The verified result

• Champion: Cam Hazzard, DUNKMAN’s first official World Dunk Champion.
• Final opponent: Dengxing Chen, according to Bleacher Report’s championship recap.
• Championship prize: $500,000.
• Peak score: 9.91, described by DUNKMAN as the highest score of the season.

TNT Sports’ official result post confirms the title and prize. Bleacher Report’s independent recap also records Cam as the first DUNKMAN World Champion.

The final completed a run that began with Cam winning Group A in his first dunk contest. That qualifier put him into the eight-athlete World Championship field. The title now turns a breakout summer into a permanent, independently checkable result.

The work before the spotlight

The dunk is the ignition. The engine is the work Cam built before the audience arrived.

Alongside years of jump training, Cam has been building the digital infrastructure around his name. He created a positive-mentions agent that finds source-linked coverage, organizes it, and helps keep his website current. He has also been documenting Vertly, the AI vertical-jump coach he built, and teaching what he learns with Dennis Yu and Dylan Haugen.

The 85-day head start

Cam did not wait for the championship to build a place for the attention to land. On June 1, 2026, he published the first-person story of Dennis Yu and Dylan Haugen building CamHazzard.com during a conference lunch break. In that article, Cam wrote that the site had not existed 24 hours earlier.

Eighty-five days later, on August 25, Cam became the inaugural DUNKMAN World Champion. By championship night, the domain already held his biography, athletic proof, videos, press, projects, and contact paths. The win created a surge of attention; it did not have to create the infrastructure from zero.

Build the site before the spotlight. The clip creates attention. The owned domain gives that attention somewhere permanent to go.

That sequence is now the lighthouse case study for The Athlete Spotlight. Its public pages identify Cam as the platform’s paid partner and figurehead, and CamHazzard.com as the lighthouse build. Cam shares in Athlete Spotlight revenue. His result is his own; the program does not promise athletic, sponsorship, traffic, or financial outcomes.

Start your own athlete site

The same sequence is now a product. Take the free 60-second athlete brand audit, then start a site for $30 a month. Cam is Athlete Spotlight’s paid partner and lighthouse case; his championship result is his own. The program does not promise athletic, recruiting, sponsorship, or income outcomes.

What this shows young AI builders

AI did not make Cam a world champion. It helped him turn real work into durable proof: a home base he controls, source-linked stories, useful tools, and a system that keeps working when the viral moment moves on.

That is the practical lesson behind the AI Builder Program. Builders learn by shipping on real projects, documenting what happened, and improving from evidence. The program is a paid, one-year commitment; it does not promise earnings or a particular outcome.

Bring the lesson to a campus or conference

Universities and conference organizers can bring Dennis, Dylan, and young practitioners into a hands-on session built around live implementation—not a lecture about AI. Workshop inquiries are handled by Local Service Spotlight; Cam’s athletic appearances and sponsorships are handled separately. DUNKMAN, TNT, HBO Max, Shaquille O’Neal, ACU, and other institutions are not presented as sponsors or endorsers of either program.

Watch next

• The Magic Berry Challenge: Cam and Dennis on turning trustworthy third-party proof into marketing that lasts.
• Cam Hazzard and Dylan Haugen on practical AI: an introduction to using AI on real business work.
• Cam Hazzard: Star AI Builder: the documented case study behind the program connection.

Editorial note: This factual recap was published immediately after the official announcement so Cam could celebrate and travel. It uses linked official results and previously published, source-backed material. Cam has not yet supplied a first-person championship account; this page will be updated when he does.

Why I Made the Trip

Three reasons:

• Networking with zero pressure. When you’re not competing, you can actually talk to people. Dunkers, media, potential sponsors, all of it.
• Scouting. This was one of the toughest groups yet, and the Worlds are on August 25. I wanted to see with my own eyes what these guys are bringing so I can study up.
• Meeting people in person. Some of these guys I’d only ever talked to online, and that was overdue.

The night backed all of it up. There were guys performing like Isaiah Rivera, Miller Dunks, Aeramiah Binford, and Darius Clark, who holds the vertical jump world record at 53 inches. I was actually in the building the night that record fell at Fanatics Fest. They put on an absolute show, and the full Group C results are on the DunkMan site.

Meeting Vince Carter

Vince Carter is one of my dunking GOATs, and I’ve looked up to him basically my whole life. Getting to see him in person and talk with him one-on-one was a super cool experience I won’t forget.

A Shout-Out on Live TV

At one point during the broadcast I got a shout-out on live television as the Group A winner in the building. Getting my face on TV again never gets old.

This one’s short because the trip was simple: watch, learn, connect. The level in this league is insane, and August 25 can’t come soon enough.

Thousands of DMs I Couldn’t Answer

Over the past year I’ve gotten hundreds of DMs, honestly probably thousands, from people asking me to train them and help with their vertical. I love helping people. It’s genuinely one of my favorite things to do. But there’s no physical way to answer that many messages one by one.

I’m a triple major in Information Systems, Accounting, and Finance, and I’ve been building with AI tools for a while now. So the answer felt obvious: mix my AI experience with my jump training knowledge and build something actually useful. I spent the past three months building a full app, and the final sprint went from first commit to Apple approval in 28 days. It’s live now, and it’s called Vertly.

The Problem with Generic Jump Programs

Most jump programs today work like this: you pay a fee, and you get back one generic set of exercises that are supposedly good for your vertical. And look, those exercises can be good. The problem is that your jump has way too many variables for one template to cover:

• Your technique
• Elastic jumper or power jumper
• Young or old
• Short or tall
• Even long femur versus short femur

One program can’t account for all of that. It’s the same reason I train the way I do instead of grinding through someone else’s plan. I broke my whole approach down in how I trained a 50-inch vertical without grinding.

