Darren was born in Maui, Hawaii in February of 1996. At a young age, Darren moved with his family to Nashville, Tennessee, and shortly after picked up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu at a no-gi Academy in Nashville, where he practiced for roughly 4 years. Even though he has had a large part of his BJJ training outside of the gi he still has a blue belt and has participated in NAGA tournaments and professional grappling bouts. For the first part of his career he had trained out of Pound-4-Pound MMA in Nashville, TN with his longtime friend Anthony Wilkerson. After his first round win over Johquavious McKinney, Darren had found a pattern with his opponent's, they all had problem showing up to the fight, A total of 3 fights were scheduled for Darren after the McKinney win and every single one fell through. Darren ended up taking a 4 year and 7 month break from fighting. During his layoff he moved to Phoenix, AZ and started training out of John Crouch's MMA Lab and Tim Welch's Soul Fighter's BJJ. After about 8 months of training in Phoenix Darren moved back to Nashville and switched from Pound-4-Pound to Nashville MMA.