CAM HAZZARDEpisode 71 of the Dunk Talk Podcast is out. I sat down with Dylan Haugen for over an hour and we got into all of it. The first dunk at fifteen. Tearing both hamstrings on a sweat patch. The bone shard my body had to absorb for a full year. The 47-inch test. The hand surgery in January. Chuck calling about DunkMan while my hand was still tied to my chest. Testing 50 inches two and a half weeks later, on the exact day I planned to. This is the long version of my whole story.
If you only want the fast highlights, the shorter mini-recap is here. This is the deeper article. The order roughly follows the episode.
How I met Dylan in Dallas
The episode starts with the Dallas trip. Dennis Yu and Dylan were down for a volleyball conference, teaching JVA clubs how to use AI in their organizations. Dylan reached out when he heard he was going to be in town and we made a session happen at a big private gym we rented out. He summed it up pretty cleanly on the show:
“I didn’t do too great, but Cam went off and hit 360 underboth, 360 scoop, 360 inverter, basically every single 360 variation you can think of.”
That session is the one Dylan put up as “The BEST Dunker in the World?!” on his channel, and it’s the lead-in for everything we talked about on the podcast.
Why I thought dunking was CGI as a kid
For most of my life I assumed I was going to play college basketball. That was the vision. I watched Dunkademics growing up with my cousin, but every time we watched it he told me the dunks were fake. So I literally grew up thinking the stuff Dunkademics filmed was CGI. Some of the dunks he showed me actually weren’t possible at the time, so I had no reason not to believe him.
First dunk at fifteen, in November 2021
I got my first dunk in November of 2021. I was fifteen. Dylan was thirteen when he got his, so he beat me to it by two years, which was funny to find out on the call. Mine happened at my local rec center with my phone propped up on a basketball. The camera setups in the early days are always rough. Dylan said he used to put his phone inside a Croc and didn’t even know how it worked. I did the shoe trick too.
Two months after the first dunk I got a backscratcher in my backyard. By May of 2022, during my AAU season, I had my first windmill.
Tearing both hamstrings on a sweat patch
This is the part that almost ended the whole thing. A couple weeks after that first windmill, during warmups, I went up for a normal dunk and hit a sweat patch on the floor that one of the other players had left behind. My legs did the splits. Both hamstrings tore at the same time. Instead of tearing the muscle, I tore the bone off where the hamstring attaches.
The piece of bone wasn’t big enough for surgery. The fix was to wait for my body to absorb it. That took an entire year. I did zero jumping during that stretch. In the middle of it I grew about six inches.
Coming back, watching Dunk Camp 2023 from the stands
I came back in February 2023. Something weird happened on the recovery. Within a couple weeks I had all my dunks back. I don’t fully understand it. Dylan told me he had the same experience after a knee injury. He came back, dunked one time before the injury, then was hanging on the rim off lobs the literal first day back. Time off might just give your body a chance to reset.
The thing that flipped my dunk progression was Dunk Camp 2023 in Dallas. I went as a spectator to watch the show. A week or two later I hit 360 windmill, pump reverse, and reverse windmill. My bag opened up after one show.
The four dunkers I grew up watching on Dunkademics
Dylan asked me about my dunk idols. There are four:
- Isaiah Rivera. The GOAT in my head growing up. I studied his jump technique in eighth grade and have never had to relearn it. That’s why my foundation is solid. Dylan said I look similar to him in how I jump and he’s right.
- Jordan Kilganon. The ultra elite. If you’re talking the absolute hardest dunks ever done, Kilganon is the GOAT.
- Jordan Southerland (1FootGod). What he does off one foot is insane.
- Donovan Hawkins. My favorite to watch. I saw him at Dunk Camp 2023 and was shocked by how hard he dunks in person.
Donovan also reacted to my subscriber-submitted dunks before I had an Instagram. He told me I jump way too high not to be posting. That’s how the account started.