An AI Trained Only on How I Train

Vertly is an AI built on every single thing I know about jump training, and that’s the only thing it’s built on. When you ask it a super specific question about your body and your situation, it tailors the exercises to you instead of handing you the same workout as everyone else. Then it walks you through the workout, explains why you’re doing each exercise, and shows you how to do it.

My own results came from training this way. The 50-inch vertical and the Group A win in Shaq’s DunkMan league weren’t built on a generic template, and yours shouldn’t be either. I think this is a modern solution to a problem that’s been haunting jumpers for years.

What’s Inside Vertly

Coach Cam is the heart of it: ask me anything about jumping higher, and it reads your training log before it answers. It’s the closest thing to DMing me, because you basically are.

Air Levels tracks your vert to the inch. Log an honest jump, watch the number climb, and see exactly how far you are from your goal.

The Bag is my catalog of 275 dunks, ranked. Vertly calls your next one based on what you’ve already landed, and you go bag it.

The Locker is your athlete card: peak vert, plant foot, hang time. All of it real, all of it yours.

Get Vertly on the App Store

Vertly is live right now, it’s free to download, and the paid plans are affordable on purpose. Getting real jump training help shouldn’t cost what a private coach costs. You can learn more at vertlyapp.com.

If you’ve ever DMed me asking how to jump higher, this is my real answer. Download it, tell it about yourself, and let’s get you up.

Stop 1: The Last Big Session with Billy Dunkademics

On Monday night I flew out to dunk with Billy from Dunkademics, who I consider my jump coach. He flew me out, we grabbed dinner, and we talked dunks for hours, which is genuinely one of my favorite things to do. Then we game-planned for Tuesday, my last big dunk session before the DunkMan World Championship.

We got to the gym around 9 a.m. and dunked for about three and a half hours. I absolutely cooked myself, but I was hitting some amazing dunks, and I walked out of there confident and excited for the Championship. The last time I was in that gym, I watched a world record fall. This time was about sharpening my own list.

The 15-Minute Airport Sprint

Straight from that session, still in my workout clothes, I drove to the airport with 15 minutes to get through security and to my gate for the flight to Indianapolis and the Pat McAfee Show. I made it. I still don’t fully know how, but I made it, and I was still sweating on the plane. When you’re young, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Travel chaos is apparently my thing this summer.

Stop 2: Live TV in Indianapolis

The trip didn’t get easier from there. My layover in Vegas got delayed so badly that I didn’t land in Indianapolis until 2:30 in the morning. Between the session and all the travel, I was running on fumes when I walked into the Thunderdome. I still put on a show: five dunks on live ESPN, an Eastbay over an NFL lineman, and a $25,000 surprise. I wrote the full story in my day on the Pat McAfee Show.

Stop 3: Dunking in Dude Perfect Headquarters

As soon as the show wrapped, I flew straight back to Dallas, which is home for me. It wasn’t a relaxing evening. The next morning I woke up and went straight to Dude Perfect headquarters to meet the team and talk about future content collaborations.

The team was amazing. I brought one of my friends along, showed him around the facility, met everyone, and got to see how fun that environment really is. And obviously I had to throw down a few dunks while I was there. Nothing too crazy. I just wanted to be able to say I’ve dunked in Dude Perfect headquarters.

Three stops, four days, zero rest. I’m tired, I’m confident, and I’m exactly where I want to be heading into the DunkMan World Championship on August 25 in Atlanta. I still don’t know exactly where all of this is going, but I’m having fun doing it.

On August 12 I dunked live on ESPN inside the Thunderdome, the Pat McAfee Show’s home base in Indianapolis. Five dunks with no real warm-up, an Eastbay over an NFL lineman to close the show, and a $25,000 surprise I didn’t find out about until the ride back to the hotel. Three weeks earlier, I didn’t even know Pat McAfee knew my name.

The Pat McAfee Show Clip I Never Expected

On July 22, the day after I won Group A of DunkMan, Pat McAfee was on ESPN doing his normal sports commentary when he pulled up a clip of my winning dunk and showed it to his whole audience. I wasn’t expecting it at all. Watching yourself on ESPN, completely out of nowhere, is one of the most surreal feelings I’ve had all summer.

I thought that was the end of it. Super cool moment, save the clip, move on. My manager saw it differently. He reached out on my behalf to see if there was any chance I could get on the show. I didn’t really think it was possible, but I liked the idea, so he sent it.

Within a few days, Pat McAfee himself responded and said he wanted me on the show. I could hardly believe it.

“We Can’t Wait to Have You Break the Thunderdome World Record”

I flew to Indianapolis and walked into the Thunderdome, the show’s main headquarters. They escorted me to the green room, where I did some light stretching, nothing too crazy, because I genuinely wasn’t expecting to dunk on live TV that day.

During one of the commercial breaks, Pat McAfee came back to the green room to say what’s up. He was fired up that I was there. Then he said, “Man, we can’t wait to have you break the Thunderdome world record,” and walked out.

I had no idea what that meant.

So I watched the show from the back and pieced it together. He was telling the audience he wanted me to be the first person to set a Thunderdome world record, which is their way of saying the craziest dunk that’s ever been thrown down in that building. I was not ready for that. I was worn out from travel, and I’d cooked myself in a three-and-a-half-hour dunk session that same morning (that whole week is its own story). My entire warm-up was a C4 energy drink and some light stretching in a side room.

