NXT Advent Calendar Day 14: A young Bayley teams... with her future trainer?

Image credit: WWE.com.

Today, we all know Bayley as the NXT woman's champion, a leader of an entire division of amazing female wrestlers, a member of the Four Horsewomen and a future main roster megastar. But she's been around a lot longer than that.

Bayley has been in NXT since 2012, but despite playing a plucky young star, she's actually been wrestling since 2008 when she was just eighteen. As Davina Rose, she came up through several California indies before branching out to SHIMMER and Shine.

She considered Big Time Wrestling her home promotion and in May 2011 at their sixth annual Wrestlefest event, she teamed with none other than Sara Del Rey to take on the  team of Amber O'Neal (now Amber Gallows) and Sassy Stephie. The four women would put on an explosive tag team contest on the card where most of the matches were highlighted by wrestling veterans. (Kevin Nash and Sean Waltman wrestled a local team in the main event.) They were given an impressive length of time, and Davina was able to show why she belonged in a match with the more seasoned competitors.


Just over a year later, Sara Del Rey would retire as an active wrestler to take on the role of a coach for NXT (under her real name, Sara Amato.) Six months later, Davina Rose would become one of her students and take the ring name Bayley.

It must have been a strange experience for Bayley to suddenly be training under one of her former peers, but her time on the indies saw her regularly working with a WWE alum already, former Straight Edge Society member Serena. In the three years since her signing, Bayley has become the face of the NXT women's division and a true testament to how much good Sara's training and the presence of Bayley and the other Four Horsewomen have done for women's wrestling in America.

Kana is officially a WWE superstar

The news came out just in the last day that perhaps the best competitor in modern Japanese women's wrestling has signed a deal with WWE. It appears to be an interesting one as well, since she will keep her current in-ring name as she makes the sojourn into WWE waters.

Image credit: WWE.com. 

I first discovered Kana a few years back when her name was first announced for a SHIMMER show. I ended up learning about Tajiri's SMASH promotion from researching her and immediately became a huge fan of her work. She's an incredibly woman inside the ring with all the charisma necessary to make it as a stop wrestling star. Even without perfect English skills (though to my understanding her English is better than most Japanese wrestlers), she should have no problem interesting fans.