From teaching assistant to 'pro dunker,' here's how D-FW's Cam Hazzard won $35K off Shaq
· Yahoo Sports
Cam Hazzard, by any measure, already was an exceptional 21-year-old.
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He’s triple-majoring in Accounting, Finance and Information Systems at Abilene Christian, where he has a 4.0 GPA and is a former teaching assistant.
Lewisville-born, Little Elm-raised Hazzard was a varsity basketball co-captain and marching band brass captain at Frisco Lone Star. He’s an entrepreneur and a passionate community volunteer.
But as an incredulous TNT national audience learned earlier this week, and subsequently millions more social media viewers, the 6-2 Hazzard also is one of the world’s best dunkers.
How good is he? On Tuesday night, in what he says was the first dunk competition of his life, he won Shaquille O’Neal’s Dunkman League Group A Qualifier. Pocketing $35,000, he earned one of eight spots in the Aug. 25 finals, where the world Dunkman champion will receive $500,000.
Cam Hazzard takes the top score of the night with THIS dunk 😳🔥 pic.twitter.com/NCD6wMyzSC
— TNT Sports U.S. (@TNTSportsUS) July 22, 2026
“I always view dunking as a side hobby,” Hazzard told The Dallas Morning News by telephone from Abilene, his viral performance in Atlanta’s Overtime Elite Arena still reverberating. “It’s one of my favorite things to do.
“I never saw it as even a possibility of a career that I made some side cash on. I just thought it was all for fun. But this is changing the game pretty fast.”
Before his performance, in which he beat seven competitors and earned the $10K dunk-of-the-night bonus with a 360-degree tomahawk in which his eyes nearly reached rim level, some viewers might have thought his reported 50-inch vertical leap was exaggerated.
“It looks like he’s literally flying!” one of TNT’s analysts exclaimed.
“It looks different from the other competitors, doesn’t it?” chimed play-by-play voice Adam Lefkoe.
360 BETWEEN THE LEG DUNK from 21 year old Cam Hazzard 😮💨 pic.twitter.com/xacDmwHFO7
— TNT Sports U.S. (@TNTSportsUS) July 22, 2026
Upon returning to summer classes at Abilene Christian, and his remote internship for an Austin accounting firm, Treaty Oak Financial, Hazzard found himself getting approached by one stranger after another.
Of course, the fact that he was wearing a Dunkman T-shirt was a pretty good clue.
“It’s a weird feeling,” he said with a laugh. “It’s gone to the point where people are coming up and asking if I’m the person who went viral on Tuesday. It’s been crazy. I’ve never experienced something like that.”
In case you’re wondering, yes, Hazzard grew up as a Mavericks fan, with his grandparents taking him to American Airlines Center for games.
His father, Preston Hazzard, is Frisco ISD’s fine arts director. Mother Whitney Hazzard is a longtime saxophone private teacher. Cam has two sisters, Caitlyn and Lauren.
Cam entered Abilene Christian’s honors college as a Heacock and Dukes Scholar and on an Instrumental Band scholarship, and he plays trumpet for the school’s Big Purple Band.
But instead of perhaps showing his trumpet skills on America’s Got Talent, he’s now a national sensation on what some might see as a dunk reality show, with 7-1 O’Neal as Dunkman League commissioner.
Hazzard says it’s his understanding that it was O’Neal who spotted some of his dunks on social media and decided to make Hazzard one of this season’s 24 dunk invitees. But the first time Hazzard and O’Neal met in person was July 16 in New York, when they attended Dunkman’s promotional launch at Fanatics Fest.
“I remember him walking out on the court, this crazy-tall human being,” Hazzard said. “I was like, ‘What the heck? ’ Because I feel like I’m tall, but seeing him made me seem like a child.
“The first time I dapped him up after hitting one of my first dunks, that was a pretty cool experience. His hand just wrapped all around mine. It was crazy. He’s an amazing person and super-supportive of the dunk community. I couldn’t be more grateful for that.”
Hazzard says he grew up watching dunks on sites like Ball Is Life and House of Highlights, adding, “I never imagined I would be on there with multi-million-view videos.”
Unlike perhaps most of the 23 other Dunkman contestants, Hazzard is a relatively late arriver to the dunk community.
He dunked for the first time at age 15. Two months later, he recorded his first backscratcher dunk.
The following year, 2022, featured his first windmill dunk, but he says two weeks later he tore both hamstrings while slipping on a wet spot in an AAU game. That meant a full year of no jumping.
“It killed my college ball vision and started something better,” Hazzard wrote on his website, camhazzard.com.
In 2023 he attended Dunk Camp in Dallas, where he was inspired by legends Isaiah Rivera, Jordan Kilganon, Jordan Southerland and Donovan Hawkins.
“A week or two later, I hit my first 360 windmill. My bag got deep fast,” he wrote.
“This past December,” Hazzard told The News, “I starting taking off. I started hitting dunks that were getting more and more rare. I was really excited about it. All I wanted to do was contribute back to the dunk community, which was really supportive, would reach out and hype up my dunks.”
Adding intrigue to the Hazzard narrative during the competition is his unlikely comeback story.
In January, on the first possession of his Abilene Christian intramural team’s first game, Hazzard jumped for a rebound. But as his arms swung upward, his hand hit the heel of another player.
“It’s hard to imagine it happening, but that’s what happened,” he said. He said his hand was basically shattered. One knuckle was broken off. His middle finger was split horizontally. Doctors pieced his hand back together with plates and screws.
In the hospital, doctors strapped his arm to his chest to stabilize his hand.
“I didn’t know if I was going to be able to come back fully because I had so much metal in my hand,” he said.
In February he got the Dunkman invitation.
“I was like, ‘I have to come back,’” he said. “I kept my head down, went through the pain and three months later, I was back on the court.”
He says his best dunk is performing a 360 spin, pushing the ball under both legs and lifting it for the slam, a feat he says fewer than 10 people on the planet can perform. There’s also his “360 behind the back” and “360 J-Rich Eastbay.”
What national TV viewers saw Tuesday, he says, was a mere teaser for what he’ll perform Aug. 25, which will be simulcast on TNT Sports and YouTube.
As a budding data and systems analyst, he was asked whether the way his brain functions makes him a better dunker.
“Oh, yeah, for sure,” he said. “On my second dunk [Tuesday], I missed it and people were saying I was completely out.
“Obviously I was super-bummed. I wasn’t expecting it. But I already had a game plan. I feel like because I have an analytical brain and can think through each scenario, I was able to pull out a dunk that pushed me into first place after the first round.
“I just carried that momentum through the final round.”
Whether or not he prevails and wins that $500,000, Hazzard said he feels as though he’s already won.
“I wasn’t sure how I give back to the dunk community until I was reached out to about Shaq’s Dunkman8 League,” he said. “I realized maybe that was my calling, to represent the community on a big stage like this.”