Five Dunks on Live ESPN

The sequence went like this:

• A light one-hander to feel out the rim and get my legs under me.
• A 360 windmill, which I missed. Honestly, I wasn’t worried about it. With no full warm-up that dunk is a coin flip, and I told them exactly that.
• A 360 pump to get myself going.
• My signature, the 360 under both. Fewer than 10 people in the world land it, and that one got the whole room going.
• The finale. Right before the show ended they wanted one more, so they sent out the biggest guy in the studio, an NFL lineman standing around 6’4″, and put him under the rim. The whole crew was hyping me up. I jumped over him and threw down an Eastbay to close the segment.

That’s how the show ended. Me over a lineman, the crew losing it.

The $25,000 I Found Out About on YouTube

On the way back to the hotel I was still processing everything, so I pulled up the live clip on YouTube to watch it back. That’s when I heard Pat McAfee say, “We’re gonna send him $25,000.”

Complete shock. I wasn’t expecting a dollar from this trip. I flew out for the experience and would have done it for free. Instead I came home with a story I’ll tell forever and a nice bonus on top of it.

I’ve said before that my whole approach is “be so good they can’t ignore you.” This trip was the first time I really felt that working at a national level. A month ago Pat McAfee didn’t know who I was. Now he’s showing my dunks to his audience and flying me out to Indianapolis. Next up: the DunkMan World Championship, August 25 in Atlanta, live on TNT. Grateful doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Greatest hits — money pages

These three pages are where Cam Hazzard’s talk is supposed to turn into money. The tree is every URL. These are the ones to amplify. How we pick hits.

Paired with the topic wheel. The topic wheel is what Cam Hazzard talks about. This money tree is which URLs collect that talk into money. Every chip on the wheel is a link; the tree is the sitemap of those links. Sibling method: Topic Wheel · Money Tree.

---
name: map-your-money-tree
description: Draw any website as a money tree — trunk (domain), limbs (offer groups), branches (money pages and definitive hubs), leaves (posts that link up to them) — measured from the site's real internal links, then diagnose the six defects a sitemap hides and output a dated publishing plan. Use when someone asks "which of my pages actually make money", "why isn't my content converting", "map my site", "audit my internal links", or when a monthly MAA needs a structural section.
author: Dennis Yu — BlitzMetrics / Local Service Spotlight
license: Apache-2.0
version: 1.0 (2026-08-15)
references:
  - https://blitzmetrics.com/money-tree/
  - https://blitzmetrics.com/seo-tree/
  - https://blitzmetrics.com/money-pages-vs-blog-posts/
  - https://blitzmetrics.com/maa/
  - https://blitzmetrics.com/9-triangles-framework-scalable-home-service-businesses/
  - https://localservicespotlight.com/quick-audit/
---

# Map Your Money Tree

**Use this when** you need to know which pages on a site actually earn, and which of the
content already published is feeding them. Not "how much traffic does this page get" —
*what is connected to what, and in which direction.*

This is the structural half of [MAA](https://blitzmetrics.com/maa/). The leaf counts are
the Metrics. The bare and split branches are the Analysis. The publishing list at the end
is the Action. Redraw it monthly and the delta is the report.

## The one idea

**A leaf counts only when it actually links.**

Not when it is topically related. Not when it sits in the right category. Not when someone
meant to link it. The link is the measurement; everything else is a plan. Every number this
skill produces must be reproducible by re-running the crawl.

---

## The five layers

| Layer | What it is | How you know |
|---|---|---|
| **Root** | Off-site proof of the entity: Knowledge Panel, Wikidata, LinkedIn, YouTube, podcast appearances, press, review profiles. | It is not on the domain and you cannot edit it directly. |
| **Trunk** | The domain and its home page — the entity home. | It is the URL you would put on a business card. |
| **Limb** | A group of branches sharing an audience or a job — the offers, the method, a vertical. | It is how the site's own services page already groups things. |
| **Branch** | A money page, or a definitive article that owns a concept. | Someone converts on it, or it is the one canonical page for a topic. |
| **Leaf** | A post that links **up** to a branch. | It is dated, it flows through a feed, and its body contains a link to its branch. |

Roots and trunk are **Why**. Limbs and method branches are **How**. Money branches are
**What**. Leaves are **Proof**. A stranger — or a language model — should be able to read
all four off one page.

---

## Inputs

- The domain.
- Read access to every published URL and its **rendered** body (not raw — page-builder and
  shortcode markup must be expanded so the links inside are visible).
- The site's own services page and main navigation, for the branch list and its grouping.
- Optional: the previous run's tree, for the delta.

---

## Procedure

### 1. Inventory every published URL
Posts and pages both, with id, URL, title, publish date, and rendered body.

On WordPress:
```
GET /wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=100&page=N&status=publish&_fields=id,link,title,content,date
GET /wp-json/wp/v2/pages?per_page=100&page=N&status=publish&_fields=id,link,title,content,date
```
Page until the `X-WP-TotalPages` header runs out. On any other stack, use a crawler that
returns rendered HTML. De-duplicate by (type, id) — retried requests double-count silently.

### 2. Extract internal links from every body
Match `href` values on the site's own host. Normalise: drop the query string and fragment,
force a trailing slash, lower-case the host. **Make the set unique per source page** — a
post linking to the same branch five times is one leaf, because the first link is the one
that carries the value.

```js
const RX = /href="https?:\/\/(?:www\.)?example\.com(\/[^"#?]*)/g;
const outs = [...new Set([...html.matchAll(RX)].map(m => m[1].replace(/\/+$/,'') + '/'))];
```

For a personal brand site, also match the company domains — its money pages usually live
on another host, and they still count as branches.

