Category: Dunker Spotlight

A third place finish at a FIBA contest in Croatia. A second FIBA event in France one week later. The Black Band from The Dunk Camp in Utah, one of only 13 awarded in the world. A 44 to 45 inch vertical at age 18. That is a real competitive record, and almost nobody outside Poland watched Piotr Zawiślak, the Polish dunker, build it.

The interview above is five minutes long and it is the closest thing to a full accounting of those two years that exists on video. Joe Kenney, who is Hoopin Nate’s dad, sat down with Piotr at camp and asked the questions that a highlight reel never answers. What did this cost? What is still missing? Who did you learn it from?

Where He Started

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

Outdoor rims in Poland is not a poetic detail. It is a training environment with no film crew, no gym time, no coach standing under the rim, and weather that decides half your sessions for you. Every rep from that period exists nowhere except in his legs. There is no archive of it because there was nobody there to make one.

Two years later he is on the FIBA circuit with a podium finish, and he says the result out loud without dressing it up.

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

The Part Nobody Filmed

Joe closed the interview with the sentence that should be pinned to the top of every dunk highlight on the internet. He has been watching this sport through his son, so he sees the hours rather than the clips.

“The average person has never put in the amount of time and effort and frustration that it takes to get to the level of Piotr.”
Joe Kenney

Frustration is the word that carries it. A dunk that lands in a nine second clip usually cost a few hundred failed attempts, a tweaked ankle, and a stretch of weeks where the jump got worse before it got better. None of that survives in the format the sport shares itself in. The clip is the only thing that travels, and the clip is the smallest part.

Why You Did Not See It Happen

Piotr was not hiding. His contests were in Europe, his results were posted in Polish, and his footage moved through platforms and feeds that American dunk fans do not search. Search his name in English two years ago and you found scattered clips with no context and no through line connecting them to a person with a record.

That is the visibility gap, and it has nothing to do with talent. It shows up any time an athlete’s proof exists in one language, one country, or one closed platform. The dunks were elite the entire time. What was missing was anything a search engine or an AI assistant could read and repeat back when somebody asked who he was.

Before the camp session, all 76 campers were audited on exactly this, and the ranked results are public on the Dunk Camp audit leaderboard. Most of them scored near zero on discoverability while holding genuinely rare athletic credentials. Piotr was one of many, not an outlier.

He Can Name His Own Gaps

What separates this interview from a normal camp clip is that Piotr diagnoses himself on camera. He wants to be the best dunker alive and he says the number that stands between him and it.

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

He is at 44 or 45. He also names the hole in his bag without being pushed: he is strong off the dribble and needs to add lob dunks and work off the backboard. Then there is the 720, which he calls his one target after landing 540 several times. Those are three specific, checkable claims that a fan can track over the next two years.

Specifics are what turn an athlete from a highlight into a story people can follow. A dunker who says “I want to get better” gives you nothing to watch for. A dunker who says 44 going on 50, dribble game strong, lob game missing, 720 pending, has just handed you a scoreboard.

The Two Names He Learned From

Isaiah Rivera is the first, and the reason is mechanical rather than sentimental. Isaiah jumps off the same approach, is right handed, and builds dunks the same way Piotr does, so studying him is studying a further along version of the same body. Joe added that the best thing about Isaiah is how he treats people, which is why the community keeps pointing young dunkers at him.

The second name is Lipek, the Polish dunker, who is a doctor now. Piotr has met him a few times, and watching a countryman finish school without leaving the sport is why he says he plans on college and possibly physical therapy school. That detail belongs in his record as much as the vertical does.

This Article Is the Fix, Said Out Loud

Dylan Haugen of Dunk Talk and Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics taught a session to 76 campers at The Dunk Camp about going from invisible to found, followed, and sponsored. The method is not complicated. Take the real stories that already exist, turn them into things that live publicly at a permanent address, and connect them so a search engine can understand who the person is.

“our goal is to repurpose and take things that already exist, your real stories, and turn them into articles that live publicly.”
Dylan Haugen

Dennis closed that talk by offering to interview any camper who wanted it, film it, and put it on these sites. The video above is that offer being taken. This article is that promise being kept, and it is worth saying plainly rather than pretending the coverage appeared on its own. The full method is written up in the system taught at the camp, and the step by step version for dunkers is in the dunker playbook for getting sponsored.

Who He Says Is Next

Joe raised the aging out question directly. There was a 38 year old jumper competing that night who was still incredible, and much of the generation that built modern dunking is closer to the end than the start. Piotr’s list of who takes over was Dylan Haugen, himself, Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney, and Dillan McCarthy. Joe added Cam Hazzard, another young dunker, to it.

Piotr told his own version at outdoor rims to the FIBA circuit. The technical breakdown is in the Dunk Talk FIBA conversation, the athlete timeline is in living the dream on schedule, and the general case for building the record early is in documenting the climb while it happens.

Two years took Piotr Zawiślak from an outdoor rim to a FIBA podium. The next two are the ones worth watching, and now there is a record of where he started from so anyone can measure the difference.

