DWCS Season 10 Kicks Off With a 10-0 Prospect Fighting Diabetes

Dana White's Contender Series hits double digits on Tuesday, August 11, when Season 10 opens at the APEX in Las Vegas with a five-fight card and one hell of a story at the top of the marquee. Jonathan Kunneman, a 26-year-old out of Denver, walks in 10-0 as a pro with six submissions and four knockouts — and he's done all of it while managing Type 1 Diabetes, a condition he's lived with since he was 11.

The show streams at 7:00 pm ET / 4:00 pm PT on Paramount+, running 10 straight Tuesdays. The format hasn't changed: roughly five bouts a night, White and his matchmaking panel grading in real time, contracts handed out (or not) once the smoke clears. Last year's Season 9 tied the record with 46 athletes signed, so the bar for getting noticed is genuinely brutal.

The Undefeated Diabetic

Kunneman's edge is partly that there's no roadmap for a diabetic fighter making weight — he's had to become his own experiment, juggling blood sugar against a hard cut. He's framed that constant discomfort as the thing that drives him, and said he wants White to remember the kid who threw himself into the fire. There's history to overcome, too: a rib injury during a wrestling scramble scrapped his planned 2025 DWCS appearance and cost him two months, after which he couldn't land an opponent.

This year he gets Joe Kropschot, a 31-year-old middleweight from San Ramon training out of Skrappack and Team Santos. Kropschot's résumé is short but violent — 8-3 with a 100% finish rate, meaning every single win has come inside the distance. He started 4-0, hit a rough patch of three straight losses, then rebuilt his grappling and mindset well enough to win the LFA middleweight title.

Kropschot's Road and the Flyweight Wildcard

Kropschot fights under coach Gilbert Melendez, credits his fiancée Victoria for keeping him steady since he was 16, and leans on a mental-toughness philosophy he reckons is 75% of the game. He's calling this the defining moment of his life. Kunneman, for his part, thinks he's the harder-hitting, more explosive, sharper fighter — so there's no shortage of belief on either side of the cage.

Elsewhere on the card, keep an eye on flyweight Bilal Hasan, a 24-year-old from Everett, Washington sitting at 8-0-1. The self-styled 'Indo-Ninja' is a former CFFC champion with three title defenses, a Taekwondo black belt since age four, and a training camp that reads like a cheat code: he's mentored by flyweight great Demetrious Johnson (25-4-1) and coach Matt Hume. Hasan cites Conor McGregor and Michael Jackson as influences and wants highlight-reel finishes — exactly the kind of theater that tends to get a contract signed on this stage.