taught me and that I’ve now started applying for others around me in the dunk world.

How Dennis Came Into My Life Through Dunking

I always tell people about Dennis the same way he introduces me to people he knows: through the dunks first. Dennis found me because of a trampoline dunk video. He saw it, reached out, and ended up inviting me to a Vegas trampoline session with Donovan Hawkins. That’s how we met. Not through a networking event, not through some online course, through dunking.

Dennis has 30-plus years in digital marketing and built the analytics infrastructure at Yahoo in the late 1990s. He’s run roughly a billion dollars in ads for brands like Nike, Adidas, Red Bull, Starbucks, the Golden State Warriors, and Rosetta Stone. He’s the founder of BlitzMetrics. When he talks about the mechanics of how search engines and AI systems identify and understand a person, he’s not guessing. He built the systems.

“I’m a former search engine engineer. Back in the late ’90s, I built the analytics at Yahoo.”

What I think is actually cool about Dennis is that the same frameworks he used with the Warriors and Nike are the same ones we brought into a room of dunkers in Salt Lake City. The scale is different. The method is the same.

“these are the same ones we’ve trained on Adidas and Nike and the Warriors and Red Bull.”

The Knowledge Panel Is Not a Vanity Metric

One thing that kept coming up in the room was the assumption that being verified on Google is basically like the blue checkmark on TikTok, a status symbol. Dennis pushes back hard on that. I’ve heard him say this enough times that it’s genuinely changed how I think about my own presence online.

“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.”

The way Dennis frames it, the confidence score is a measure of how well Google understands who you are and what you do. Anything above 400 is what he calls celebrity tier. The reason it matters beyond Google is that the same structured data that gives you a Knowledge Panel is what makes you show up correctly when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude who you are. It’s the same signal. If Google understands you, AI systems understand you. If neither does, you’re invisible in two places at once.

I built my panel by getting verified, setting up proper Person schema on this site, and making sure my Wikidata entity pointed to accurate, consistent information. It wasn’t complicated, but it was methodical. That’s what we walked the campers through in Salt Lake City, and you can see the full breakdown with rankings in the audit leaderboard we published at dunkerspotlight.com/dunkcamp26.

Building Brooke’s Presence and Cam’s

Two of the people I care most about in this space are Brooke Lance and Cam Hazzard, and we’ve been doing this work with both of them. Brooke landed the number two spot on the audit leaderboard at the camp, which I was genuinely proud of, not just because she’s my girlfriend, but because of the actual work that went into it.

Brooke already has a Wikidata entity, a personal brand site, and a growing content presence. I’ve been building that with her over time. On stage I was straightforward about why.

“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.”

With Cam, the story is a little different because Cam runs hard and fast. Dennis and the team built camhazzard.com in about 20 minutes over lunch from a single 20-minute interview video, the day before Cam spoke at a conference. Cam then went and built his own positive-mentions agent, which he demoed at the Detroit AI Summit. He’s also a DunkMan League athlete with a 50-inch vertical, and he now ranks for nearly his entire first three pages of Google on his own name. The work compounds. You can read more about how that came together in the BlitzMetrics piece on how we built Cam’s personal brand AI.

The System We Actually Use

People in the room kept asking what tools we were using, and the honest answer is: Claude, mostly. But the way we use it is not what most people expect. There’s no magic prompt. There’s no one click. You direct it the way you’d direct a coworker.

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

The central piece of our setup is what I call the brain, which is literally a folder of files on my computer. Every article we write, every task we run, every piece of context the agents need lives in there. The agents read it, use it, and add to it after each task. The system gets smarter each time it runs because it documents itself.

The content output side works the same way. One video becomes articles across a network of sites. Each article lives on a different domain, in a different voice, for a different audience, but they all point back to the source and to each other. That’s the repurposing system I’ve built out with the team, and if you want the step-by-step breakdown for how we apply it to the dunk world specifically, the full dunker visibility playbook is worth reading.

For the dunkers at the camp who want to see how this same logic applies to local businesses and service providers, the same playbook for local service businesses connects the dots. And Dennis wrote his own take on the knowledge gap that kept showing up in the room at Dennis Yu on the creator knowledge gap.

Why I Care About Pushing Dunking Forward

I’ve been dunking since I was 13. I host the Dunk Talk podcast. I’m a DunkMan athlete. Dunking is the thing I built my whole identity around, so when I get to do something like this, show up at a camp I first attended as a 14-year-old and now teach at it, it means something real.