2024 was four to five hours of dunking every day
2024 was just volume. I was like Dylan McCarthy. I’d go to the gym for four to five hours a day, hooping and dunking. No real training program. No measured vertical. I never tested before I tested 47 inches. The fact that I had zero knee pain or shin splints during that year still surprises me. Pure work load.
Elite dunks didn’t start showing up until summer 2025. That’s when the bag actually opened.
Getting into weightlifting (and why I was embarrassed of it)
For a long time I would not post training, only jumps. My squat was bad. I had back pain. Power cleans intimidated me. I’d touched weights but never seriously, because I was embarrassed putting 225 on the bar.
That changed last summer when I went to my friend Reece Boltin. Reece has perfect Olympic lifting form. I told him I was going to suck and to just teach me the squat, the power clean, and the deadlift. Once my form locked in, my back pain went away and weight training became fun. Numbers now: 385 deep squat, 275 power clean. Deadlift was at 425 before I stopped doing it because it wasn’t helping me enough.
One thing I told Dylan that I think matters: nobody is training me. No coach. He pointed out that there aren’t many dunkers at my height who jump my numbers without a coach. I program myself off THP and the JumpX guys’ content, but I tend to overwork. The fix has actually been my busy schedule, because it forces me to spend less time in the gym. An hour to ninety minutes a day on lifts is enough for me. More than that is repetitive.
January 2026: shattering my hand at intramurals
Second week of January, intramural basketball at college. I tell people honestly that intramurals are the only reason I’m at college. I was being careful because I had dunk events lined up that spring. I saw the ball in the air on a lob, started my arm swing, and smashed my hand on the bottom of someone’s heel coming down from their jump.
I shattered the middle of my hand horizontally and broke the knuckle off completely. My finger was pointing the wrong direction. I didn’t even register what happened. Two weeks later I had pretty significant surgery. I have permanent plates and screws in there now.
“I thought I was gonna be out forever. I was peaking at that point. I was hitting 360 underboth pretty consistently, and I had all these elite dunks, and then I just shattered my hand.”
The Chuck call, one week after surgery
About a week after the surgery, Chuck reached out to me about DunkMan. My hand was still tied to my chest. I couldn’t move it. He offered me the spot. I was shocked, excited, and nervous all at once because my surgeon was actually worried about some of the tendons in my hand healing properly. I didn’t know what my recovery would look like. I committed anyway.
I was out two and a half months doing nothing. I couldn’t even hold myself in place on the leg extension machine because my butt would come out of the seat without my hand to brace. Whenever the cleared-to-jump call came, I went straight back to the gym.
The day I planned to test 50 inches
A few days after getting cleared, I did a height check. .99 second flight time at 60 frames a second. Got my chin over a 10 foot rim. That told me I needed to test as soon as possible.
I put a date in my calendar. It was a Wednesday. I labeled it: this is the day I’m going to test 50 inches. Did a short training cycle that lifted heavy early and deloaded the second half. When the day came I had classes from 8 AM to 12, work from 12 to 5, then drove to the gym, had a Monster, and tested 50 inches. On the exact day I had planned.
That’s the timeline. Around two and a half weeks of training back from a hand surgery that had me out for two and a half months. About seven verified people in the world have tested a 50 inch vertical depending on how you count it. I’m one of them.
DunkMan: from the show, to the league
Most people know the DunkMan show from 2017 and 2018 when it was called Dunk King. Shaq revamped it as the DunkMan show in December 2025. I interviewed for that show. I didn’t get on it. Instead of running another show season this year, Shaq turned it into an actual professional sports league. That’s what’s happening this summer.
It’s tournament-style instead of reality-show-style. $500,000 on the line plus performance bonuses. Mac McClung is in it, which is wild. Dylan and I are both in it. He signed a week before me. It’s the biggest dunk league that has ever existed. My first formal dunk contest will be the biggest one ever.