### 3. Build the inbound index
Invert the map: for every URL, the list of posts and the list of pages that link to it.
Count them **separately**. Theme headers and footers are pages linking to pages; only body
links from posts are leaves.

### 4. Name the branches from the site, not from memory
Take the money pages off the services page and the main navigation, in the grouping those
pages already use. Add the definitive articles — the pages that own a concept. Do not
invent a tidier taxonomy than the one the site presents to a visitor: if your tree
disagrees with the navigation, the tree has just found its first defect.

### 5. Resolve redirects and duplicates before counting
Request each branch URL and follow the chain. Merge redirected URLs into one branch and
**report the merge** rather than hiding it. Two live 200s for one offer is a split branch,
not two branches. This is the step everyone skips and where most findings are.

### 6. Draw it to scale
Branch thickness and foliage density from the leaf count on a **square-root** scale, so a
300-leaf branch does not visually annihilate a 30-leaf one. Bare branches drawn bare.
Nothing placed by hand — if the drawing is prettier than the site, the drawing is lying.

### 7. Publish it on the site it maps
As a live page with every node a real link — never a screenshot. Ship three synchronised
forms on the same URL: the diagram (inline SVG), the identical structure as a **visible**
text outline, and `ItemList` JSON-LD naming each branch, its role, its content type and its
inbound count. The picture is for humans; the other two are for agents.

---

## The six defects — and where each one routes

Diagnosis is worthless without a destination. This is a scan that names the department.

| # | Defect | What it looks like | What it costs | Routes to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | **Bare branch** | A live money page with zero posts linking to it | Nothing on the site has ever pointed a visitor at the thing you sell | Content — one customer story per bare offer |
| 2 | **Split branch** | Two live URLs for one offer (usually a page and a post) | Internal links divide; neither ranks as well as one would | Plumbing — pick one, 301 the other, consolidate |
| 3 | **Redirect tax** | Many internal links pointing at a URL that 301s | Every link takes the slow road; often includes the main nav | Plumbing — rewrite links to the destination |
| 4 | **Broken target** | Internal links pointing at a 404 | Invisible in analytics, because nobody clicks a link they cannot see | Plumbing — restore or repoint |
| 5 | **Inverted tree** | Leaf counts fall as price rises | The cheapest offer carries the most proof; the most expensive carries none | Strategy — decide what you are actually selling |
| 6 | **Canopy with no branches** | Hundreds of posts linking to each other and almost nothing structural | Looks enormously productive, converts nothing | Personal brand — wire the proof to an offer |

Also check the roots. A tree with no off-site proof — no Knowledge Panel, no consistent
`sameAs`, no third-party corroboration — is standing in loose soil no matter how good the
canopy looks. That routes to entity/authority work.

---

## The QA gate — nine checks, all must pass

A wrong tree is worse than no tree, because people act on it.

1. **Every node resolves.** Status recorded for each branch; no 404s; every 301 shown as a redirect rather than silently followed.
2. **Counts are reproducible.** Re-run the crawl; identical numbers. Drift means the extractor is matching something other than links.
3. **Counts are unique per source.** One post linking three times counts once.
4. **Navigation excluded.** Only body links from posts are leaves.
5. **No branch invented.** Every branch appears in the site's own navigation, services page, or definitive-article set.
6. **No money page missing.** Cross-check against the services page and main menu. A money page absent from the tree is the worst error — an invisible bare branch reads as a branch that does not exist.
7. **Duplicates consolidated.** Split URLs appear as one branch, flagged, with both URLs named.
8. **Text outline matches the diagram.** Same nodes, counts and order — that is what agents and screen readers read.
9. **Date and method stated.** A tree without a crawl date is a claim, not a measurement.

---

## Output

1. **The diagram** — inline SVG, every node an anchor, light/dark, no runtime JS.
2. **The text outline** — visible, nested, live links, counts, health flags.
3. **The schema** — `ItemList` JSON-LD, one entry per branch.
4. **The findings** — the defects above, each with the specific URLs and counts.
5. **The action list** — dated, ordered by cost-to-fix, one line per bare branch.
6. **The delta** — versus the previous run. Any branch still bare after a redraw is a branch nobody has decided to sell.

## Definition of done

- Every branch on the services page and main nav appears in the tree.
- Every count is reproducible and every URL resolves or is flagged.
- The page carries diagram + outline + schema on one URL.
- Every defect names a destination, not just a problem.
- The next publishing action is unambiguous to someone who did not run the audit.

## Cadence

Monthly on an active site. The value is in the delta, not the snapshot. A metric you look
at once is a screenshot.

---

*Method: <https://blitzmetrics.com/money-tree/> · Framework: <https://blitzmetrics.com/seo-tree/> ·
Page-versus-post rule: <https://blitzmetrics.com/money-pages-vs-blog-posts/> ·
Want it run for you: <https://localservicespotlight.com/quick-audit/>*

I got to a 50 inch vertical on about six hours a week in the weight room, while I was a full-time college student, in my school’s band, and doing an internship. My jump day sat on top of that, once a week.

That is the part people do not believe, so let me say the uncomfortable version. My busy schedule is part of why it worked. It forced me to stop overtraining. I actually got better when I was forced to train less.

This is my whole vertical jump training approach, the real version, including the exact lifts and plyos I ran to get there.

The short version of my vertical jump training

If you only read this far, my whole approach to vertical jump training is this: get strong, stay lean, jump with real intent, and stop doing so much. That is most of it. Everything below is the detail.