The camp host, Andy Nicholson, said something in the intro that I keep coming back to. He was talking about watching where some of the athletes have gone since coming through the program, and he said about me:

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

That hit differently than I expected it to. I’ve put a lot of hours into the dunk stuff, and having someone who’s watched that journey acknowledge it out loud was one of those moments where you realize the work actually shows.

2026 is a real year for DunkMan. The league is growing, the athletes in it are serious, and the sport has legitimate momentum. I want the people in this community to be able to build on top of that, to have a real presence, real search visibility, real brand equity, not just great dunks that disappear after they post them. That’s why I care about this work. And that’s why I’ll keep showing up at camps and teaching it.

If you want to watch the full session and see what we covered, the video is at the top of this page. We also covered the session from a community angle over on our Dunk Camp branding session recap, and for the repurposing methodology behind how one talk becomes six articles, the one-video repurposing system at BlitzMetrics walks through exactly how we built this package.

Day 1 of Dunk Camp 2026 is in the books, and this year we are out in Salt Lake City. It was a really good first day for me. My jumping felt amazing, I hit two new dunks, and I got close on two more that would have made it my best session ever. Here is everything that went down on the opening day, including a 52.5-inch vertical that had the whole gym talking.

Why a lot of the pros sat Day 1 out

One interesting thing about Day 1 is that a lot of the pros actually held off on jumping. Dunk Camp runs four days and builds to the Dunk Show at the end, so the smart play is to pace yourself. In past years I have watched guys go big on day one, then deal with some nagging injury by day four that keeps them out of the Show. So this time a bunch of them sat the opening session out on purpose. It is the same lesson I keep coming back to: you are not training for any single day, you are training to still be standing for the one that matters. You can see what a full opening day looks like when everyone does let it fly in my recap of Dunk Camp Day 1 back in 2023.

I went the other way and jumped, because my body felt good and I wanted to take advantage of it. That is the gamble at a camp like this. You read your own body and decide.

The two new dunks I hit

The first new one was a Windmill Elbow off a Hand-Off. I have been chasing that dunk for a while now. I tried a bunch of different methods to set it up, finally settled on the Hand-Off, and then hit it first try today, which was crazy. When something you have been grinding on for months falls on the very first attempt, it almost does not feel real.

The second was a 360 Scoop off a lob, also first try. I have done a version of that off a Hand-Off a long time ago, so it had been forever since I landed it, and getting it off a lob today felt great.

I also got really close on Underboth and a 360 Eastbay. Honestly, if either one of those had gone down, it would have made this my best session ever. I am a little annoyed I did not finish them, but I got close on both and landed a lot of other good dunks, so I am taking it as a great day either way. If some of these dunk names are new to you, I keep a running dunk terminology page that breaks down how I spell and define all of them.

The guys who went off

Jordan Southerland was dunking, and you will see him in this video. Nathaniel Kenney, who a lot of people know as Hoopin Nate, had an Eastbay, a 360 Windmill, and a ton of other stuff. That is wild when you consider his best dunk at Dunk last year was a one-hander. A leap like that in one year is exactly what this camp does to people.

Then there is Piotr Zawislak, an 18-year-old from Poland who told me to just call him Peter. He was insane. He hit 360 Underboth, 360 Inverter, 360 Behind the Back, 360 Eastbay, and a 540, just a crazy list in one day. Dac and Chi also did some stuff for another channel, so I could not film or post their dunks here, but I am excited for you to see those when they come out.

Ethan Pimstone got measured at 52.5 inches

The number everyone was talking about came from Ethan Pimstone, who got measured at 52.5 inches today. I think they were still confirming the number when I filmed this, so I am not going to call it official until they lock it in. But a jump like that is absurd either way, and it is right in world-record territory if it holds up. What makes it even crazier to me is that Ethan was the 48-inch jumper who came out of nowhere when I had him on the podcast, and now he is testing 52.5. That is not a small bump. That is a different level.

I am officially in Shaq’s DunkMan League

If you caught my shirt in the video, yes, that is real. I am officially in Shaquille O’Neal’s new DunkMan League, the first professional league built around the sport of dunking. There is a lot more coming on that front, and I cannot wait to share it. Being part of the first real pro dunk league is a full-circle thing for me, and it is a sign of where this sport is finally headed.

More from Dunk Camp this week

This was just Day 1, and there is a lot more from Dunk Camp coming this week. Camps like this are the whole reason I run the Minnesota Dunk Squad back home. My best jumping days come from being around people better than me, and a gym full of the best dunkers in the world is that same idea turned all the way up.

