Jackson Olson, the second baseman and content creator for the Savannah Bananas, the entertainment-focused baseball team that has become one of the most viral sports organizations in the world, has been officially announced as a contestant on Season 35 of Dancing with the Stars.
ABC made the announcement Tuesday May 12, 2026 during Disney’s Upfront presentation.
He is the third celebrity confirmed for the season, joining Love Island and The Traitors breakout Maura Higgins and Summer House favorite Ciara Miller.
The full Season 35 cast, including all celebrity contestants and their professional dance partners, will be announced on Wednesday September 2, 2026 exclusively on Good Morning America.
The season premieres in fall 2026 and will air live on ABC and Disney+, with episodes streaming the next day on Hulu.
The head start referenced in the headline is real. Olson already has a nickname among Savannah Bananas fans: the Greatest Showman.
He earned it by performing a full dance routine inspired by the musical that became one of the Bananas’ crowd-favorite infield celebrations after wins.
He is 28 years old, plays second base and has been performing choreographed routines in front of tens of thousands of fans at MLB stadiums across the country for the past several years.
Olson is not a DWTS celebrity contestant who needs to learn to perform. He is a performer who needs to learn ballroom technique.
That distinction is the specific thing that makes this casting interesting.
Who Is Jackson Olson?
The Savannah Bananas are not a conventional baseball team.
They are, as the description that has attached itself to the organization over the years makes clear, the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, a performance-focused traveling exhibition that uses the sport as a framework for entertainment, trick plays, choreographed routines, comedy bits and a relentless commitment to making the audience part of what happens on the field.
Founded by Jesse Cole in Savannah, Georgia, the Bananas developed their own modified version of baseball called Banana Ball, faster, more entertaining, built around keeping the crowd engaged from first pitch to final out.
The team travels across the United States playing at stadiums large and small, and the performances have accumulated hundreds of millions of views on social media.
They appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the Today Show and Good Morning America. They sold out games at Dodger Stadium, Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park.
They became one of the genuinely unexpected cultural phenomena of the past several years in American sports.
Jackson Olson became one of the team’s most recognizable faces through a combination of his play and his social media presence.
He is a second baseman, number 8, who can do things on a baseball field that most second basemen cannot.
He is also a content creator whose Instagram and TikTok channels have built an audience around what he describes as macro baseball insights alongside storytelling about family, relationships, food and the experience of building a life and a career as a professional entertainer who happens to play baseball.
His nickname the Greatest Showman came from a specific moment: he created a full dance routine inspired by the Hugh Jackman musical film, which became the Bananas’ infield celebration after wins.
An infield celebration involving a choreographed number inspired by a Broadway-style musical film. At a baseball game. That is the Savannah Bananas, and that is Jackson Olson’s specific contribution to it.
He told a podcast in 2025 that if he could be on any reality show, he would choose Dancing with the Stars over The Bachelor.
That preference was not hypothetical, he appears to have been telling anyone who asked what he was already working toward.
The Derek Hough Tease That Everyone Noticed
The announcement on Tuesday had been telegraphed more openly than most DWTS casting reveals.
The clearest signal came in March 2026, when DWTS judge Derek Hough appeared at a Savannah Bananas game.
The two performed together onstage during the event, Hough joining the Bananas’ entertainment format in a way that generated significant social media attention.
At the end of the performance, Hough tossed Olson a miniature mirrorball trophy, the prize that DWTS champions receive at the end of each season.
A DWTS judge throws a mirrorball to a Savannah Bananas player during a joint performance and nobody in the audience is supposed to draw conclusions. The internet drew conclusions.
Days before Tuesday’s official announcement, Olson posted a video on Instagram with a caption asking when he would finally “share the secret” he had been keeping. The secret is now confirmed. The mirrorball may eventually be the full-size version.
What Season 35 Is Shaping Up To Be
Olson joins a Season 35 cast that is taking shape with a specific kind of energy.
The first two confirmed contestants, Maura Higgins and Ciara Miller, both come from the reality television world, specifically from the Bravo and Peacock universe that has been producing DWTS contestants for years.
Maura Higgins became one of the most discussed personalities in reality television through her runs on Love Island UK and The Traitors, where her combination of humor, candor and genuine entertainment value made her one of the season’s most memorable contestants.
Ciara Miller built her following through Summer House and her own Traitors appearance.
Both bring established fan communities to the show and both represent the specific reality TV demographic that DWTS has cultivated as a reliable viewer base.
Olson’s addition represents a different kind of audience expansion, the massive Savannah Bananas fanbase, which skews younger and more digitally native than traditional DWTS viewers and which will follow him into a show they might not have watched otherwise.
His presence alongside Disney+’s announcement of exclusive Banana Bowl streaming rights reflects a deliberate strategy. Disney has now aligned the Savannah Bananas brand with multiple parts of its entertainment portfolio simultaneously.
The full cast will be announced September 2 on Good Morning America. Hosts Alfonso Ribeiro and Julianne Hough will return.
Judges Carrie Ann Inaba, Bruno Tonioli and Derek Hough, the same Derek Hough who threw Olson a mirrorball in March, will be at the judges’ table.
The Banana Bowl And The Disney Partnership
The Olson announcement came alongside a separate and equally significant piece of news for Savannah Bananas fans.
Disney announced at the same Upfront presentation that Disney+ has become the exclusive home of the Banana Bowl, the Savannah Bananas’ season championship game, which will stream live on the platform this October.
The Banana Bowl will feature the top teams in the Banana Ball league competing for the season championship, with what the Bananas are calling one of the biggest performances the league has ever assembled, all six teams, all together, with the signature on-field entertainment from first pitch to final out.
For a team that has built its identity on the performance as much as the competition, putting the championship on Disney+ is both a commercial validation of what they have built and a distribution platform that matches the scale of the audience they have already accumulated online.
Olson competing on DWTS while the Banana Bowl streams on Disney+ in the same fall season is the kind of synchronized expansion that does not happen by accident.
The Savannah Bananas and Disney have structured 2026 to be the year the organization moves from viral internet phenomenon to mainstream entertainment brand.
What To Watch For
Olson described himself in a 2025 Sports Illustrated feature as someone who found his way to the Bananas after a conventional minor league career path did not produce the results he had hoped for.
The Bananas gave him a stage where his full personality, athlete, entertainer, storyteller, musical theater enthusiast, was not a distraction from the sport but the point of it.
Dancing with the Stars is a different kind of stage with different rules and a different kind of scoring.
The athleticism that makes him a second baseman transfers to some degree, coordination, timing, the ability to perform under pressure in front of crowds.
The performance instincts transfer more directly. What does not transfer is ballroom technique, the specific language of waltz, foxtrot, salsa, quickstep and all the other dances the show requires, executed with the precision that the judges’ scoring demands.
He knows how to perform. He does not yet know how to dance. Learning the difference between the two, on live television, in fall 2026, is the specific journey that DWTS Season 35 is going to document.
The full cast is announced September 2. The Greatest Showman is already confirmed.
