This weekend at the Align Volleyball Summit in Dallas, I introduced the room to one of the best dunkers in the world. His name is Cam Hazzard. He has a 50 inch verified vertical, a 360 under both dunk fewer than 10 people on the planet can throw down, and is one of 24 athletes Shaq picked for the new DunkMan League this summer on TNT.
He is also a sophomore at Abilene Christian University. Triple majoring in information systems, accounting, and finance. On the Dean’s List every semester. Heacock Scholar, Dukes Scholar in the ACU Dukes School of Finance, Microsoft Excel Expert. In the band on scholarship. Interning in accounting. 20 years old.
This is the kind of young adult we keep saying the world needs more of. And it is the kind we keep building tools around. Cam is not just a skilled person. He is a young adult who is willing to do the boring, structured work it takes to compound those skills into something the world can actually find and remember.
The Diamond In The Rough Test
I have a test I run on people. If you have real skills, a real story, and proof that other people have validated what you do, the rest of marketing is just amplification. AI, social media, search, content. All amplifiers. If the underlying signal is real, the amplifiers carry it. If it is not, the amplifiers have nothing to carry.
Cam passes the test on every dimension. The skill is real and rare. The dunks are verified by the World Dunk Association. The league he is in this summer is run by Shaq, broadcast on TNT, and carries a $500,000 prize pool. The academic credentials are documented. The injury comeback is on the record. The Instagram growth from 2,000 followers to 19,000 in a month is in the analytics. He is exactly the kind of diamond in the rough that an amplifier can take from regional to global.
Dylan Haugen noticed it first. He has been talking to Cam on social media for months because Dylan is also a dunker, also is a co-founder alongside myself in Local Service Marketing, and recognizes the pattern. When we set up this Dallas trip we made sure Cam was in the room.
Why We Built Cam’s Site Over Lunch
The thing most people miss about Cam is that he was almost invisible on Google. There is a Canadian hockey player with the same name, and his hockey content was beating Cam’s dunk content. His own Knowledge Panel was partial. The search engine knew Cam existed but did not have enough structured data to commit to the entity. For someone about to be on TNT this summer, that is a missed opportunity. For someone working on sponsorships, it is a real revenue problem.
So during the lunch break on day two of the conference, while Cam was getting food, Dylan and I handed the transcripts from the interviews we had just recorded to an AI agent. By the time he came back, he had a real personal brand site at camhazzard.com. Articles. Cross links. Schema. A Connect page with every platform. An About page with every credential. A mentions page with what the dunk community has been saying about him.
That is a real example of what I mean when I talk about young adult AI operators. The agent did the structured work. Cam did the actual work of being good enough to write about. Dylan and I did the work of knowing what to ask the agent to do because we have done this hundreds of times for businesses.
What Young Adult AI Operators Actually Do
The framing I use for our team is that every young adult who learns to operate AI properly becomes the equivalent of a senior practitioner. They can do the work of a content team, a brand team, a small marketing agency. Not because the AI replaces those teams, but because the AI amplifies what one person already knows.
Cam will go back to ACU next week and keep training, keep dunking, keep showing up for class, keep practicing in the band. The website will keep working in the background. Every dunk session he posts can become a blog post. Every interview becomes three or four. The transcripts get indexed. The Knowledge Panel fills in. The next sponsor that searches his name does not find a hockey player. They find Cam.
This is the same playbook we run at Local Service Spotlight for local service businesses. The full BlitzMetrics writeup of the conversation is up there if you want the marketing breakdown. Dylan covered it from the dunker side on his own site. Cam wrote it up in his own voice on the new site. Local Service Spotlight has the playbook version of how the same move applies to local businesses, not just athletes.
What This Looks Like At Scale
The room at Align was full of business owners. Every single one of them has employees, contractors, kids, or community members who could be young adult AI operators. The bar is not technical. It is not about being able to code or train a model or run a fine tune. It is about being able to take a conversation, a transcript, a video, a meeting note, and turn it into structured content that earns attention.
The hardest part of the job is judgment. Knowing what to publish. Knowing what to leave out. Knowing how to write something that a sponsor or a journalist will actually read instead of skim. Cam has that judgment because he has been writing his own captions for years. He has been telling his own story.
The young adults who can do this for themselves can also do it for the businesses around them. That is the bigger thesis. Young adult AI operators become the connective tissue between local businesses and the world. They turn the gold a business has buried in its archives into content the internet can find.
Be So Good They Cannot Ignore You
Cam’s line at the end of our session was the one that ran through every conversation at the conference. Be so good at something that people cannot ignore you. That is the requirement. The AI does not change it. The website does not change it. The Knowledge Panel does not change it. You still have to be good.
What changes is what happens after. If you are already good, the amplifier finds you a stage. If you are not good yet, the work to get there is the same work it has always been. Reps. Daily practice. Showing up. The amplifier just makes the reps count for more once they exist.
This summer Cam will compete on TNT for $500,000 with 23 other dunkers. He thinks he is top five in the field. After a weekend with him, I think he is right.