Why doing less made me jump higher

There are serious diminishing returns in vertical jump training. If you are grinding 20 hours a week, there is a good chance you are getting worse, not better.

Jumping is not a sport where more hours always buys more skill. Every max-effort jump is a heavy rep on your tendons. Stack enough of them on top of heavy lifting and plyos and you are not training anymore, you are just accumulating damage. When I was young I got away with it. Now I deal with knee pain and shin splints, and those came from exactly that.

You do not need to be in the gym 40 hours a week like it is a full-time job. You need a few focused hours and real intent in every rep.

One clarification, because people read the six hours as a hard cap and it is not. Six hours is a good starting target, especially if you do not have much time. It is not a ceiling. And it is weight-room time. Jump days sit on top of it, not inside it.

The mistake almost everyone makes in vertical jump training

Number one is doing too much at once. Three hours of dunking, plus plyos, plus heavy lifting, all in one session.

When you are young you can survive that for a while. As you get older it is exactly how you end up with knee pain and shin splints. Trust me on both.

The second mistake is not knowing your own body. Everybody responds differently. I have friends who lift way heavier than me and do not jump as high, because they respond better to plyos and I respond big to heavy weight. There is no way to know which one you are except to test it.

The third is draining yourself so hard you quit. Do not do that. Pivot the goal instead. Lower the rim, switch to one foot, whatever keeps you going. Consistency over months beats any perfect program you cannot stick to.

What a week of vertical jump training looks like

Do not overcomplicate vertical jump training. Anchor the week with one hard jump session and build the rest around lifting.

• Two or three weight-room days. One big lower lift each, squats or power cleans, plus calf and hinge work.
• One jump day where you actually go dunk with intent.
• The rest is recovery.

You do not need special machines or a fancy split. Give me a squat rack and I can run a whole variation of workouts.

On the jump day, do not pin it to a number of minutes. That is the most individual thing in the whole program. I can go three hours. I know people who top out around an hour and a half, and 90 minutes is probably average. Count the max-effort jumps, not the clock. Run the technique and volume work as long as the quality holds, and stop when it drops or your knee starts talking.

If you are under 18

Jump more. You have specificity and growth on your side. Through about 18 I was jumping three hours a day, five days a week.

That is what I did. It is not exactly what I would prescribe to everyone, because most people do not have that kind of time and not every body handles it. But the premise holds: when you are young you can jump a lot more and still keep adding inches.

If you are older

Build the strength base and jump less, but smarter. Lean into the weight room.

At 21, most of my week is the weight room, not the court. I jump about once a week, because of the knee pain and shin splints. When I do jump it is a long session, three or four hours, a jump about every minute and a half. Those are volume and technique reps, not true maxes.

I want to be honest that the three to four hour jump session is a me thing. My body handles it with no pain. I do not recommend that volume for most people. If you can get through a long jump session without hurting yourself, great, because that is real specific training. If you cannot, do not force it.

If you are 30 or older, keeping muscle on is part of keeping your jump, since you lose muscle and power with age. A little more volume there is protective, not bulk chasing.

The lifts that actually built my vertical jump

Here is the honest truth on lifting. Getting your weight-room numbers up makes it statistically more likely your vertical goes up. It is not a 100 percent guarantee. There are people who can barely lift anything and still have a very high vertical. For most people the probability is on your side, and for me it was the whole thing.

The three non-negotiables

My list of big rocks is short: deep back squat, power clean, and calf work. Those hit everything a jump needs, so I am not chasing one magic lift.

A hinge belongs in there as an accessory rather than a main lift. RDLs, once a week or once every couple of weeks. Deadlifts I mostly stay away from.

If you are only going to run part of my program, run the squat, the clean, and the calves. The rest is specificity I earned.

How strong is strong enough

Here is a real baseline. My body weight is 190 pounds and I deep back squat 425. So a good rule of thumb is to squat over twice your body weight.

If you can deep squat 2x your bodyweight, that is already a very good baseline, and at that point strength probably is not your main limiter anymore. The number that actually matters is relative strength, strength for your bodyweight, so keep that climbing.

The power clean, and when to skip it

The triple extension you get from power cleans is extremely effective for two-foot jumpers. It trains the exact explosive extension of my takeoff under heavy load.

But the technique matters enormously and you have to get it right early. You cannot push the weight up until your technique is dialed. This lift is dangerous. There are a lot of ways to get hurt flinging that much weight onto your chest.

Learn the movement first, before you add real weight. For some people that takes a month or two just to get right, and that is fine. If after that you still cannot figure it out, power cleans might not be for you, and that is also fine. Loaded trap-bar jumps or jump squats give you basically the same jump gains with far less technique risk. Swap them in and keep moving.

Squat depth, and the 115 percent rule

Deep, full squats are the best for general strength development. That is your foundation, so most of your squatting should be deep. Deep raises everything. Your deep squat pulls up your quarter squat, but a quarter squat will not pull up your deep.

Quarter squats come in when you want to get specific and build strength at the exact angle you jump from. I am a two-foot jumper and I use them, loaded at about 115 percent of my full squat max, because you can handle more through that short range.

Two things I want nailed down because people get them wrong. 115 percent is a quarter-squat load and quarter-squat only. Never put that on a full squat. And quarter squats run at most once a week. They are a specificity tool, not a staple you hammer.

If you have mobility limits or knee and hip issues, do not force depth. Load a real squat in a pain-free range and drive the knees forward at the bottom.

The plyos I actually run

People think I spam plyos. I do them about twice a week and I do not overdo them.