Zero contest wins coming into the biggest contest ever
The events on my record so far are all from Oxford. I went on a study abroad program there last summer and an organization reached out because they thought I was based in the UK. Oxford is a thirty-minute train ride to London, so it worked out. I shocked the room at a London community dunk contest, beating dunkers like Cas and JumpLikeJay who nobody expected me to. Then a FIBA 3v3 halftime show with Cas where I didn’t miss a single dunk. Then a Jumpman 23 show event. All shows, no real contest wins. DunkMan will be my first formal competition.
“Whenever they were asking me, ‘What contest did you win?’ None. Now I’m competing in DunkMan.”
My best dunks and the one I’m not allowed to think about
Best dunks in my bag right now:
- 360 Underboth down the middle. Gets the most attention.
- 360 behind the back with a two-hand finish. One of the hardest I’ve hit. One of my favorites.
- 360 Inverter. My signature. Any given day, walk in the gym, five minute warmup, hit it first try. Dylan said it was the third dunk I did when he was filming with me in Dallas and he almost forgot to keep his camera running.
The dunk I really want is 360 behind the back Eastbay. I’m not letting myself work on it until after DunkMan because once a dunk takes over my head I can’t let it go. 360 Underboth was like that. I went to the gym for two straight hours until I hit it. Same lock-in is going to happen with this one.
The viral video I edited in the bathtub
For a long time my Instagram was raw dunk clips with no real strategy. I’d get 1,000 to 2,000 views per post. Then one day I filmed a goofy jump-competition video with a friend, where he’d do a dunk and I’d respond with a 360 windmill or something. I edited it in the bathtub. I was not trying. It got one and a half million views and that’s when people started noticing me.
That’s the real lesson on social. The one video that pops is rarely the one you spent six hours editing. Keep posting. Eventually the algorithm finds you.
Triple major, college band, the search results problem
People who haven’t followed my college stuff are usually surprised by it. I’m a triple major in information systems (primary), accounting, and finance. I’m in the college band for scholarship money. Last semester I had 8 AM class through 11, band at 11:15, an accounting internship 12 to 5 PM, then training, social posting, homework. This summer I’m doing an internship with a fractional CFO practice in Austin until DunkMan starts, then PWC tech internship after college.
The problem the dunk side caused was that whenever you searched my name on Google, a hockey player kept showing up instead of me. Dennis and Dylan worked with me on SEO. The picture now is way cleaner. If DunkMan blows up and somebody searches my name, they should land on my actual story, not a random unrelated athlete. That’s the practical case for the whole personal-brand build we’ve been doing.
“Be so good that you can’t be ignored”
Dylan asked me near the end what advice I’d give a younger dunker trying to make a name. Two pieces:
“Keep posting. All it takes is one video to go viral and you got a million eyes on you. And be so good that you can’t be ignored. If you become so good at something, it’s gonna eventually be impossible for people to ignore you.”
I’d been hitting the same dunks for months before they started getting recognition. The work was the same. The audience caught up. That’s how it tends to go.
What’s next
Short term goal on socials is 25K followers. Right now I’m just past 22K. Vert-wise I’m mostly maintaining. After Billy did a height check on me in LA that would’ve put me at a 51 inch vertical, I know it’s right there if everything aligns. But I’m not chasing it. Dunks first.
For the bigger arc, I’d love for dunking to become full time, but I’m being honest about how few dunkers actually make a real living off it without training programs in the mix. Dylan and I figure it’s basically Kilganon and Chen if you take training programs out. So I’m walking through doors as they open. DunkMan first. PWC tech offer is in the back pocket. If something breaks open from DunkMan, I’ll keep stepping forward.
For the rest of the story from the other angles: the Dunk Talk #71 episode is on this page (the embed up top), the original shorter recap covers the highlights, and the Align Volleyball Summit recap documents the marketing and SEO side of how my site got built with Dennis and Dylan. What People Are Saying is where the mentions from the dunk community live.