Elite dunkers compliment younger dunkers constantly. It happens at every session, every camp, every contest warmup. Almost none of it survives the week. The nice thing gets said, the people go home, and the only record is a memory that the person being complimented can never prove.

This one survived, because there was a camera on it.

“He’s the future, man. He is the future.”
Isaiah Rivera

That’s Isaiah Rivera at The Dunk Camp 2026 in Salt Lake City, talking about Piotr Zawiślak, who is 18 and from Poland and has named Isaiah as his favorite dunker since before anyone in the sport knew who Piotr was. The subject of this article is not the compliment. It’s what happens to a compliment when you record it, publish it, and give it a URL.

A Co-Sign With a Receipt Attached

What makes this clip usable is that Isaiah didn’t stop at the nice sentence. He gave a specific, verifiable reason.

“I missed 360 Underboth a bunch of times. You hit it second try at a session.”
Isaiah Rivera

An elite pro publicly stating that he repeatedly missed a dunk that an 18-year-old landed on his second attempt, at the same session, is a very different asset than “he’s really good.” It’s checkable. It has a place, a dunk name, and an attempt count. Anyone can watch the tape and decide for themselves whether they believe it.

“I can’t fathom even doing the stuff you’re doing at 18 years old.”
Isaiah Rivera

He added that his own vertical at that age was nowhere near 44 or 45 inches, that his first 360 Eastbay barely went down, and that watching Piotr made him feel old. Then he widened it out past the two of them: “it also shows me how much the dunk game’s evolving.”

The Part Nobody Could Have Scripted

Two days before that interview, Dennis Yu and I ran a classroom session at the same camp for 76 dunkers. We audited every one of them beforehand and posted the results publicly at the Dunk Camp 2026 audit leaderboard. The core message was that talent alone doesn’t get you found, and that learning to market yourself is a real skill worth training. The full session is documented at the repurposing system taught to 76 athletes.

Then Isaiah, who was not in that room and had no idea what we’d taught, answered a question about how to reach the top of pro dunking.

“The pro dunking game, you gotta get good at social media. You gotta get good at marketing yourself. That’s a skill in and of itself, so master that.”
Isaiah Rivera

“all of us, myself, Jake Clark, Jordan Kilganon, 1FootGod, we all mastered the social media game as well.”
Isaiah Rivera

We couldn’t have manufactured that. When we say it, we’re the people selling personal brand websites to dunkers, and a reasonable person should discount it. When Isaiah Rivera says it unprompted, and lists three other dunkers at the top of the sport who did the same, that’s a different kind of evidence. He’s not affiliated with us, he’s not being paid to agree, and he arrived at it from inside the sport rather than from marketing.

Moments Evaporate, Documents Compound

Here’s the practical difference. If that exchange had happened with no camera, Piotr would own a great story he could tell in interviews, and every listener would have to take his word for it. Instead it’s a two-minute video with a timestamp, a transcript, quotable lines, and a permanent address on the internet.

A brand looking at Piotr can watch it. A contest organizer deciding on an invite can watch it. A journalist writing about the next generation of dunkers can quote it and cite it. Six years from now, when Piotr is competing at whatever the sport becomes, that clip is still there and still says the same thing.

That’s the gap Dunker Spotlight exists to close. Dunkers produce some of the best video content of any sport on earth and stay almost completely invisible to Google, to AI assistants, and to the people who write sponsorship checks. The dunking isn’t the problem. The record-keeping is.

This Article Is the Thing It’s Describing

Worth being direct about the loop here, because pretending otherwise would be silly. Dennis closed the camp session by offering to interview any camper who wanted it, make a video, and put it on our sites. Piotr took the offer. The interview at the top of this page is that offer being kept, and this article is the second half of it.

One two-minute conversation became five articles across five sites, each one written from a different angle and each one linking to the others. Piotr’s own first-person account is at Isaiah Rivera called me the future. The dunk-community breakdown of all three pieces of advice is at Isaiah Rivera’s three rules for young dunkers. The version for athletes outside dunking is at the endorsement you cannot buy. The search and AI mechanics are at why an expert co-sign is an entity signal.

That’s the same pattern we demonstrated on stage using Cam Hazzard’s personal brand site, which was built in about 20 minutes from a single 20-minute interview and now ranks nearly his full first three pages of Google on his own name. Same system, different dunker, done in public so you can copy it.

What to Actually Do With This

If you’re a dunker, the takeaway isn’t “go get famous people to say nice things about you.” It’s simpler than that. The nice things are probably already being said to you at sessions and camps. You’re just not capturing them.

Turn the camera on before you ask the question. Ask for a specific, not a general compliment, because “he’s good” is worthless and “I missed that dunk a bunch of times and he hit it on his second try” is a credential. Then put it somewhere permanent that you control, with the quote written out in text so a search engine can read it.

Isaiah’s last piece of advice to Piotr was to enjoy the moments, because nobody dunks forever. He’s right. Document them while you’re enjoying them, and the moments outlast the career.