If you want to actually hear how guys like Ethan and Jordan got to this level, I have sat down with a lot of them on the Dunk Talk Podcast. Day 1 set the tone, and I cannot wait to show you the rest.

This week Dennis Yu and I flew to Dallas for the Align Volleyball Summit and got to spend 24 hours with Cam Hazzard. We rented a court for a dunk session, recorded podcasts, did our talk on AI for the room, and over lunch on day two we built him a personal brand site under his name using an AI agent. The video above is the recap interview we did at the end of the trip.

If you have not heard of Cam yet, you will soon. He is 6’2”, has a 50 inch verified vertical, hits a 360 under both on a regulation hoop, and is one of 24 dunkers Shaq just picked for the new DunkMan League this summer. We have been talking online for a while, mostly trading clips and DMs after his stuff started showing up everywhere. This weekend was the first time we got to actually dunk together.

The Session

The Texas Flight Crew runs sessions out of a court a couple miles from where the conference was. We rented it out for the afternoon, and Cam went off. He threw down a 360 under both, a 360 inverter, and a 540 on a clean ten foot rim, all in the same session. I have been dunking for years and probably been in a hundred sessions. I have seen a 360 under both go down in person before, but not many times, and watching Cam hit it with that much power on his first try was something else.

For the people who do not know the dunk, you jump, complete a full 360 in the air, then transfer the ball under both legs before finishing the dunk. Fewer than 10 people on the planet can hit it on a regulation rim. Cam is one of them. He is also coming off a shattered hand that he had surgery on three days before Chuck called him into DunkMan. He told us he was at about 85 percent that morning. I could not tell.

After the session I pulled him aside and we recorded a Dunk Talk Podcast mini episode. Dennis grabbed him for a longer one on one too, which is up on his site. Both interviews are also published on Cam’s new site now.

The Lunch Break Build

The fun part of the trip from my side was watching Dennis hand the transcripts to an AI agent during lunch on day two and have it build out an actual website. I run a digital marketing agency. I have spent years pulling content out of one place and putting it somewhere else. Watching the agent do in 45 minutes what would have taken a content team a week was the moment that landed for me too.

This is the work I have been doing for my own brand for years. Long form gets clipped, clipped goes on social, social drives back to long form, transcripts get turned into blog posts, blog posts get internal linked, internal linked content tells Google who you are. That is the loop. The AI agent is what makes that loop run on someone else’s behalf without a team.

For dunkers specifically, here is the thing. Most of us already have the content. Sessions, training clips, vlogs, Q and As, sit downs. The problem is that all of it lives on Instagram or TikTok. None of it shows up when somebody googles your name. So when a sponsor or a league or a journalist looks for you, they get a bio and a couple of reels. They do not get the actual story. Cam had this problem worse than most because there is a Canadian hockey player with the same name. Until this week, his hockey content was beating Cam’s dunk content on Google.

What Other Dunkers Can Learn From Cam

I think the broader takeaway, and the thing I want every dunker in my orbit to hear, is what Dennis kept saying on stage. AI is an amplifier. It is not a replacement. Cam already had the story. He already had the highlights. He already had the academic side, the injury comeback, the league announcement. None of that was created by the agent. The agent just took the work that was already there and structured it in a way Google, ChatGPT, and Gemini could actually read.

That is the bar. If you do not have real reps, the agent has nothing to amplify. If you have been training, posting, getting invited, and grinding, the agent can take 12 months of work and turn it into a brand a sponsor would actually pay attention to.

If you are a dunker reading this and you have been on the fence about doing more than just posting clips, this is your sign. Start the YouTube channel. Do the sit down with the local podcast. Write the article about the camp you went to. Put the transcript on your site. The work compounds the same way 41 inches becomes 45 becomes 50.

What Is Next

Cam is heading into DunkMan League this summer. We talked about it on the Dunk Talk episode and on Dennis’s interview. He thinks he is top five in the field. After spending a weekend with him I think he is right. The dunks are there. The story is there. The website is there now too. If you want to follow it, his connect page has every platform in one place.

You can read Cam’s own recap of the weekend on his site, Dennis’s breakdown of why a young AI operator like Cam is the kind of person we keep building tools around, and the BlitzMetrics breakdown of the conversation. Local Service Spotlight has the playbook version of the same move applied to local businesses.

Tune in this summer on TNT.