The one that matters most

Number one, hands down, is max-effort max-approach jumping. It is the most specific thing you can do because it is the jump. If you want to get good at something, the closer you train to the actual technique, the better. You only get good at what you actually practice.

Low volume, max intent, mixed with heavy lifts. That is exactly why I lift heavy through the week but only jump once, and when I jump I am using every ounce of effort I have.

Sprinting

If I could only do one exercise with no weights at all, it would be sprinting.

I sprint before almost every heavy leg day to warm up: three 40 meter sprints at max effort. It gets my body firing and makes sure I am not just building muscle to get big, I am refining it and making it specific to jumping.

Keep sprints in year round, not just before a peak. Volume is not the point with sprints. Intent is.

Isometrics for tendon stiffness

I build stiffer tendons with isometrics, and my favorite is simple. Set the safety pins in a squat rack, get under the bar, and drive up into the pins at about 85 percent effort. The bar cannot move, so you are producing max tension against something immovable.

I hold 20 to 30 seconds on a training day, then switch my stance and go again. When a tendon is actually flaring up I drop to about 15 seconds. Same tool, two jobs, do not mix them up.

A stiffer tendon returns energy faster with less stretch. A jump only lasts about a quarter second, so saving that time is everything.

Depth drops

Depth drops build reactivity off the ground because they give you a very short contact time.

Here is the bonus most people miss. If you do a depth drop and just land, instead of jumping back up, it actually helps with knee pain. I use landing-only reps to build my tendons up so they are ready to absorb force when I land off a real jump. That has prevented a lot of injuries for me.

I do not buy the idea that a higher box is always better. I do move my box height up gradually, but the reason is to get used to absorbing bigger landing forces, not because higher equals more vert.

And do not spam them. Three sets of three is plenty for the high-intensity stuff. Piling on more will actually start to decrease your vertical. Lower-intensity bounces like pogo jumps are different and can carry more volume, something like three sets of ten.

What is overrated

Regular box jumps, the tall-box tuck jumps people spam for Instagram, where you pull your knees up and land on a box and call it explosive. That does not earn its place.

A seated box jump is a different exercise. You start dead stop from a seat with no countermovement, so there is no stretch reflex to hide behind and you are training pure force from a standstill. That one I keep.

The plateau nobody warns you about

I hit a wall around a 46 inch vert with almost no weight training, and I could not get past it. Not until I started lifting heavy. Then my vert took off, because I am a high reactor to heavy weight.

For a lot of people the plateau is not a technique problem or a program problem. It is untapped strength. That is the first question to ask: are you actually lifting?

After that, the fix is usually planned variety, not random variety. If a lift has gone stale, swap in a familiar-but-new heavy stimulus and it tends to spike things back up.

The other big lever is getting leaner. A mentor told me a line I still repeat: “fat doesn’t fly.” If you are just getting started, cut the extra weight first. You will have to work a lot harder to get those extra pounds in the air when you could just take them off and jump higher almost automatically.

The 3.5 minute rule, and how I actually tested 50

This is the most specific piece of advice in this article and almost nobody does it.

On max jump days, when you are going for a new dunk or a vertical PR, give yourself at least three and a half minutes of rest between max-effort jumps.

When I tested my 50 inch vertical, I did 10 max-effort jumps before the test. I literally set a 3.5 minute timer and would not let myself jump again until it went off. That reset is what lets your body deliver maximum performance on the next attempt.

Most people take three deep breaths and go again, then wonder why attempt eight is worse than attempt two.

Deloads, and being okay feeling like you did not do enough

A deload is not full rest. It is dropping fatigue so your fitness shows through. Lower the volume, keep the intensity. Drop off too hard and you just detrain.

The signs I watch for: I feel flat, my numbers stall, my knees and shins start barking. That is fatigue piling up, not weakness.

Here is the mental part, and it is the hardest thing in this whole article. On a deload you will leave the weight room feeling like you did not do enough.

That is good. That is exactly how you are supposed to feel. Athletes always want to keep working and you have to fight that urge.

Also, do not panic about being a little sore on a max jump day. Adrenaline covers a lot. You do not want to go in out of shape, but a little soreness is fine.

Vertical jump training gear you should not buy

Save your money on the toys. Weighted insoles. Jump soles. Carbon fiber insoles. Ankle weights. Weighted vests used wrong. Most of it just rides the excitement of a new toy, or adds mass to your feet, which actually slows you down.

Same with the myths. A thousand calf raises a day does nothing. Any program promising 12 to 15 inches in three months is the biggest gimmick of all. And “sleep when you’re dead” is backwards, skipping sleep just kills your recovery and your power.

Be careful any time somebody claims one exercise will make you jump higher. A lot of the time they are just trying to sell you a program.

Two more traps. Do not copy elite genetic freaks, because what works for a freak usually does not apply to you at your level. And do not change every exercise every week. It takes a few weeks to adapt to a lift before the gains show up.

Run the scientific method on yourself

I do not hand people one rigid vertical jump training plan, because everybody trains differently.

I do not have a coach and I do not run a rigid plan on myself either. I run the scientific method on myself. Try it, write down the result, keep what works for me.

That is the whole method. Try it, log it, keep what moves your number. Yours will not be identical to mine.

And the last myth worth killing: jumping high is not pure genetics. Jumping is a skill. Anyone can improve their vertical by changing the small things.

The biggest myth of all is that you need a perfect, fully planned program before you can start. You do not. People overcomplicate it so hard they never do anything. Sometimes it is as simple as starting with “I want to jump higher.”

Just start.

I built this into an app

Everything above is what I do. The problem with writing about vertical jump training is that an article cannot look at your numbers.

