Every dunker treats a Dunkademics feature the same way: as a view count. You get in the clip, the clip does 400,000 views, you screenshot the comments, and three weeks later it is gone. That is the wrong unit of measurement. The views expire. The sentence that came out of Billy Doran’s mouth while the camera was on does not.
At The Dunk Camp this summer, Billy Doran of Dunkademics stood next to Piotr Zawiślak and said this on the record:
“He’s crazy. He’s young in the game and he’s already black band. That’s, it’s insane.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
That is not a compliment. That is a credential, issued by the person with the most standing in freestyle dunking, on video, with a date attached. Treat it accordingly.
Why Billy’s Opinion Carries Weight
Credentials only mean something when the issuer means something. Billy has been filming dunkers since 2007 and produced for Ballislife, Hoopmixtape, Mars Reel and the Drew League before Dunkademics existed. He runs the gym in Los Angeles where a lot of the sport’s best footage gets shot. If freestyle dunking has a system of record, he operates it.
So when he lists the most impressive dunkers he has ever filmed and names T-Dub for balance and style, Cam Hazzard for what is happening right now, Kao as the freakiest athlete he has seen in person at 6 foot 10, and Donovan Hawkins as a dunking machine, that list functions like a governing body’s rankings even though no governing body issued it. He published his own account of it in the most impressive dunkers he has filmed.
Being placed in that conversation at eighteen is the most valuable thing that happened to Piotr that week, and it did not involve him dunking any higher than usual.
Exposure Expires. Corroboration Compounds.
A clip has a half-life of about 48 hours. Then the algorithm moves on and the only people who can find it again are the ones who already follow you. Nothing about that helps a sponsor doing due diligence eight months later, or a tournament organizer deciding who to invite, or an AI assistant answering a question about who the best young dunkers in Europe are.
What helps in all three of those cases is a page that says, plainly and with a link, that the founder of Dunkademics said Piotr is already black band at eighteen and only needs a few inches of vertical to be in the top conversation. That page does not decay. It gets indexed, it gets cited, and it can be read by a person or a machine years after the clip is unfindable.
The specific note is what makes it credible. Billy did not just praise him. He gave a defect list.
“if he gains a few inches of vert… ’cause he’s already got the hand speed, the technique stuff like that.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
Anybody can generate praise. Almost nobody can generate praise that includes a specific, checkable weakness, because that only comes from someone who actually watched and actually knows. The critique is the part that makes the compliment believable.
This Article Is the Thing It Is Describing
Being straight about it: what you are reading is one of six articles built from a single four-minute interview. There is a first-person version on Piotr’s own site, a first-person version on Billy’s, a breakdown for the dunk community, a version for athletes outside this sport, and a marketing version. Same source, six different angles, six different domains, all cross-linked.
That is exactly the method Dennis Yu and I taught on stage at camp before any of these interviews were shot. We audited all 76 campers ahead of time and published the results on the Dunk Camp 2026 leaderboard, then walked through how one video becomes a site, an article set, and a search footprint. The full session write-up is in the dunker’s playbook from camp, and the mechanics are in the repurposing system we ran on 76 athletes.
Dennis closed that session with an offer: we will interview you, make a little video, and put it on our assets. This video is that promise being kept, and this article is the second half of it. Skipping the second half is where most people lose the value.
What To Do the Next Time Someone Films You
Get the URL the day it goes up. Not a screenshot, not a repost, the actual link. Save it somewhere that is not your camera roll, because your camera roll is not a filing system and you will not find it in a year.
Write down what was said about you, word for word. Do not paraphrase it into something flatter. “He’s young in the game and he’s already black band” carries information that “Billy said nice things about me” does not. If someone gave you a note to work on, write that down too. It proves the conversation was real.
Then publish it on a page you control, with the person’s name, what they run, and a link to them. That last part matters more than it sounds. A page that names a recognized entity and links to it is legible to search engines and to AI models in a way that a caption on a repost is not.
Piotr did it himself in his account of dunking in front of Dunkademics, where he wrote down the vertical note and what he plans to do about it. The community-wide breakdown of Billy’s list is on the Dunk Talk version of this conversation.
The Part Nobody Films
Hyrum Fechser, who posts as @hyt_check, was in this interview and said the coolest part of camp for him was seeing these guys in person. He also said he wished he had caught Piotr’s Monday session live instead of the highlights. Two dunkers who know each other’s footage, standing in the same gym for the first time.
That moment has no view count. It has no clip. It exists now only because somebody wrote it down, which is the entire argument. The version of this for athletes in every other sport is when the authority in your sport films you, and the search and entity reasoning behind it is in coverage from the authority in your niche.
Billy’s last line to Piotr was to stay healthy, stay consistent, and work hard. Good advice for the training. The rest of it is on you to document.