This week I was in Dallas with Dennis Yu to speak at the Align Volleyball Summit, and the Texas Flight Crew and I rented out a court for a session before the conference. Eight of us got reps in. The guy I most wanted to meet was Cam Hazzard, one of the 24 athletes Shaq just picked for the new DunkMan League this summer. We recorded a mini episode of the Dunk Talk Podcast right after the session, and the things Cam said about content, jumping, and the dunking community ended up being more useful to me than just about any pure dunk session I have been to this year.

Why I Wanted Cam in This Episode

I have been running the Dunk Talk Podcast for over a year and have interviewed dunkers across the spectrum: Jordan Kilganon, Isaiah Rivera, Jordan Southerland, Donovan Hawkins. Cam is a different stage of the journey. He is 20 years old, has a 50-inch verified vertical, and lands a 360 under both, a dunk fewer than 10 people on the planet hit. Outside the tight-knit dunk community and the people who have been following the announcements for Shaq’s new DunkMan League, most folks have not seen him work out yet. That is exactly why I wanted him on the show before the league starts. The story of how a dunker like Cam Hazzard goes from local college gym clips to one of the 24 best in the world is the story this sport needs.

The 85% Session

Cam threw down a 360 under both, a 360 inverter, a 540, and a long list of other dunks on a legit ten-foot rim. I personally had a decent session but didn’t hit all the dunks I wanted to. When I asked Cam how he felt the session went, this is what he said:

“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.”

What I Took From His Content Strategy

The content section was the part of the conversation I think about most. Cam went from 2K to 19K on Instagram in a few months. The shift was not the algorithm. It was him.

“I had about 2,000, 3,000 followers back in November, and I was just posting my dunk clips with some gym bro music… 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.”

And then the actual lesson:

“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 on social, and they don’t build a connection with the audience. They might pick up some views, but they’re not building a following. This is something Dennis Yu and I have been talking about for a year in our work with Local Service Spotlight. Story-driven, relatable content is what makes someone actually hit the follow button. Cam figured it out in one Christmas break. He also did a separate interview with Dennis Yu from the same Dallas trip that gets deeper into where he ranks in the league.

The Donovan Hawkins Story

Cam’s actual breakthrough moment was Donovan Hawkins doing a YouTube reaction to his subscriber dunks and telling Cam in the DMs that he was jumping too high not to post. I have heard versions of this story from almost every dunker I have interviewed. There is always one older creator in the scene who sees a young dunker, recognizes the gift, and pushes them onto the platform. That is the role I want Dunk Talk to play more often. Give the next Cam Hazzard a platform earlier in their journey, instead of waiting for the lone YouTuber to spot them.

Getting the Call From Shaq Mid-Surgery

The detail that got me was when Cam told me he broke his hand and got the DunkMan call three days post-op.

“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.”

I have had my share of injuries over the years and I know how easy it is to mentally check out during rehab. Cam used the down time to get sharper. That is the part I want for my own training cycle this year. When something goes wrong, lean in instead of resetting. The host-side breakdown of this episode is over on Dunk Talk, and Dennis covered the marketing-lens version of the same Dallas trip on his site.

What the Dunking Community Looks Like With Money on the Line

Toward the end I asked Cam how he thinks the community is going to react when there is $500K on the line. His honest answer:

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

I have the same question. The dunking world has been relentlessly collaborative for as long as I have been in it. People show up to each other’s sessions and lift each other higher. Once the prize money is real, the format is on TNT, and the scoring system is new, the social pressure changes. I think the culture holds, because the people in this league actually love the sport. But I am going to be watching closely as a host and as a dunker.

What’s Next

We are going to do a full longer episode with Cam soon to go through his entire story end-to-end. It will cover the 360 under both, the academic side at Abilene Christian University, and the road to TNT.

Are you tuning in to DunkMan this summer? Drop a comment with who you think wins the $500K. I have my own pick after this session, and I will share it on the next full episode.

I have some friends who want to start a web design agency. Their biggest problem isn’t building websites. Claude can do that now. Their biggest problem is finding businesses that actually need one.

So I built them a tool. It took about 20 minutes of my time, and it finds local service businesses without websites using the Google Places API. You type in a city, a business type, and some filters, and it spits out a list of prospects you can call today. You can download the whole thing as a CSV.

I’d never built a web tool before this. I’m not a coding expert. I’ve been using AI tools for about a year and a half, and I just got Claude Code less than 24 hours before I made this. But that’s sort of the point.