That is why I built Vertly. It is an AI jump coach trained on how I actually train, and it builds you a plan around your own testing instead of handing you my week. It is free to start.

Get Vertly on the App Store

More from me

• I Won Group A: The Full Story of My First Dunk Contest Ever
• Stuck on a Tarmac Three Days Before the Biggest Night of My Life
• Three of the Eight: The Night the Vertical World Record Fell at Fanatics Fest
• The 360 Under Both on a Regulation Hoop
• World Record at Dunkademics: The Head Touch
• More about me

The 50 inch vertical and the DUNKMAN Group A win have been covered independently by the Dallas Morning News and The Atlanta Voice. My athlete profiles are listed with DUNKMAN and the World Dunk Association.

Quick note before we get going: you might see other posts and coverage about this night around the site and around the internet. This one is different. This is my personal account, every dunk and every emotion, straight from me.

On July 21, I competed in the first dunk contest of my life. It happened to be the premiere night of DUNKMAN, Shaq’s professional dunk league, live on TNT, the biggest dunk contest ever held, with $500,000 on the line for the eventual champion.

I won it.

Highest score of the night. Dunk of the Night. Group A champion. $35,000. And as of right now, a Top 8 seed in the world.

Here’s how it actually went down.

The group nobody wanted

Let me paint the picture of what I walked into. Group A wasn’t just my first contest. It was, in my opinion, the hardest group in the entire league. Joel Henry, the number one dunker in Europe. Dengxing Chen, the number one dunker in Asia. Shelby McEwen, the Olympic silver medalist in the high jump from 2024. Jonathan Edwards, the man behind the NBA 2K dunk animations. And Doug Anderson, NCAA dunk contest champion.

And then me. A 21-year-old college student who had never competed in a single dunk contest in his life, in the first group ever shown on national television. The way I saw it, anything less than first place and my World Championship hopes were done. No warm-up contest, no easing in. Straight into the deep end.

The warm-up told me something

During warm-ups I threw down a few dunks, nothing from my real bag, just dunks that come easy to me, and the crowd went crazy. That was my first time ever experiencing a crowd like that, and it was only the warm-up. Shaq was courtside watching me for just the second time in person, and he was loving every second of it.

That’s the moment I knew: DUNKMAN was going to have a problem on their hands tonight.

Round one: the drop and the climb

I was the fourth seed, so I watched Doug Anderson, Shelby, and Chen all go before me.

Dunk 1: the 360 reverse windmill. I picked this one for a reason. Vince Carter was in the building: the man who originated that dunk, and the man everybody says did it with the best style ever. I agree with them. But I didn’t want it to stay undisputed. So I gave my best shot at recreating his dunk, in front of him, and I crushed it. The announcers were going crazy, the judges scored it well, and I was sitting in second place.

Dunk 2: the miss. I went up for a 360 East Bay and my shoe slipped out from under me on the takeoff. Rhythm gone, dunk missed. My first missed dunk of the night, on national television, in my first contest ever. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t freak out a little inside. Only the top three advance to the finals, and that miss dropped me to fourth. Season over, right there, if I let it be.

I kept my head down and stuck to the plan.

Dunk 3: the 360 inverted East Bay. Crushed it. First attempt. The judges scored it extremely high, high enough that I didn’t just sneak into the top three, I jumped from fourth place all the way to the top seed heading into the finals.

The finals: the dunk I invented

For my first dunk of the finals, I went to my signature: the 360 double-pump back scratcher. I originated that dunk. I still haven’t seen anyone else land it. A few days before the contest, my clip of it had gone viral with around 5 million views, and I’d heard the judges talking about that exact dunk off the floor. It’s the riskiest dunk in my bag. It’s also the best one. I had to pull it out.

I crushed it. Best dunk I’ve ever done in competition, and the judges agreed: 9.55 out of 10, the highest score of the night by far.

And understand what it beat. These guys emptied the tank. Joel and Chen were jumping over actual cars. Chen did an inspec over six people. That’s the level of contest this was, and the 9.55 still came out on top. That should tell you everything about how hard that dunk is.

Since your lowest score gets dropped, by my last dunk of the finals the math was already done. I’d won. So I took a victory lap: a simple two-hander, just to soak in a moment I’ll never get back. Shaq was jumping up and down. I dapped him up while Draymond Green and CashNasty, who were incredible on the call all night, lost their minds on the mics.

What I said when they handed me the mic

Right after the win, I did a live interview on the broadcast with CashNasty, and I said what I truly believe: I’m honored to have come out on top, but the real win isn’t the trophy. The real win is being part of the legacy that turns dunking into a real sport. I could not be more blessed to be in the position I’m in, helping carry it to that next stage.

Then Shaq picked my 360 double-pump back scratcher as the Dunk of the Night (only one dunk per group stage gets that honor), which came with $10,000. Add the $25,000 for winning the group, and I walked out of Overtime Elite Arena with $35,000 and a Top 8 seed in the world.

The court got crashed after that: pictures, autographs, mini interviews everywhere. I also sat down for about an hour-long interview about the win that’ll be rolling out over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

What’s next

Group A is done, but the job isn’t. The World Championship is August 25 in Atlanta: eight dunkers, one champion, $500,000.

Two years ago nobody knew my name. Today I’m a Top 8 world seed in the first professional dunk league in history. Be so good they can’t ignore you.

See you August 25.

If you want the training that got me on that stage, I wrote up how I trained a 50 inch vertical without living in the gym.

The highlight reels show the dunks. They don’t show you sitting on a grounded airplane for two hours, sore from head to toe, watching a storm swallow the airport, three days before the biggest contest of your life.

The flight that didn’t happen

I left Fanatics Fest in New York running on adrenaline and not much else. Three days of the biggest fan festival on earth, a world-record vertical competition, and my body was feeling every bit of it. The plan was simple: fly straight to Atlanta, get three clean days of recovery and preparation, and show up to Group A of DUNKMAN ready to shock the world.

The weather had other plans. A storm rolled over the airport, and after about two hours sitting on the plane, they called us off. Flight canceled. Three days out from the contest, and I’m standing in an airport in New York instead of recovering in Atlanta.

I’m not going to pretend that didn’t get to me. All that sitting threw off my rhythm, I was sore from the Fest, and the clock on my prep was burning. But panicking has never fixed a flight. I caught the first flight out the next morning, got to Atlanta, and got to work. Losing that night meant the margin for error was gone. Every hour left had to count.

No stone unturned

You can’t control a storm, but you can control everything else about your preparation. So that became the mission: leave nothing, and I mean nothing, unturned.

First move was getting with a physical therapist in Atlanta. We went through my whole body, worked out the soreness from Fanatics Fest and the travel, and made sure there was no pain I was carrying into that arena that didn’t need to be there. He got me right.

Then it was the unglamorous stuff, which is really the whole sport. Diet: I obsessed over every single thing I put in my body those three days: the right food and the right supplements at the right times. Recovery: stretching and mobility work every day, exactly on plan. Sleep: the night before the contest, I got ten hours. That’s not luck. That’s treating sleep like it’s part of the competition, because it is.

By the time competition day came, there was nothing I could look at and say “I should have done more.” Whatever happened on that court, I was going to walk in knowing I’d done everything in my power to be ready.

The dinner that reminded me why

A few hours before the show, my family flew in, and my girlfriend and I got to sit down and have dinner with them.

I could tell you about every rep of my prep, but honestly that dinner might have been the most important part of the whole three days. Sitting there with the people who have watched me chase this since I was a kid, hours before I stepped on national television for the first time, it reminded me exactly why I do this. To make my family proud. To show my girlfriend what I pour myself into every single day. All the pressure I’d been carrying about the group I’d drawn (hardest group in the league, on TV first, against the biggest names in the sport) didn’t disappear, but it got put in its place.

I walked out of that dinner calm. Prepared, rested, fed, healthy, and surrounded by my people.

Then it was time to go be a problem.

What happened next deserves its own post, and it’s the story I’ll be telling for the rest of my life.

The jumping itself is the simple part. Here is the vertical jump training behind it.

Me. Darius Clark. Dillan McCarthy. One court. One bar that kept going up.

What Fanatics Fest even is

If you haven’t been, Fanatics Fest is the biggest sports fan festival in the world: 200,000 people packed into the Javits Center in NYC over four days, right in the middle of World Cup summer. Athletes, collectors, celebrities, live shows everywhere you look. When we got to the DUNKMAN court to warm up, Kevin Hart was filming a live episode of Cold as Balls with Serena Williams on the stage right next to us. That’s the kind of weekend it was.

Shaq makes it official

Before our show, DUNKMAN held a press conference with Shaquille O’Neal to announce the league to the world: the first professional dunk league, premiering July 21 on TNT, with my group, Group A, going first. Mac McClung, Isaiah Rivera, and Tyler Currie were up there with Shaq, some of the biggest names in the game. And when the press conference wrapped, Shaq pointed everybody to our court and said we were going to try to break the world record. No pressure.

The competition

We put on a dunk show first to get the crowd going, and then Shaq came in and turned the whole place up another level. Then it was time.

Everything was done right. Standing reaches verified by one of the most trusted testers in the sport before anybody jumped. This wasn’t a social media clip. This was legit.

Some context on what we were up against: Darius Clark held the official Guinness World Record at 50.5 inches. But two weeks earlier in Utah, Ethan Pimstone had put up an unofficial 52.5 and beaten Darius head to head. So Darius walked into New York with a serious chip on his shoulder. Dillan had tested 52. I’ve tested a verified 50, and in a height-check test measuring head height instead of hand touch, I measured out at 51. So I came in with high hopes too.

We all started at 48 inches, and all three of us cleared it clean. Then the bar went to 50, and that’s where the night humbled me. Dillan and I both missed it.

But the show was just getting started.

53 inches

Darius clutched up and cleared 51, breaking his own record right there. And then Shaq did the most Shaq thing possible. The prize pool was $10,000, and Shaq looked at Darius and said if you go for 53, I’ll make it twenty.

Darius said bet. No hesitation.

Understand what 53 inches means: that’s the theoretical limit of the human body. Nobody in that building had real expectations he’d get it. And he did it. He cleared 53, smacked the bell, and the flight-time reading came back at 1.017 seconds, the highest ever recorded, backing the jump up with hard data. The place exploded. I’ve been around a lot of athletic feats, and I’ve never heard a crowd like that.

What it meant

The clips went everywhere. Darius got the recognition he deserves, DUNKMAN introduced itself to the world in the loudest way possible, and I got to be on the court for a piece of history, not as a spectator, but as one of the three guys pushing the bar up.

Did I want to jump higher that day? Of course. But watching a world record fall from ten feet away, knowing I’m one of the only humans on earth who belongs in that conversation, put a battery in my back like nothing else.

Because the second that event ended, I was on my way to the airport. New York to Atlanta. Group A of DUNKMAN, the biggest dunk contest in history, was days away, and I had a contest to win.

That trip turned into a story of its own. More on that in the next post.

People ask what I do to jump like that. This is how I train my vertical without grinding.