How It Started

I was in school, typing on my iPad, and I asked Claude whether it could build something like this. Instead of answering my question, it just started building it. Right there in the browser, it generated the logic, the UI, everything.

The problem was I couldn’t share it with anyone. It was just sitting in a Claude chat. So I asked Claude what I should do to make it a real, deployable tool. It gave me a prompt with all the logic and specifications to feed into Claude Code.

Building It in Claude Code

I opened up Warp (my terminal) and pasted the prompt into Claude Code. While it was running, I was going back and forth between two things: Claude Code in the terminal building the tool, and Claude in my browser explaining what was happening.

I could’ve just hit “okay” on every step and let it figure everything out. But I wanted to understand what was going on. So I kept asking questions in the browser while Claude Code kept building in the terminal. The browser Claude would also give me additional instructions to pass back into Claude Code to make sure things were done right.

Eventually, it was done. I deployed it to Vercel, and the tool was live.

What the Tool Actually Does

The Prospect Finder is straightforward. You fill in four fields:

• City (like Blaine, MN or Minneapolis)
• Business type (HVAC, plumber, landscaper, dentist, whatever)
• Minimum reviews (to filter out brand-new listings)
• Minimum rating (so you’re targeting established businesses)

Then you paste in your Google Places API key. The tool searches Google Places, checks each business for a website, and filters out anyone who already has one. What you’re left with is a clean list of businesses without websites, complete with their name, address, phone number, rating, review count, and a Google Maps link.

Testing It Live

I ran a search for HVAC companies near my area. It found eight businesses without websites.

The first result was Ham Lake Heating and Cooling. I clicked through to their Google Maps listing, and sure enough, there was an “Add a website” option where a website link would normally be. No website.

I tried another one with a more unique name: Maddox Heating and Air Conditioning, 4.3 stars. This one actually did have a website, but it wasn’t showing up in Google Maps. That’s a problem they need to fix, and honestly, that’s another service you could offer them.

A third result confirmed no website at all. Just profiles on directory sites, but nothing they own.

The tool isn’t perfect. It’s searching the Google Places API, so if a business has a website but hasn’t added it to their Google listing, it’ll show up as a prospect. But that’s still useful information. If their web presence is that disorganized, they probably need help.

The CSV Workflow

After each search, you hit “Download CSV” and get a spreadsheet with everything. The real power comes from running multiple searches.

Say you want every plumbing company without a website across the Minneapolis metro. You’d search Blaine, download the CSV. Then do Minneapolis, St. Paul, Grand Rapids, Wayzata. Each one gives you a new file. Then you can combine them into a Google Sheet and start tracking who you’ve contacted, who responded, and where you are in the process.

Getting Your Google Places API Key

You’ll need a Google Places API key to use the tool. Here’s how:

1. Go to console.cloud.google.com
2. Create a new project (I called mine “ProspectFinder”)
3. Search for “Places API” and enable the one that says Places API (New)
4. Go to API & Services, then Credentials, and grab your API key

You do have to put a credit card on file, but Google gives you free credits. Even if you’re running 10 or 20 searches a day, you won’t come close to the limit. It’s a basic tool making basic API calls.

One thing I had to troubleshoot: the original Places API didn’t work with the tool. I had to switch to the Places API (New) endpoint. If you’re building something similar, save yourself the headache and use the new one from the start.

What I Learned

This was my first time really using Claude Code, and a few things stood out.

First, the barrier to building tools is basically gone. I don’t know how to code. I’ve never built a web app. But I went from an idea to a deployed, working tool in 20 minutes of actual effort. Claude Code was running longer than that in the background, but my time investment was minimal.

Second, going back and forth between Claude in the browser and Claude Code in the terminal is a good workflow. The browser version is great for understanding and strategy. The terminal version is great for execution. Using them together made the whole process smoother.

Third, I actually learned something. I didn’t just blindly accept every step. By asking questions along the way, I built up an understanding of how deployment works, what serverless functions do, and how APIs connect. That knowledge compounds. Next time I build something, I’ll be faster and more confident.

Try It Yourself

The tool is free and live. You bring your own Google Places API key, and the tool never stores it. It stays in your browser session and goes directly to Google. Try it out here.

If you’re running a web design agency, doing cold outreach, or just want to find businesses that need help with their online presence, this is a quick way to build a prospect list without manually Googling every business in town.

This is not what we do at Local Service Spotlight at all. We don’t do cold outreach. This was just me wanting to see if I could build something useful with Claude Code for the first time. Turns out I could.